Justine was dead and at rest, and Victor was alive. Blood ran freely in his veins, but despair and remorse pressed on his heart, and nothing could lift them. Sleep fled from his eyes. He believed he had done harm too horrible to describe, and that worse was still to come.
He had begun life with good intentions, he says. He had longed to be of use to others. Now all of that had withered.
He shunned human faces, and even the sound of joy was torture. Deep, dark, deathlike solitude was his only comfort.
A Father’s Advice
His father watched the change in his son with pain. He too was suffering, he said with tears in his eyes, for no one had loved William more. But it was a duty to the living not to add to their unhappiness with excessive grief. Excessive sorrow, he said, also harmed the one who felt it.
It was good advice, but it did not fit Victor’s case. Had remorse and terror not been mixed in, he would have been the first to hide his grief and comfort his family. All he could do was look at his father in despair.
The Lake at Night
Around this time the family moved to the house at Belrive. Within the walls of Geneva the gates closed at ten and the lake was out of reach, but here he was free. When the family was asleep, he took the boat out and spent hours on the water.
Drifting in the middle of the lake, he was often tempted to plunge into the silent water. What held him back was Elizabeth, his father and his surviving brother. If he deserted them, he would leave them unprotected against the fiend he had let loose.
He lived in daily fear that it would commit some new horror. When he thought of it, he ground his teeth and his eyes burned. He longed to put out the life he had given so thoughtlessly. He would have made a pilgrimage to the highest peak of the Andes, he says, if he could have hurled it down from there.
When Falsehood Looks Like Truth
The house was in mourning. His father’s health was shaken, and Elizabeth, deep in sorrow, felt every pleasure was an insult to the dead.
Elizabeth told Victor that since Justine’s death the world no longer looked the same to her. She used to read of vice and injustice in books as tales of long ago. Now people seemed to her like monsters thirsting for one another’s blood.
She went on. When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can be sure of any happiness? The murderer walks the world free, and is perhaps even respected. Yet even if she were sent to the scaffold for the same crime, she would not change places with such a wretch.
Victor listened in agony. Not in deed, but in effect, he thought, he was the true murderer.
Elizabeth read the anguish in his face and took his hand. There was despair in his look, she said, and sometimes vengeance, and it frightened her. Here in this peaceful, beautiful homeland, as long as they loved one another, what could disturb their peace?
Even as she spoke, Victor was afraid. The destroyer might be close at that very moment, ready to take her from him, and he drew nearer to her. He compares himself to a wounded deer. It drags itself into some untrodden thicket to gaze at the arrow that pierced it, and to die.
To Chamounix
When it became unbearable, he tried to escape his feelings by moving his body and changing his surroundings. In one such fit he suddenly left home for the Alpine valleys. It was the valley of Chamounix, where he had often gone as a boy. He had become a wreck since then, but those wild and enduring scenes had not changed.
It was the middle of August, about two months after Justine’s death. He rode on horseback, then hired a mule for the rough roads. The deeper he went into the ravine of the Arve, the lighter the weight on his spirit grew. The cliffs, the raging river and the waterfalls spoke of a power like the Almighty’s, and he ceased to fear any lesser being.
When he reached the village of Chamounix, he sat exhausted at a window watching pale lightning above Mont Blanc. The rushing of the Arve lulled him to sleep.
Montanvert in the Rain
The next day he wandered the valley and stood by the source of the Arveiron, which rises from a glacier. The grand scenery could not take away his grief, but it calmed it.
But the next morning all that comfort had fled. Rain poured down and thick mist hid the summits. Still he resolved to climb to the top of Montanvert. He remembered the sublime ecstasy he had felt the first time he saw that moving glacier. He knew the path well and wanted to be alone, so he went without a guide.
The path was steep and desolate. Trees broken by winter avalanches lay all around. There was one ravine where even a loud voice could bring stones crashing down.
Around noon he reached the top and sat for a while on the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. When a breeze cleared the mist, he went down onto the glacier. It took him two hours to cross ice that rose and fell like the waves of a troubled sea.
Standing in a hollow of the rock on the far side, he gazed at Mont Blanc. His sorrowful heart swelled with something like joy. He cried out to the wandering spirits, if they did wander, to allow him this faint happiness, or else to take him away with them from the joys of life.
