The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (8 page)

I was suffused with such hope and enthusiasm, in those Oxford days, that I would often run through the fields beside the barn in sheer overabundance of energy. I could look up at the clouds rolling above me and see within them the patterns I discerned in the pearly iridescence of a fly’s wing or the shifting colours in the eye of an expiring dove. I considered myself to be a liberator of mankind, freeing the world from the mechanical philosophy of Newton and of Locke. If I could find one single principle from the observation of all types of organism, if in the study of cells and tissues I could detect one presiding element, then I might be able to formulate the general physiology of all living things. There is one life, one way to live, one energetic spirit.

Yet there were periods of my existence when, in the last reaches of the night, I awoke with horror. The first hours of the day provoked in me alarm, and I would rise from my bed and pace through the dark streets as if they were my prison. On the first faint appearance of dawn, however, I became calm. The low and even light, across the water meadows, filled me with a sensation akin to courage. I needed it more than ever. I had begun my anatomy of dogs and cats, purchased at small expense from the poorer people of Oxford. I told them separately that I needed the creature to catch the mice and rats in my lodging, and they parted with it willingly enough. It was easy to sedate the animal with nitrous oxide, and I calculated that the heart would beat for thirty minutes before it relapsed into a painless death. In those few minutes I began the process of dissection, turning the floor of my experimental theatre into a pool of blood. But I persevered in my course. I wished to prove that the organs of the creature were not distinct entities, but
depended for their efficacy upon the interdependence of them all. Thus if I hindered the workings of one, then the others would be harmed or damaged in some fashion. And so it proved. I was making such strides in my experimental philosophy that I could see all difficulties falling away.

IN THE WEEK BEFORE THE END
of that term I received a letter from my father in Geneva, informing me that my sister had become gravely ill. Elizabeth was my twin in all but name. We had grown up in each other’s company. We had played together from infancy and, although we had not studied together, I had acquainted her with the import of my schoolbooks. We were said to resemble each other in features, too, and both possessed the same nervous and restless temperament.

I made plans to return home immediately. There was a packet boat leaving for Le Havre from London Bridge on the Monday following, and I travelled to London two nights before to arrange my ticket. I had hoped to see Bysshe, of course. He had not communicated with me since my departure from the city, and I was eager to learn of his adventures in my absence. I walked into Poland Street soon after my arrival, but there was no light at his window. I called up to him, but no answer came.

I had hired a small cabin on the boat to Le Havre, but it smelled so strongly of brandy and camphor that I was happy to spend much of the voyage on the open deck. The journey downriver was uneventful enough, apart from the sight of the great number of vessels that seemed like a forest of masts slowly moving past, but I was much struck by the flat marshes of the estuary near the mouth of the Thames. The isolation and
loneliness of this region (which, as a passenger told me, was shunned because of the ague), stirred my spirit. I think that even then I had some faint intimations of my future labours, and of the necessity for secret and silent work far beyond the haunts of men. Had I not begun that course in the fields outside Oxford? Yet as I sailed away from England, I did not foresee that I was destined to become the most wretched of human beings.

My journey took me overland by coach from Le Havre to Paris; from there I travelled on to Dijon, and so to Geneva. I was impatient to see my sister, but was obliged to change horses and rest overnight in Paris. I arrived in the early evening at an inn along the Rue St. Sulpice and, after the recent interdiction of travel between France and England, the proprietor was delighted to receive my English companions. He called together a small number of musicians, who played in the courtyard, while his wife and daughters danced a Polish mazurka before us. Such is the warmth of Gallic hospitality, about which so many libels are spread in neighbouring countries. I was to share my chamber with an Englishman travelling on business, Mr. Armitage. He was selling spectacles, lenses and such like. He was the one who had warned me of the ague upon the estuary, and he had already regaled me with several stories concerning the trade in optical goods before I decided to take the air.

I walked outside where my attention was drawn at once to a line of Parisians standing and shuffling their feet outside a pair of folding gates. Some were obviously poor, some affluent, and some of that mixed nature known to the English as shabby genteel. But their variety interested me. They stood nervously and uncertainly before the gates, speaking not at all and
keeping their eyes averted from one another. I asked the proprietor, who was standing in the porch of the inn, what this signified. “Ah,
monsieur
, we do not talk of it.” Why did they not speak of it? “It is bad fortune for the inn.
C’est la maison des morts. La Morgue.”

The house of the dead? I believed I knew to what he was referring. It was an institution well known in the city, where the unidentified bodies of the dead were put on display at certain fixed points of the day so that they might be recognised by friends or relatives. There are no doubt some who consider it to be an unpleasing spectacle, but I was delighted by the good fortune that had put it in my way. I could see nothing to loathe in nature. Just as there are some who love to walk in ruins, savouring the traces and sensations of old time, so I saw no objection to walking among the dead and the decomposed. The human frame is in a continual state of decomposition, day by day; its tissues and its fibres wear away, even as we use them, and I saw nothing to be feared in the close observation of that process. If I were to be practised in the art and method of anatomy, I must also observe the natural corruption of the human body.

