Chapter 16 — Geneva, William, the locket

The Creature, alone again after the De Laceys, sets out for Geneva — the city Victor's lab journal had named as home. He travels mostly at night and through forests. He saves a young girl from drowning in a stream and is shot at by the man who finds him bending over her body — the man assumes he is a kidnapper. The bullet wounds his shoulder. The injury, and the misunderstanding, embitter him. He arrives in Geneva at the start of summer.

In the woods at Plainpalais, near Victor's family estate, he encounters a small boy — about five, beautiful, unaccompanied, playing among the trees. The Creature approaches him, intending to befriend a child young enough not yet to fear him. The child sees him and screams. He calls him a monster. He shouts that his father is M. Frankenstein, who will punish the Creature. The name lands. The Creature, in a rage so sudden it surprises him, strangles the child. The boy is dead in a moment.

He searches the body. He finds, around the child's neck, a small locket; opening it, he sees the portrait of a beautiful woman — Caroline, Victor's mother. He keeps it. Walking through the woods afterwards, he comes on a barn at the edge of a path, with a young woman sleeping inside on the hay. She is Justine — out walking, exhausted, taking shelter in the barn. The Creature, looking at her, conceives in cold blood the idea of revenge by proxy. He cannot have her. He will see to it that someone like her is destroyed for what he has done. He slips the locket into her pocket while she sleeps and walks out of the barn. The next morning Justine is searched and arrested. The Creature, for the first time, has acted not from impulse but from deliberation. The killing of William was a moment's rage; the framing of Justine is an architecture. He is becoming, the chapter is suggesting, what the world has insisted he was.