If you
had listened to the voice of conscience, and heeded the stings of
remorse, before you had urged your diabolical vengeance to this
extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived.”

“And do you dream?” said the dæmon; “do you think that I was then dead
to agony and remorse?—He,” he continued, pointing to the corpse, “he
suffered not more in the consummation of the deed;—oh! not the
ten-thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine during the lingering
detail of its execution. A frightful selfishness hurried me on, while
my heart was poisoned with remorse. Think ye that the groans of Clerval
were music to my ears? My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love
and sympathy; and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did
not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot
even imagine. “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 for ever 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 re-kindled 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 bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour
and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No crime, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable
to mine. When I call over the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot
believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and
transcendant 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
quite 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 whilst I destroyed his hopes,
I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever 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
human kind 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 they will
meet my eyes, when it will haunt my thoughts, no more. “Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is
nearly complete. Neither your’s nor any man’s death is needed to
consummate the series of my being, and accomplish that which must be
done; but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to
perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which
brought me hither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the
globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this
miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and
unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall
die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the
prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me
into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both
will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel
the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away;
and in this condition must I find my happiness.