 in society. I abhorred the face of
man. Oh, not abhorred! they were my brethren, my fellow beings, and I felt
attracted even to the most repulsive among them, as to creatures of an angelic
nature and celestial mechanism. But I felt that I had no right to share their
intercourse. I had unchained an enemy among them, whose joy it was to shed their
blood, and to revel in their groans. How they would, each and all, abhor me, and
hunt me from the world, did they know my unhallowed acts, and the crimes which
had their source in me!
    My father yielded at length to my desire to avoid society, and strove by
various arguments to banish my despair. Sometimes he thought that I felt deeply
the degradation of being obliged to answer a charge of murder, and he
endeavoured to prove to me the futility of pride.
    »Alas! my father,« said I, »how little do you know me. Human beings, their
feelings and passions, would indeed be degraded if such a wretch as I felt
pride. Justine, poor unhappy Justine, was as innocent as I, and she suffered the
same charge; she died for it; and I am the cause of this - I murdered her.
William, Justine, and Henry - they all died by my hands.«
    My father had often, during my imprisonment, heard me make the same
assertion; when I thus accused myself, he sometimes seemed to desire an
explanation, and at others he appeared to consider it as the offspring of
delirium, and that, during my illness, some idea of this kind had presented
itself to my imagination, the remembrance of which I preserved in my
convalescence. I avoided explanation, and maintained a continual silence
concerning the wretch I had created. I had a persuasion that I should be
supposed mad; and this in itself would for ever have chained my tongue. But,
besides, I could not bring myself to disclose a secret which would fill my
hearer with consternation, and make fear and unnatural horror the inmates of his
breast. I checked, therefore, my impatient thirst for sympathy, and was silent
when I would have given the world to have confided the fatal secret. Yet still
words like those I have recorded, would burst uncontrollably from me. I could
offer no explanation of them; but their truth in part relieved the burden of my
mysterious woe.
    Upon this occasion my father said, with an expression of unbounded wonder.
»My dearest Victor, what infatuation is this? My dear son, I
