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 forever have chained my tongue.
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