Boy, you will never see your father again; you must come with me.
Hideous monster! Let me go. My papa is a syndic he is M.
Frankenstein he will punish you. You dare not keep me.
Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy to him towards whom I have
sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.
The child still struggled and loaded me with epithets which carried
despair to my heart; I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a
moment he lay dead at my feet.
I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish
triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, I too can create desolation;
my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and
a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him.
As I fixed my eyes on the child, I saw something glittering on his
breast. I took it; it was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite
of my malignity, it softened and attracted me. For a few moments I
gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her
lovely lips; but presently my rage returned; I remembered that I was
for ever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could
bestow and that she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in
regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one
expressive of disgust and affright.
Can you wonder that such thoughts transported me with rage? I only
wonder that at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in
exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind and perish in the
attempt to destroy them.
While I was overcome by these feelings, I left the spot where I had
committed the murder, and seeking a more secluded hiding-place, I
entered a barn which had appeared to me to be empty. A woman was
sleeping on some straw; she was young, not indeed so beautiful as her
whose portrait I held, but of an agreeable aspect and blooming in the
loveliness of youth and health. Here, I thought, is one of those whose
joy-imparting smiles are bestowed on all but me. And then I bent over
her and whispered, Awake, fairest, thy lover is near he who would
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