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Count Willem Jan Gerrit van Overdijk tot Polder took a bite of a chocolate and savored the taste. It never occurred to him that not everyone in this prosperous day and age could afford it. The chocolate melted on his tongue, spreading the exquisite taste to every corner of his mouth, until it got to the cavity in his left back molar.

“Damn!” said the count with the decorum that befitted his station, when the sharp pain of sugar in a cavity riveted his attention on one of the less pleasant aspects of life in the seventeenth century. The tooth would have to come out.

“Call the barber!” screamed the count to his valet.

“At once, your grace.”

The count’s love of chocolate slowly took its toll. A tooth here, two there. Here he was in the prime of life, his hair was still a rich, wavy brown; his muscles rippled, but his mouth did not have even a single decaying tooth in it. Despite his money, the count’s lack of teeth was a distinct disadvantage in pursuing the other love of his life—young, beautiful girls.

“I’d sooner dance with a goat,” the comely, young Anne had been heard to reply on more than one occasion. This widely shared attitude put a distinct crimp in the count's love life.

“There is a man, your grace, who makes sets of teeth for those who have none,” said the count’s valet, who could not afford chocolate, but had all his teeth, responding to a particularly un-countlike diatribe that his master had directed at him. “They say that his sets of teeth look so real that no one can say if they are yours or not.”

“Have them bring round the carriage and get me my cloak!” said the count, slipping back into character.

The carriage pulled into a dark street in an unsavory part of town. It stopped in front of a dingy shop under the sign of the bat. The count and his valet went in.

“A great tragedy,” said the proprietor, “that one so young should be so stricken.”

“Spare me your platitudes!” said the count. “Can you do it?”

“Of course, your grace, but not without cost.”

“Hang the cost! I’ve grown tired of eating mush and . . .” he said, leaving his thoughts of the beautiful Anne unexpressed.

“As you wish, your grace. They’ll be ready in a month.”

The count left with visions of conquests to be made at the Ball.

A week later, the lovely Lucretia scanned the ballroom with a practiced eye and her attention fell on a pale young man with flashing white teeth. She glided across the ballroom floor like a lioness stalking her prey. Her decolletage caught his eye.

“May I have the honor of this dance, mademoiselle?”

“Enchantée.”

After five waltzes, it was not clear who was steering whom outside to the veranda: he or she. The full moon shone brightly as they stopped briefly at the top of the stairs before descending into the garden. They went down the garden path, and sat on a bench in front of a hedge. No one from the ballroom could see them now. He bent over to bite her neck.

A club, applied diligently to the back of his head by a muscular, but dirty hand, stretched him out flat on the gravel of the garden path. Lucretia got up without a word and headed back to the ballroom. She knew that the money would be waiting for her in her room like it always was.

The two grubby men who had come out of the shadow of the hedge went through the young man’s pockets. Whatever was in them was a bonus for them.

“Look at ‘em long ones,” said the short one. “I ain’t never seen nothing like them afore. And they’s sharp too.”

“I don’t cares what you thinks of ‘em,” said the tall one. “She picked him out and he’s the one.”

With practiced skill, they carefully removed all the young man’s teeth. A week later, the teeth had made their way to the dingy shop under the sign of the bat. It took another two weeks for the proprietor to mount them in the plates. As promised, precisely a month from the day of their order, the teeth were delivered to the count.

They fit like they had been made for him—which they had. They gleamed as he smiled. It was a dazzling smile, an enchanting smile, a bewitching smile. He smiled all the while he paid the proprietor—a task which usually made him frown. He smiled as he made his entrance to the Ball. Everyone noticed his flashing white teeth. He smiled at the beautiful Anne, who would have been better off dancing with a goat, but danced with him instead.

In the light of the full moon, on a garden bench, the vampire’s stolen teeth remembered their purpose and the vivacious Anne met an untimely end. The count was pleased with his new teeth. He had discovered something to replace his love of chocolate.