Stuart Townsend was an agent of the Talamasca. He first became known to them at the turn of the 20th century due to an accident that happened in his youth. When he woke up, he had become possessed by the spirit of a dead French girl, who found herself now in the body of a ten year old boy, but did not know how to leave the body. This was easily proven by her/his expertise of French and knowledge of Paris in 1840. In Stuart's body, she stayed as Antoinette, or Tony as the family began to call her/him.

"This situation continued until Stuart was twenty years old. Then one night he fell down the stairs, suffering a severe concussion. The doctor, half awake and waiting for the inevitable music to rise from the parlor, discovered his son unconscious in the hallway and rushed him to the local hospital, where Stuart lay in a coma for two weeks.

When he woke up, he was Stuart. He had absolutely no recollection of ever having been anyone else. Indeed, he believed he was ten years old, and when he heard a manly voice issuing from his own throat, he was horrified. When he discovered he had a grown man's body, he was speechless with shock.

Dumbfounded he sat in his hospital bed listening to stories of what had been happening to him for the last ten years. Of course he did not understand French. He'd had a terrible time with it in school. And of course he couldn't play the piano. Why, everybody knew he had no musical ability. He could not even carry a tune.

In the next few weeks, he sat staring at the dinner table at his 'enormous' brothers and sisters, at his now gray-haired father, and at his mother, who could not look at him without bursting into tears. Telephones and automobiles which hardly existed in 1905 when he had ceased to be Stuart startled him endlessly. Electric lights filled him with insecurity. But the keenest source of agony was his own adult body. And the ever deepening realization that his childhood and adolescence were now gone without a trace.

Then he began to confront the inevitable problems. He was twenty with the emotions and education of a ten-year-old boy. He began to gain weight, his color improved, he went riding on the nearby ranches with his old friends. Tutors were hired to educate him, he read the newspapers and the national magazines by the hour. He took long walks during which he practiced moving and thinking like an adult.

But he lived in a perpetual state of anxiety. He was passionately attracted to women, but did not know how to deal with this attraction. His feelings were easily hurt. As a man he felt hopelessly inadequate. At last he began to quarrel with everyone, and discovering that he could drink with impunity, he began to 'hit the bottle' in the local saloons.

Stuart later became a trusted member of the Talamasca secret society, devoted to vampires, ghosts and witches. He disappeared while studying the Mayfair Witches.

- (Otaru)