my father thought it best to yield. We took our passage on board a vessel
bound for Havre-de-Grace and sailed with a fair wind from the Irish shores.
It was midnight. I lay on the deck looking at the stars and listening to
the dashing of the waves. I hailed the darkness that shut Ireland from my
sight, and my pulse beat with a feverish joy when I reflected that I should
soon see Geneva. The past appeared to me in the light of a frightful dream;
yet the vessel in which I was, the wind that blew me from the detested
shore of Ireland, and the sea which surrounded me, told me too forcibly
that I was deceived by no vision and that Clerval, my friend and dearest
companion, had fallen a victim to me and the monster of my creation. I
repassed, in my memory, my whole life; my quiet happiness while residing
with my family in Geneva, the death of my mother, and my departure for
Ingolstadt. I remembered, shuddering, the mad enthusiasm that hurried me on
to the creation of my hideous enemy, and I called to mind the night in
which he first lived. I was unable to pursue the train of thought; a
thousand feelings pressed upon me, and I wept bitterly.
Ever since my recovery from the fever, I had been in the custom of taking
every night a small quantity of laudanum, for it was by means of this drug
only that I was enabled to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of
life. Oppressed by the recollection of my various misfortunes, I now
swallowed double my usual quantity and soon slept profoundly. But sleep did
not afford me respite from thought and misery; my dreams presented a
thousand objects that scared me. Towards morning I was possessed by a kind
of nightmare; I felt the fiend s grasp in my neck and could not free
myself from it; groans and cries rang in my ears. My father, who was
watching over me, perceiving my restlessness, awoke me; the dashing waves
were around, the cloudy sky above, the fiend was not here: a sense of
security, a feeling that a truce was established between the present hour
and the irresistible, disastrous future imparted to me a kind of calm
forgetfulness, of which the human mind is by its structure peculiarly
susceptible.
Chapter 22
The voyage came to an end. We landed, and proceeded to Paris. I soon
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