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 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.
