Chapter 14
The creature, still speaking to Walton as the afternoon fades, turns to the intertwined histories that shaped the cottagers he had come to watch and long for. He begins with their former dignity. The old man’s name was De Lacey, a man of good French lineage who had lived for years in Paris in comfortable affluence, respected by his superiors and beloved by his equals. His son Felix had been bred in the service of his country, and his daughter Agatha had ranked with ladies of the highest distinction. Only a few months before the creature’s arrival, the family had dwelt in a luxurious part of that great city, surrounded by friends and graced with every enjoyment that virtue, refined intellect, and a moderate fortune could bestow.
Their ruin, the creature explains, was wrought by the father of Safie, a Turkish merchant who had long inhabited Paris until he fell out of favor with the government. On the very day his daughter arrived from Constantinople to be with him, he was seized, thrown into prison, tried, and condemned to death. All Paris was indignant, for the injustice was flagrant; it was judged that his religion and wealth, rather than the crime alleged, had brought the sentence down upon him.
Felix happened to be present at the trial, and his horror at the verdict was uncontrollable. On the spot he vowed to deliver the man, and after many fruitless efforts he discovered a strongly grated window in an unguarded corner of the building that lit the prisoner’s dungeon. By night he went to the grate and made his intentions known. The Turk, amazed and delighted, tried to kindle his deliverer’s zeal with promises of reward, but Felix rejected the offers with contempt. Yet when he saw the lovely Safie, allowed to visit her father and expressing her lively gratitude with every gesture, the youth could not deny, even to himself, that the captive possessed a treasure sufficient to reward all toil and hazard.
The Turk perceived the impression his daughter had made and hastened to bind Felix more entirely by promising him her hand in marriage once they were safely away. Felix, too delicate to accept openly, looked forward to the event as the consummation of his happiness. In the days of preparation, his zeal was warmed by letters from the lovely girl, who found means to express her thoughts in her lover’s language through an old family servant who understood French. In them she thanked him with ardor for his intended services toward her parent and gently deplored her own fate.
From copies of these letters, which the creature had secretly obtained in the hovel, he had learned the substance of her story. Safie related that her mother had been a Christian Arab, seized and enslaved by the Turks, but so favored by her beauty that the merchant had married her. That lady, born in freedom, had spurned the bondage to which she was reduced, had instructed her daughter in the tenets of her own religion, and had taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Muhammad. The mother had since died, but her lessons were indelibly impressed on Safie’s mind, and the girl sickened at the prospect of returning to Asia and being immured within the walls of a harem. The prospect of marrying a Christian and remaining in a country where women were allowed to take a rank in society was enchanting.
The night before the execution, the Turk quit his prison and by morning was many leagues from Paris. Felix had procured passports in the names of his father, sister, and himself; the elder De Laceys, forewarned, had quitted their house under pretense of a journey and concealed themselves in an obscure part of the city. Felix conducted the fugitives through France to Lyons and across Mont Cenis to Leghorn, where the merchant resolved to await a favorable chance of slipping into the Turkish dominions.
Safie resolved to remain with her father until the moment of his departure. The Turk renewed his promise of marriage, and Felix lingered, basking in the tender and simple affection she showed him. They conversed through an interpreter and sometimes through the language of looks, and Safie sang to him the divine airs of her native country. But while the father openly encouraged the hopes of the youthful lovers, secretly he loathed the thought of his daughter uniting with a Christian. He feared Felix’s power to betray him to the Italian state in which they now lived, and so he spun a thousand schemes to prolong the deceit until he could secretly carry his daughter away.
The news from Paris soon assisted those schemes. The French government was enraged at the escape of their victim and spared no pains to detect the deliverer. The plot of Felix was quickly discovered, and the elder De Lacey and Agatha were thrown into prison. When the news reached Felix, he was roused from his dream of pleasure by the thought of his blind and aged father and his gentle sister lying in a noisome dungeon while he himself breathed free air beside the woman he loved. Quickly he arranged with the Turk that Safie should remain as a boarder at a convent in Leghorn if the merchant should find a chance to flee before Felix could return to Italy. Then, quitting the lovely Arabian, he hastened to Paris and delivered himself up to the vengeance of the law, hoping by that sacrifice to free De Lacey and Agatha.
He did not succeed. They remained confined for five months before the trial, the result of which stripped them of their fortune and condemned them to a perpetual exile from their native country. They found a miserable asylum in the German cottage where the creature had discovered them. Felix soon learned that the treacherous Turk, on discovering his deliverer reduced to poverty and ruin, had become a traitor to all good feeling and honor. He had quitted Italy with his daughter and insultingly sent Felix a mere pittance of money to aid him, as he said, in some plan of future maintenance.
Such were the events that preyed on Felix’s heart and made him, when first the creature saw him, the most miserable of his family. He could have endured poverty, and even gloried in it as the meed of virtue, but the ingratitude of the Turk and the loss of his beloved Safie were misfortunes more bitter and irreparable. Her arrival, the creature notes, now infused new life into his soul.
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