Draft of Frankenstein. Volume one. Chapter seven.
Mary Shelley It was on a dreary night of November that I held the accomplishment of my toils with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony.
I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the life, this thing that lay at my feet.
It was already one in the morning.
The rain patted dismally against the pans and my candle was nearly burnt out when by the glimmer of the half extinguished light,
I slipped a dull yellow eye of the creature, opened it pretty hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe?
Or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and I had endeavoured to form his limbs too in proportion,
and I had selected his features as a beautiful, beautiful, great God.
His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath his
hair was of a lustrous black and flowing his teeth of a pearly whiteness.
But these experiences only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes that
seemed almost of the same colour as the dumb white sockets in which they were set.
His shrivelled complexion and straight black let the different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.
I had worked half, nearly two years for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.
For this, I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had decided with an ardour that far exceeded moderation.
But now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished.
And breathless horror and disgust filled my heart, unable to enjoy the aspect of the being I had created.
I rushed out of the room and continued a long time, traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.
At length, Latitude conceded to the tumult I had before endured.
And I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness.
But it was in vain. I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams.
I thought I saw Elizabeth in the bloom of health, walking in the streets in Ingolstadt.
Delighted and surprised, I embraced her. But as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the shoe of death.
A features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms.
A shroud enveloped her form. And I saw the grave ones crawling in the folds of the flannel.
I started from my sleep with horror.
A cold Jew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed, one by the dim and yellow night of the moon.
As it forced its way to the window shutters. I beheld the wretch, the miserable monster whom I created.
He held up the curse of the bed. And his eyes, if I say, may be called for fixed on me.
His doors opened and he muttered some inarticulate sounds while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.
He might have spoken, but I did not hear. One hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed down the stairs.
I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited where I remained during the rest of the night,
walking up and down in the greatest agitation,
listening attentively, catching and firing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demon I to corpse,
to which I had so miserably given life. Oh, no mortal could support the horror of that countenance.
A mummy again in due to with animation could not be so hideous.
A stretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished.
He was ugly then. But when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing.
Such as? Even Dante could not have conceived my path that night.
Wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery and
others I nearly sight to the ground through languor and extreme weakness mingled with this horror.
I felt the bitterness of disappointment, dreams that have been my food and pleasant rest for so long.
This space will now become a help to me. And the change was so rapid to overthrow.
So complete.