A Figure Crossing the Ice
As he spoke, he saw in the distance the figure of a man coming toward him at superhuman speed. It bounded over the crevasses Victor had crossed with such care. As it came nearer, it seemed taller than any man.
His eyes clouded and he felt faint, but the cold mountain wind revived him. As the shape drew close he knew it. It was the wretch he had created.
Trembling with rage and horror, he resolved to wait and close with it in mortal combat. The face that came near showed bitter anguish mixed with contempt and malice. But Victor hardly noticed. Rage at first took away his voice, and when it came back he poured out his loathing and scorn.
“Devil, do you dare come near me? Begone, vile insect! Or rather, stay, so I can trample you to dust! If only ending your miserable life could bring back the ones you so fiendishly murdered!”
A Voice Understood at Last
The dæmon answered. What had been inarticulate sounds on that night in Ingolstadt had become words.
“I expected this welcome. All people hate the wretched. How much, then, must I be hated, who am more miserable than any living thing! Yet you, my creator, loathe and reject me. You and I are bound by ties that only the death of one of us can break.”
He went on. “You mean to kill me. How dare you play with life this way? Do your duty toward me, and I will do mine toward you and the rest of mankind.”
If Victor agreed to his conditions, he said, he would leave Victor and everyone else in peace. But if Victor refused, he would glut the maw of death with the blood of Victor’s remaining friends.
Victor shouted that the tortures of hell were too mild for his crimes and sprang at him. He easily slipped away and spoke.
“Be calm! I beg you to hear me before you pour out your hatred. Have I not suffered enough? Life, though it may be nothing but a heap of pain, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, you made me stronger than yourself. But I will not set myself against you. I am your creature. If you do the part you owe me, I will be mild and obedient to my natural lord and king.”
Then he said:
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” (Chapter 10)
“Everywhere I see happiness, and I alone am shut out of it for ever. I was kind and good. Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I will be good again.”
A Chance Even the Guilty Are Given
Victor told him to go. There could be nothing between them, he said. They were enemies.
He pleaded again. His soul had glowed with love and humanity, but he was alone, miserably alone. If his own creator hated him, what could he hope for from others who owed him nothing? People drove him off and hated him, and the barren mountains and glaciers were his only refuge.
If mankind knew he existed, he said, they would arm themselves against him just as Victor did. So should he not hate those who hated him? Yet it was in Victor’s power to spare them that evil.
He added one more thing. Human laws are bloody, but even they let the guilty speak in their own defence before they are condemned. Victor called him a murderer, yet would destroy his own creature with a clear conscience. Hear my story, he said, and then, if you can and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.
Victor asked why he must be reminded of things he shuddered to think he had caused. Cursed be the day you first saw light, he said, and cursed be the hands that formed you, though that meant cursing himself. Then he told him to take his hated shape out of sight.
At that, he placed his hated hands over Victor’s eyes, and Victor flung them away. He said:
“Like this, I take from you the sight you hate. But you can still listen. It is cold here. Come to the hut on the mountain. Before the sun goes down you will have heard my story and can decide. Whether I leave the company of men for ever and live a harmless life, or become the scourge of your kind and hasten your own ruin, is up to you.”
The Fire in the Hut
He led the way across the ice, and Victor followed. Victor did not answer him, but as he walked he weighed each of his arguments, and decided at least to hear his story.
Curiosity pushed him on, and compassion settled his decision. He wanted to know whether this being had truly killed his brother. And Victor says this. For the first time he felt what a creator owes his creature. Before he complained of his wickedness, he ought to have made him happy.
The rain began again. They went into the hut, the fiend triumphant, Victor heavy-hearted. Victor sat by the fire his odious companion had lit, and he began his tale.
Two Sitting Face to Face
On that night in chapter five, he lifted the curtain and made sounds no one could understand. Nearly two years later, in this chapter, he speaks better than Victor does. He speaks of Adam and the fallen angel, of human law and the right to a defence.
Victor called him devil, insect and monster, and lunged at him. He dodged, said he would not fight, and asked first to be heard. And with the same mouth, he threatened blood if he was refused.
At last Victor agrees to listen. For the first time he thinks of a creator’s duty. Before blaming him, he should have made him happy.
From here on, the one telling the story is him. Victor remembers his tale and passes it to Walton, and Walton writes it down.
Before blaming someone, have I ever stopped to ask whether there was something I should have done for them and didn’t?