found that I had overtaxed my strength and that I must repose before I
could continue my journey. My father s care and attentions were
indefatigable, but he did not know the origin of my sufferings and
sought erroneous methods to remedy the incurable ill. He wished me to
seek amusement 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.
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