So I joined the waiting Parisians and, when the folding gates were unlocked by an official, I moved forward into the Morgue. I became at once aware of a peculiar and not unpleasing odour, much like that of damp umbrellas or of the wet straw generally to be found on the floor of a hansom cab. The air was humid, as if a coal fire had been introduced into the room. It was a long low chamber with small-paned windows, much like the interior of a London coffee-house. Where the seats and boxes might have been there were several shallow partitions, with sloping
platforms fixed in them. On these the bodies of the dead had been placed, with their clothes hanging above them as a further means of identification. Each was protected from the inquisitive throng by a sheet of plate glass, just as if they were lying in the window of a shop. There were five on the occasion of my visit, three males and two females, and it was a nice calculation to determine the causes of their deaths. One middle-aged man, thickset with a heavy jaw and shaved head, appeared to have been burned; but the livid red bruising, and the swollen limbs, convinced me that he had been drowned. My guess was confirmed when I noticed the pool of water seeping below the body. The face of an adjacent female was almost unrecognisable, looking like nothing so much as a bunch of bruised and overripe grapes: I could fathom no reason for the savage pulping of her visage, unless it were some frightful accident. Yet she interested me. The rest of her body was quite untouched, apart from some streaks of blood and dirt, and it occurred to me that with a new head she might have been an object of lust. She could be identified now only by a lover, or perhaps by a parent.

I did not approach these sights with any levity, but I did not feel the least repulsion; my principal feeling was one of fascination for the curious stillness of the bodies. Once the principle of life had left them they became vacant rooms, more devoid of animation than any waxwork or mannequin. You could imagine a waxwork to be capable of breath and movement, but no act of sympathetic imagination could grant these cold limbs life. I was looking at objects that would never be able to return my look.

In another partition I found the body of an elderly man who
had no mark upon him at all. I could tell from his curled boots, placed beside him, that he was an artisan or labourer. There was a curious feature about him, however. I noticed a slight wetness about his eyes, and what seemed to be a tear had settled upon his cheek. The residue of emotion, on what was now an empty visage, affected me in the strangest way. I turned to leave, and was caught momentarily in the crowd clustering around. I glanced towards the open door, at the far end of the low room, and for a moment caught sight of an elderly man standing beside it. He seemed to be exactly the man I had just seen behind the glass, as if by some intervention of the black arts he had brushed away the tear and come alive. Then he smiled at me. I knew all this to be a momentary illusion, but it did not lessen my horror. I walked slowly towards the door, where the official of the Morgue held out his hand for
a pourboire
, but the figure of the old man had gone. I was relieved to find myself in the open air of the street, and tried to dismiss the incident from my mind, but it lingered with me even as I climbed the stair to the chamber in the inn.

My fellow traveller, Armitage, was lying on his bed fully clothed. Fresh as I was from the sights of the Morgue, for a moment he startled me. “Now, Mr. Frankenstein,” he said. “Will you sup with me? The wine here is very cheap.” He had a low, deep voice that for no reason at all irritated me.

“An early night for me, I am afraid. The coach for Dijon leaves at daybreak. It will be a hard journey.”

“So you need sustenance.” He was older than me, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, but he had an indefinably ancient manner. “You gentlemen of Oxford have been known to starve.”

“How do you know that I am from Oxford?”

“It is printed on your luggage. Eyes, you see. Good eyes.” I had already become aware that he was a salesman of optical goods. “The eye is a tender organism.” He spoke slowly, and with great emphasis. “It swims in a sea of water.”

“I beg your pardon. It does not.”

“Oh?”

“It has roots and tendrils. It is like a trailing plant connected to the soil of the brain.”

“Can we say that it is like a lily? It swims on the surface.”

“You may say that, Mr. Armitage.”

He smiled broadly, having settled the matter to his satisfaction, and clapped me on the back as if he were congratulating me for agreeing with him. “We must get you bread. And meat. And wine.”

Over the rough meal, which the chambermaid brought to us, we exchanged the usual remarks. He lived in Friday Street, off Cheapside, with his father; his father manufactured the lenses and the spectacles, in a workshop on the ground floor of their property, while he acted as a commercial traveller. He had taken advantage of the peace to sail to France, with specimens of his father’s latest work. “You will not find lenses more finely ground,” he said. “You can pick out a distant spire by moonlight.”

“Does he build microscopes?”

“Of course he does. At the moment he has in hand a design that has cylindrical eyes, so to speak, that will make the smallest object clear.”

“I would be very interested in that.”

“You would? What is your study at Oxford, Mr. Frankenstein?”

“I am concerned with the workings of human life.”

“Is that all?” He smiled at me. I could not imagine him breaking into laughter.

“That is how I learned of the nervous fibres of the eye.”

“You are an anatomist then?” He suddenly became very grave, as if I had trespassed upon some private pursuit.

“Not exactly. Not essentially. I cannot claim any great proficiency.”

“Do you know how long the eye survives when it is released from its casing?”

“I have no idea. Minutes, perhaps—”

“Thirty-four seconds. Before its light is extinguished for ever.”

“How do you know this?”

“They dry very quickly, when they have left the socket. Do not ask me how I know.”

“But if they were kept in an aqueous solution, what then?”

“Then, Mr. Frankenstein, you would be considered to ask too much.” He began to eat, very slowly, the meat and bread upon his plate.

I remembered the phrase from Terence. “Nothing human is alien to me, Mr. Armitage.”

He did not answer but continued chewing on his meat. It was veal, as I remember, coated in breadcrumbs in the manner of my compatriots. I had very little appetite for it. Occasionally he would look up at me, with no particular expression in his eye beyond that of calm observation. Eventually he spoke. “My father had an interesting apprenticeship. From the age of fourteen he worked for Dr. John Hunter. Do you know that name?”

“Indeed. Very well.” Hunter’s reputation as a surgeon and anatomist had reached me even in Geneva, where his
Natural History of Teeth
had been translated into French.