Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the seventeenth chapter of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Come with us as we release one bite a day of one of your favorite classic novels, plays & short stories. Bree reads these classics like she reads to her daughter, one chapter a day. If you love books or audiobooks and want something to listen to as you're getting ready, driving to work, or as you're getting ready for bed, check out Bite at a Time Books!

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Video welcome to Bite at a Time Books, where we read you your favorite classics one byte at a time.

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Be continuing Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Chapter 17 the being finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me and the expectation of a reply, but I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition.

He continued, you must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.

This you alone can do, and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede.

The latter part of his tale had kindled anew in me the anger that had died away while he narrated his peaceful life among the cottagers.

And as he said this, I could no longer suppress the rage that burned within me.

I do refuse it, I replied, and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me.

You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes.

Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world?

Be gone, I have answered you.

You may torture me, but I will never consent.

You are in the wrong, replied the fiend, and instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you.

I am malicious because I am miserable.

Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?

You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph.

Remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me.

You would not call it murder if you could precipitate me into one of those ice rifts and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands.

Shall I respect man when he condemns me?

Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness and instead of injury.

I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.

But that cannot be.

The human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union.

Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery.

I will revenge my injuries.

If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.

And chiefly towards you, my arch enemy, because my Creator do I swear in extinguishable hatred.

Have a care.

I will work at your destruction nor finish until I desolate your heart so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.

A fiendish rage animated him as he said this.

His face was wrinkled into contortions, too horrible for human eyes to behold.

But presently he calmed himself and proceeded.

I intended to reason this passion is detrimental to me for you do not reflect that you are the cause of its excess.

If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me I should return them a hundred and hundredfold.

For that one creature's sake I would make peace with the whole kind but I now indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realized.

What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate.

I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself.

The gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive and it shall content me.

It is true we shall be monsters cut off from all the world.

But on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

Our lives will not be happy, but.

They will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel.

Oh, my Creator, make me happy.

Let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit.

Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing.

Do not deny my request.

I was moved.

I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent.

But I felt that there was some justice in his argument.

His tale and the feelings he now expressed proved him to be a creature of fine sensations.

And did I, not, as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it wasn't my power to bestow?

He saw my change of feeling and continued.

If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again.

I will go to the vast wilds of South America.

My food is not that of man.

I do not destroy the lamb and.

The kid to glut my appetite.

Acorns and berries afford me sufficient.

Nourishment.

My companion will be of the same nature as myself and will be content with the same fare.

We shall make our bed of dried leaves.

The sun will shine on us as on man.

And will ripen our food.

The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty.

Pitiless as you have been towards me.

I now see compassion in your eyes.

Let me seize the favorable moment and persuade you to promise what I so ardently desire.

You propose, replied I, to fly from the habitations of man, to dwell in those wilds where the beasts of the field will be your only companions.

How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile?

You will return and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their detestation.

Your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a companion to aid you in the task of destruction.

This may not be.

Cease to argue the point, for I cannot consent.

How inconstant are your feelings.

But a moment ago you were moved by my representations.

And why do you again harden yourself to my complaints?

I swear to you by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me that with the companion you bestow I will quit the neighborhood of man and dwell as it may chance, in the most savage of places, my evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy.

My life will flow quietly away, and.

In my dying moments I shall not curse my Maker.

His words had a strange effect on me.

I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him.

But when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror.

And hatred, I tried to stifle these sensations.

I thought that as I could not.

Sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.

You swear, I said, to be harmless.

But have you not already shown a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust?

You?

May not.

Even this be a faint that will increase your triumph by affording a wider scope for your revenge.

How is this?

I must not be trifled with, and I demand an answer.

If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion.

The love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence everyone will be ignorant.

My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise.

When I live in communion with an.

Equal, I shall feel the affections of.

A sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded.

I paused some time to reflect on all he had related and the various arguments which he had employed.

I thought of the promise of virtues which he had displayed on the opening of his existence, and the subsequent blight of all kindly feeling by the loathing and scorn which his protectors had manifested towards him.

His power and threats were not omitted in my calculations.

A creature who could exist in the ice caves of the glaciers and hide himself from pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices was a being possessing faculties it would be vain to cope with.

After a long pause of reflection, I concluded that the justice do both to him and my fellow creatures, demanded of me that I should comply with his request.

Turning to him therefore, I said I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe forever and every other place in the neighborhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile.

I swear, he cried, by the sun and by the blue sky of heaven, and by the fire of love that burns my heart, that if you grant my prayer while they exist, you shall never behold me again.

Depart to your home and commence your laborers.

I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety, and fear not but that when you are ready, I shall appear.

Saying this, he suddenly quitted me.

Fearful perhaps of any change in my sentiments, I saw him descend to the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost among the undulations of the sea of ice.

His tail had occupied the whole day, and the sun was upon the verge of the horizon when he departed.

I knew that I ought to hasten my descent towards the valley, as I should soon be encompassed in darkness.

But my heart was heavy and my steps slow.

The labor of winding among the little paths of the mountain and fixing my feet firmly as I advanced, perplexed me.

Occupied as I was by the emotions which the occurrences of the day had produced.

Night was far advanced when I came to the halfway resting place and seated myself beside the fountain.

The stars shone at intervals as the clouds passed from over them.

The dark pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground.

It was a scene of wonderful solemn.

Tea and stirred strange thoughts within me.

I wept bitterly, and clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, oh, stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me.

If ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory.

Let me become as not.

But if not, depart.

Depart and leave me in darkness.

These were wild and miserable thoughts, but I cannot describe to you how the eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon.

Me, and how I listened to every.

Blast of wind as if it were a dull, ugly cyrus on its way to consume me.

Morning dawned before I arrived at the village of Chumminu.

I took no rest, but returned immediately to Geneva.

Even in my own heart, I could give no expression to my sensations.

They weighed on me with a mountain's weight, and their excess destroyed my agony beneath them.

Thus I returned home, and entering the house, presented myself to the family.

My haggard and wild appearance awoke intense alarm, but I answered no question.

Scarcely.

Did I speak?

I felt as if I were placed under a ban, as if I had no right to claim their sympathies, as if never more might I enjoy companionship with them.

Yet even thus I loved them.

To adoration and to save them, I resolved to dedicate myself to my most abhorred task.

The prospect of such an occupation made.

Every other circumstance of existence pass before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life.

Thank you for joining Bite at a Time Books today while we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.

Again, my name is Brie Carlyle, and.

I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of Frankenstein.

Don't forget to tag us on your social media posts at bite atotime books, and we hope to be able to feature you in this Saturday segment.

Check out the show notes or our website, Bite at a Time books for the links for our show.