With that calumny, I trust, disposed of, I must urge you as strongly as possible to give up this wild thought you say you have, of leaving Paris. Or, rather, do not leave that city for anywhere but London, where your laboratory and your work are waiting for you. I wish you had heeded my urgings to remain there; it was a mistake for you to come to Paris in the first place. You say that there are times when you despair of ever succeeding in your work; I answer that a great man like you must never speak of despair, you must put all such foolish thoughts entirely from your mind! We have, both of us, the best reasons in the world to expect renewed success from your labors, and that in the very near future. We have both seen, with our own eyes, the embodiment of your earlier success, walking about the world on two legs like a man.
There, in my London house, my friend, inside your laboratory, is where your future (I might say all our futures) lies.
On the other hand, there is certainly nothing at all that can be gained by your attempting to come on here. As for clearing the air between us, as you put it, I should hope that the atmosphere between two such fast friends cannot be poisoned by the maunderings of one old man, no matter how crafty and demoniacally clever he may be, no matter how much he may love to sow discord between friends, even as he has sown it between a mother nation and her colonies.
But I have things of more importance to communicate.
I urge you to leave to me the problem of recapturing the monster, and of dealing with the criminal agent Freeman. Whether the matter of the stolen aerostat can be hushed up, in the interests of peace, is to me a matter of indifference.
We have not yet cornered Freeman and the fiend, but I am confident that we soon shall. That man, I insist, deserves whatever happens to him, while the unhappy creature of your creation will, as soon as he has given up rebellion, experience only kindness at my hands. I pledge you that I will show him every mercy that circumstances allow me to bestow.
Some of the measures I contemplate against Freeman—and others—may seem stringent to you. That is due to the natural kindness of your heart, and your sweet unwillingness to see the evil of the world in its true blackness. I hope you are still confident that I have at heart only your welfare and that of the world at large (which has so often seemed to me ungrateful for both our contributions, your efforts at research, mine in spreading the blessed effects of commerce and civilization). There is a tone in your letter that implies I have sometimes acted only for personal gain, a tone that would wound me deeply, except that I know you are overwrought by prolonged strain and sharp personal tragedy.
As for the book, that you have only lately taken the time to read in its entirety, I am sure that a moment's calm reflection will suffice to assure you that neither Captain Walton nor myself has ever had the slightest intention of portraying you or any member of your family in any light but the most truthful, and therefore the most complimentary. Those bungling editors, I assure you, shall be made to pay, for introducing falsehoods and exag-gerations on such a scale. I should not be at all surprised to discover that Franklin, the old bookseller and printer, was behind those machinations too.
But all these difficulties, dear Victor, lie properly in my sphere of activity and not in yours. How I wish, my dear friend, that I could persuade you not to waste your precious time upon these affairs of the world of sordid commerce and politics. Your domain is properly that of the spirit, and of the intellect; there you reign as monarch. We all look to you as to the father of the new age that is struggling to be born. The entire world_though in large part still unknowingly—awaits the additional marvels that you are going to create.
Still, I hope you will allow me to leave such considerations, important as they are, aside for now, and proceed to the main purpose of my letter. It is to set your mind totally at ease regarding chances of your continued success in your most vital work—something you must never be allowed to doubt!
Do you think, my friend, that I am an impractical man? My enemies have called me many things over the years, but never that. As sure as I am of your skill and your veracity, do you believe that I would have invested years of my life and thousands of my money, in pursuit of a scheme as impractical-sounding (I must be blunt) as yours? Would I have credited the claim of any man, even you, to be able to revive the dead, had I not the most unimpeachable evidence to support it—the witness of my own eyes and intellect?
I purpose to set down here, for the first time, a true and complete account of what the circumstances were, that operated to convince me, absolutely and completely, that you did in fact accomplish exactly what you had claimed to do.
As I have told you in the past, Henry Clerval (who alas is no longer able to speak to confirm my words) and I were both present on that fateful November night that saw the creature's animation. Not until now have I told you in detail exactly what we saw and heard. We had concealed ourselves among the branches of a large tree, the one that, you may remember, grew almost overhanging the sloping roof of Frau Bauer's lodging house. We were able to establish ourselves in such a position that, by looking into one window, we commanded the top of the front stair, and most of the length of the uppermost hall of the house. We also had the door to your laboratory in view, and at certain very important moments we were afforded glimpses into the very room where you had been conducting your experiments.
Let me admit at the start, that our original purpose in establishing ourselves in the tree might be subject to misinterpretation—that is one reason why I have never told you these details until now. We had come there, to put it bluntly, with pranks in mind. Not that I, at least, let me hasten to add, ever intended any such thing as playing a prank on you. But as you are doubtless aware, your reputation among certain of your fellow students (who were unable to conceive of the nobility of your work) was that of someone well suited to be the butt of verbal jests. There was some question of your becoming the object of even lower and more practical attempts at humor. It was widely rumored that you worked with dead bodies, in secrecy, and with this supposition as a base, the most objectionable and fantastic absurdities were freely invented by some of the students, and accepted by others as likely to be facts.
Clerval and I, therefore, had begun an investigation to ascertain the facts. I myself knew you but slightly at the time, yet I could not credit the wild rumors. It would have shamed me to ask you about them directly—you who were even then beginning to be my friend. Nor could Clerval credit them. Rather we two were determined to investigate, to convince ourselves of the seriousness and importance of your work, that we might better be able to refute the ideas of those among our acquaintances who might otherwise have launched a childish persecution against you.
In our endeavor to convince ourselves, we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
Before establishing ourselves as observers in the tree that chill, wet night, we had already learned enough, in the preliminary phases of our investigation, to feel sure that you were indeed conducting experiments upon dead bodies. More—that your work, carried out in such secrecy, involved something more than the usual simple dissection of the medical schools. We had already gone so far as to talk to Karl, who was then your servant, with a view to accumulating more information that we might be able to use in your defense. But the peasant stubbornly maintained a pose of complete ignorance, no doubt fearing that if word of your work leaked out some trouble would descend upon himself.
Clerval and I had reached our positions in the tree at a fairly early hour of the night, well before the worst of the rain commenced to fall. The upper hallway within the house, clearly visible through the window not two yards from our eyes, was faintly lighted, by the glow of a lamp somewhere on or near the stair below. The door to the room that we knew must be your laboratory was closed. Light showed around the edges of that door, from which circumstance we deduced that you were presently in that room, and at work. The sole window of the laboratory was of course closely shuttered, and to our disappointment we could see nothing when we endeavored to look directly into it.