The Mysteries of Udolpho
soon after her arrival in France, and had made ample use of it in
assisting her designs upon the Marquis, to whom she adduced such
seeming proof of his wife’s infidelity, that, in the frantic rage of
wounded honour, he consented to destroy his wife. A slow poison was
administered, and she fell a victim to the jealousy and subtlety of
Laurentini and to the guilty weakness of her husband.
But the moment of Laurentini’s triumph, the moment, to which she had
looked forward for the completion of all her wishes, proved only the
commencement of a suffering, that never left her to her dying hour.
The passion of revenge, which had in part stimulated her to the
commission of this atrocious deed, died, even at the moment when it was
gratified, and left her to the horrors of unavailing pity and remorse,
which would probably have empoisoned all the years she had promised
herself with the Marquis de Villeroi, had her expectations of an
alliance with him been realised. But he, too, had found the moment of
his revenge to be that of remorse, as to himself, and detestation, as
to the partner of his crime; the feeling, which he had mistaken for
conviction, was no more; and he stood astonished, and aghast, that no
proof remained of his wife’s infidelity, now that she had suffered the
punishment of guilt. Even when he was informed, that she was dying, he
had felt suddenly and unaccountably reassured of her innocence, nor was
the solemn assurance she made him in her last hour, capable of
affording him a stronger conviction of her blameless conduct.
In the first horrors of remorse and despair, he felt inclined to
deliver up himself and the woman, who had plunged him into this abyss
of guilt, into the hands of justice; but, when the paroxysm of his
suffering was over, his intention changed. Laurentini, however, he saw
only once afterwards, and that was, to curse her as the instigator of
his crime, and to say, that he spared her life only on condition, that
she passed the rest of her days in prayer and penance. Overwhelmed with
disappointment, on receiving contempt and abhorrence from the man, for
whose sake she had not scrupled to stain her conscience with human
blood, and, touched with horror of the unavailing crime she had
committed, she renounced the world, and retired to the monastery of St.
Claire, a dreadful victim to unresisted passion.
The Marquis, immediately after the death of his wife, quitted
Château-le-Blanc, to which he never returned, and endeavoured to lose
the sense of his crime amidst the tumult of war, or the dissipations of
a capital; but his efforts were vain; a deep dejection hung over him
ever after, for which his most intimate friend could not account, and
he, at length, died, with a degree of horror nearly equal to that,
which Laurentini had suffered. The physician, who had observed the
singular appearance of the unfortunate Marchioness, after death, had
been bribed to silence; and, as the surmises of a few of the servants
had proceeded no further than a whisper, the affair had never been
investigated. Whether this whisper ever reached the father of the
Marchioness, and, if it did, whether the difficulty of obtaining proof
deterred him from prosecuting the Marquis de Villeroi, is uncertain;
but her death was deeply lamented by some part of her family, and
particularly by her brother, M. St. Aubert; for that was the degree of
relationship, which had existed between Emily’s father and the
Marchioness; and there is no doubt, that he suspected the manner of her
death. Many letters passed between the Marquis and him, soon after the
decease of his beloved sister, the subject of which was not known, but
there is reason to believe, that they related to the cause of her
death; and these were the papers, together with some letters of the
Marchioness, who had confided to her brother the occasion of her
unhappiness, which St. Aubert had so solemnly enjoined his daughter to
destroy: and anxiety for her peace had probably made him forbid her to
enquire into the melancholy story, to which they alluded. Such, indeed,
had been his affliction, on the premature death of this his favourite
sister, whose unhappy marriage had from the first excited his tenderest
pity, that he never could hear her named, or mention her himself after
her death, except to Madame St. Aubert. From Emily, whose sensibility
he feared to awaken, he had so carefully concealed her history and
name, that she was ignorant, till now, that she ever had such a
relative as the Marchioness de Villeroi; and from this motive he had
enjoined silence to his only surviving sister, Madame Cheron, who had
scrupulously observed his request.
It was over some of the last pathetic letters of the Marchioness, that
St. Aubert was weeping, when he was observed by Emily, on the eve of
her departure from La Vallée, and it was her picture, which he had so
tenderly caressed. Her disastrous death may account for the emotion he
had betrayed, on hearing her named by La Voisin, and for his request to
be interred near the monument of the Villerois, where her remains were
deposited, but not those of her husband, who was buried, where he died,
in the north of France.
The confessor, who attended St. Aubert in his last moments, recollected
him to be the brother of the late Marchioness, when St. Aubert, from
tenderness to Emily, had conjured him to conceal the circumstance, and
to request that the abbess, to whose care he particularly recommended
her, would do the same; a request, which had been exactly observed.
