Lovecraft, H P - The Alchemist

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 111.94KB 6 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Alchemist

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 1908

Published November 1916 in The United Amateur, Vol. 16, No. 4, p. 53-57.

High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are wooded near

the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my

ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and

rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose

honored line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets,

stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of

time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses

in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts,

and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the

footsteps of the invader.

But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above the level of dire

want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of

commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in

pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the

parks, the dry and dusty moat, the ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as

well as the sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all

tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of the

four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly

reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.

It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I, Antoine,

last of the unhappy and accursed Counts de C-, first saw the light of day, ninety long

years ago. Within these walls and amongst the dark and shadowy forests, the wild ravines

and grottos of the hillside below, were spent the first years of my troubled life. My

parents I never knew. My father had been killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I

was born, by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of

the castle. And my mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved

solely upon one remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence,

whose name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the lack of companionship

which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my

aged guardian, in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose abodes

were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill. At that

time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me because my noble birth placed

me above association with such plebeian company. Now I know that its real object was to

keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line that were nightly told

and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of

their cottage hearths.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Lovecraft, H P - The Alchemist.pdf

共6页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lovecraft, H P - The Alchemist

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: