The fairy-tale rewritings by Angela Carter have had a deep impact on Anglophone literature and culture. She adopted an unfashionable mannerist style at a time when social realism was de rigueur in feminist circles, and frequently defended her tastes for fantasy, the Gothic, the macabre and the baroque. This she owed mainly to French literature, beginning with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, whose poetry awakened her vocation as a writer, as well as the Romantic literary tradition. This article brings her work into conversation with French romantic author Théophile Gautier through a comparative reading of « La Morte amoureuse » and « The Lady of the House of Love », based on her working notes and personal library. Exploring the theme of the female vampire, Carter reworks key aesthetic principles and themes (sensuality, eroticism, melancholy, transgression, the femme fatale, love and death) and appropriates Gautier’s refined style through pastiche. Although she would later reject the « Art for Art’s sake » principle in favor of popular tales as « fables of the politics of experience », « The Lady of the House of Love » can be read as a transitional text negotiating this twofold legacy.