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Page 81
"After the murder of Clerval I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken
and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror; I
abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of
my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for
happiness, that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me
he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the
indulgence of which I was forever barred, then impotent envy and bitter
indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I
recollected my threat and resolved that it should be accomplished. I
knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture, but I was the
slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested yet could not
disobey. Yet when she died! Nay, then I was not miserable. I had
cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my
despair. Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no
choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly
chosen. The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable
passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!"
I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet, when I
called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence
and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of
my friend, indignation was rekindled within me. "Wretch!" I said. "It
is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have
made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are
consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical
fiend! If he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object,
again would he become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is not
pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your
malignity is withdrawn from your power."
"Oh, it is not thus--not thus," interrupted the being. "Yet such must
be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of
my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy
may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue,
the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being
overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has
become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into
bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am
content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I
am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my
memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and
of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning
my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was
capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and
devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No
guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to
mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot
believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled
with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of
goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant
devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates
in his desolation; I am alone.
"You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of
my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of
them he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I
endured wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes,
I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and
craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned.
Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal,
when all humankind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who
drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate
the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these
are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the
abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled
on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.
"But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the
helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to
death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I
have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of
love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to
that irremediable ruin.
"There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your
abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the
hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the
imagination of it was conceived and long for the moment when these
hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts
no more.
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