TW for discussion of murder
Okay so we get some big news in this chapter
Vic’s youngest brother was murdered!
In a letter Vic receives from his father (whose name is Alphonse, it turns out!), he learns that while out on the town one day, Vic’s two younger brothers wandered off, and while Ernest returned in the afternoon, William never did. After papa Frank goes off and searches for him, he finds William’s body splayed out and apparently strangled to death.
Elizabeth is pretty wracked with guilt over this, considering that William was carrying around a picture of his mother that day which Elizabeth had given him, and when they found the body the picture had gone missing. This makes Liz think that the murderer must’ve wanted it. (I think it was in some kind of locket).
Upon receiving this news, Vic becomes distraught and sets to travel to Geneva right away. For a moment it seemed like Clerval would be coming with, which, while it would continue his characterization of being literally the too-perfect friend, would also have been sort of hilarious with its continuation of the idea that he’ll just kind of throw away everything for Vic at a moment’s notice. But no, Vic makes this journey alone.
On the road to Geneva, Vic has several really great melodramatic moments. Several times in particular he screams at nature. “Dear mountains! my own beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?” and later he shouts that at an absent William that a storm is his funeral dirge. It reminds me a lot of this list I found online a while back called “how to tell if you’re in a Dostoevsky novel” where one of the entries is “At least once each day you stop in a stairwell to clutch the banister and yell out ‘My God, how loathsome it all is!’”
While at an inn one night in the mountains, Vic thinks he sees his creation in the shadows. The figure quickly disappears but Vic is convinced not only that it was the skaab that he saw, but that his creation is in fact the real murderer of his brother… like, okay? Vic just kinda ignores any and all logistics of this and is like “Yeah, my monster traveled 700 km over mountains, made it to my hometown, murdered my brother and took a picture of my mother away, then traipsed back to around Mont Blanc so that I could see it in the shadows… sounds about right.”
It’s not just that Vic thinks this to himself either. When he gets home he starts telling everyone that he knows who the real murderer is. When his family tells him that Justine has been arrested for it and is being tried that day, he’s distressed that there’s such an apparent miscarriage of justice. “no your honor, my monster from Ingolstadt killed my brother!” Vic is convinced that, because the courts are just, and because Justine is totes innocent, that she’ll get off and then they can set about doing some monster hunting. Of course, I will say that it’s kinda suspicious that some other member of the household staff just happened to find the photo in Justine’s room. Currently I’m suspicious of Justine and this other staff member, but we’ll see where this goes. I don’t think this book will linger here long, as I don’t believe it’s a murder mystery novel.
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