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My
name is Henri Clerval, and I was born in the city of Geneva in
1775. My closest friend at school in Geneva was Victor
Frankenstein.
The Frankensteins were a rich merchant family, and my friend's
father had travelled widely. On my first visit to their house in
Geneva, I saw a rather pretty girl, perhaps a year younger than
us.
"That's my sister," Victor said. "Or rather,
we’ve been brought up together and we think of each other as
brother and sister. She is, in fact, Italian."
The Frankensteins were Swiss.
Victor explained. "Soon after I was born, my parents were
in Italy. On a very hot day they asked for a drink at a farm.
They saw five small children there. Four had dark hair like the
farmer and his wife; one had fair hair and looked quite
different. That was Elizabeth, the daughter of a landowner who
had lost his life trying to free his country from an unjust
government. My mother was not strong; it was not certain that
she would have another child but she did want a daughter. She
asked the poor farmer and his wife if she could take Elizabeth
and bring her up as her own. In the end, that was
arranged."
"It's like a story from a book," I said. "You are
lucky to have a sister. I have no one to talk to at home."
Frankenstein smiled. "Then she must become your sister,
too."
Elizabeth did become a sister to me, and remained a sister all
the time that we were children. All three of us belonged to each
other.
Besides
the fine house in Geneva, the Frankensteins had a country house
on the south side of the lake. They liked the quiet life there,
and they lived there more and more after the birth of another
son. They called him William, and a happy country girl of our
age, called Justine, came to look after him. These were the
people among whom I spent more and more of my time.
From the beginning, Victor Frankenstein's interests lay in
science. He studied nature with a kind of hunger, seeing the
world around him as so many secrets to be discovered. There were
secrets in the deep waters of the lake, in the mountains, in the
glaciers -the great rivers of ice that flowed down from the
mountains- and in the changes of weather and season. As a boy,
he always wanted quick results from his experiments, but
Elizabeth and I enjoyed helping him with them.
I
remember a day when we were out collecting wild plants for one
of those experiments. We had come down from the long, low
mountain called the Salève, and we were crossing a field near a
line of fruit trees when a thunderstorm broke. We were getting
very wet in the open field, but we knew the danger of standing
under trees in a thunderstorm.
Suddenly there was a noise like a gun, and a flash of blue
light, and we were thrown to the ground, blinded and unable to
hear. When at last we were able to see and hear again, we saw
nearby the remains of a tree, black and smoking. It had been
struck by lightning. The power of that lightning was something
that we could never forget.
It was from that day, I think, that an idea began to form in
Victor Frankenstein's mind.
It was decided that Frankenstein should go, at the age of
seventeen, to study science at the University of Ingolstadt in
Germany. His father thought highly of a professor of science
there, Dr Krempe. I, too, wanted to go to a university, but my
father would not agree to my going. He could only see laziness,
drinking and wasting time in the student life.
Before Frankenstein left for Ingolstadt, there was a very sad
happening for all of us. His mother had never been very strong.
She fell ill, and it soon became clear that she was not going to
live. She called Victor and Elizabeth to her bedside. Joining
their hands together, she said:
"Victor, my dear, I hoped to see you and Elizabeth married.
Promise me that your father will live to see it."
She died soon after.
I did not see Frankenstein for two years after he went to
Ingolstadt. Nor did his family. We received letters from him at
first, but these became fewer and shorter and told us less.
Source: Longman Classics
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