This is the route from Geneva to Chamonix represented in the standard nineteenth-century
British guidebook to the region.

From Edward Whymper, Chamonix and the Range of Mont Blanc (London: John Murray, 1896).

Evidently the journal is written in French, and it suggests that Victor's claim to
Walton that he had thought his creation beautiful until it was infused with life (I:4:2
and note) to some extent masked his original feelings.

Here, as elsewhere in the novel, we sense some strain in Victor's relationship with
his strict father. Usually it is marked by his being recalled by a paternal admonition
to obligations that he has not met: see, for instance, I:3:10 and note; I:3:12 and
note.

That is, he will not abide by rules of combat stipulated by human beings.

The Creature repeats his claim, which amounts to his saying that, like Adam, he was
created free of original sin.

With telling artistic assurance Mary Shelley has the Creature, who up to this point
has referred to himself only by personal pronouns, name himself with the same word
originally used by Victor, "wretch" (I:4:3). Here, however, he defines himself as
what King Lear calls "the thing itself . . . unaccommodated man" (III.iv.100). Perhaps,
indeed, Mary Shelley means us to hear in the insistent repetition of the word "wretch"
the memorable accents of that unsceptered, sorrowing monarch:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
—III.iv.28-36

This is actually the second such vow. The first, uttered after being driven from the
De Lacey's cottage (paragraph 3 above above and note) was, upon sober (and mistaken)
self-reflection, withdrawn. This time the Creature will carry out his threat.

From 1796, when Napoleon invaded Italy until 1814 when he was exiled to Elba, in fact,
most of Italy was either under the rule or the strong influence of France, and with
the restoration of the old monarchies in 1815, although the politics decidedly changed,
the French influence on Italy remained strong. Whether it would in either case have
involved extradition from Livorno of a non-French national might be questionable,
but the Turk's fears are not entirely groundless.

The same phrasing was used by the Creature to describe his obsession with learning
to speak (see II:4:9). After all the variants on the term, applied to and linking
the intellectual passions of Walton, Victor, and the Creature, the reader is hardly
prepared to encounter it here in its primary sense, as an expression of uninhibited
and undeflected sexual instinct.

As in the infant grin with which the Creature greeted Victor after his birth (I:4:3)
here again we are suddenly reminded that he is a newborn, signalling his wants by
crying. But, cast off by his creator and forced to make his way into the world in
utter solitude, his wants are so enormous that here we are perhaps intended by the
similarity of diction to recall the timbres of one of the most famous songs of exile
(Psalm 137) in the Western tradition.