Laurentini, on her arrival in France, had carefully concealed her name
and family, and, the better to disguise her real history, had, on
entering the convent, caused the story to be circulated, which had
imposed on sister Frances, and it is probable, that the abbess, who did
not preside in the convent, at the time of her noviciation, was also
entirely ignorant of the truth. The deep remorse, that seized on the
mind of Laurentini, together with the sufferings of disappointed
passion, for she still loved the Marquis, again unsettled her
intellects, and, after the first paroxysms of despair were passed, a
heavy and silent melancholy had settled upon her spirits, which
suffered few interruptions from fits of frenzy, till the time of her
death. During many years, it had been her only amusement to walk in the
woods near the monastery, in the solitary hours of night, and to play
upon a favourite instrument, to which she sometimes joined the
delightful melody of her voice, in the most solemn and melancholy airs
of her native country, modulated by all the energetic feeling, that
dwelt in her heart. The physician, who had attended her, recommended it
to the superior to indulge her in this whim, as the only means of
soothing her distempered fancy; and she was suffered to walk in the
lonely hours of night, attended by the servant, who had accompanied her
from Italy; but, as the indulgence transgressed against the rules of
the convent, it was kept as secret as possible; and thus the mysterious
music of Laurentini had combined with other circumstances, to produce a
report, that not only the château, but its neighbourhood, was haunted.
Soon after her entrance into this holy community, and before she had
shown any symptoms of insanity there, she made a will, in which, after
bequeathing a considerable legacy to the convent, she divided the
remainder of her personal property, which her jewels made very
valuable, between the wife of Mons. Bonnac, who was an Italian lady and
her relation, and the nearest surviving relative of the late
Marchioness de Villeroi. As Emily St. Aubert was not only the nearest,
but the sole relative, this legacy descended to her, and thus explained
to her the whole mystery of her father’s conduct.
The resemblance between Emily and her unfortunate aunt had frequently
been observed by Laurentini, and had occasioned the singular behaviour,
which had formerly alarmed her; but it was in the nun’s dying hour,
when her conscience gave her perpetually the idea of the Marchioness,
that she became more sensible, than ever, of this likeness, and, in her
frenzy, deemed it no resemblance of the person she had injured, but the
original herself. The bold assertion, that had followed, on the
recovery of her senses, that Emily was the daughter of the Marchioness
de Villeroi, arose from a suspicion that she was so; for, knowing that
her rival, when she married the Marquis, was attached to another lover,
she had scarcely scrupled to believe, that her honour had been
sacrificed, like her own, to an unresisted passion.
Of a crime, however, to which Emily had suspected, from her frenzied
confession of murder, that she had been instrumental in the castle of
Udolpho, Laurentini was innocent; and she had herself been deceived,
concerning the spectacle, that formerly occasioned her so much terror,
and had since compelled her, for a while, to attribute the horrors of
the nun to a consciousness of a murder, committed in that castle.
It may be remembered, that, in a chamber of Udolpho, hung a black veil,
whose singular situation had excited Emily’s curiosity, and which
afterwards disclosed an object, that had overwhelmed her with horror;
for, on lifting it, there appeared, instead of the picture she had
expected, within a recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly
paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of
the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle, was, that the
face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were
visible on the features and hands. On such an object, it will be
readily believed, that no person could endure to look twice. Emily, it
may be recollected, had, after the first glance, let the veil drop, and
her terror had prevented her from ever after provoking a renewal of
such suffering, as she had then experienced. Had she dared to look
again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she
would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but
formed of wax. The history of it is somewhat extraordinary, though not
without example in the records of that fierce severity, which monkish
superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind. A member of the house
of Udolpho, having committed some offence against the prerogative of
the church, had been condemned to the penance of contemplating, during
certain hours of the day, a waxen image, made to resemble a human body
in the state, to which it is reduced after death. This penance, serving
as a memento of the condition at which he must himself arrive, had been
designed to reprove the pride of the Marquis of Udolpho, which had
formerly so much exasperated that of the Romish church; and he had not
only superstitiously observed this penance himself, which, he had
believed, was to obtain a pardon for all his sins, but had made it a
condition in his will, that his descendants should preserve the image,
on pain of forfeiting to the church a certain part of his domain, that
they also might profit by the humiliating moral it conveyed. The
figure, therefore, had been suffered to retain its station in the wall
of the chamber, but his descendants excused themselves from observing
the penance, to which he had been enjoined.
This image was so horribly natural, that it is not surprising Emily
should have mistaken it for the object it resembled, nor, since she had
heard such an extraordinary account, concerning the disappearing of the
late lady of the castle, and had such experience of the character of
Montoni, that she should have believed this to be the murdered body of
the lady Laurentini, and that he had been the contriver of her death.
The situation, in which she had discovered it, occasioned her, at