Chapter 2 — early studies; Henry Clerval

At thirteen Victor finds, on a rainy day at a Bagnes inn, a volume of Cornelius Agrippa — a sixteenth-century alchemist whose work was already considered nonsense by Victor's father. His father, glancing at the book, dismisses it as "sad trash." The dismissal lands wrong with Victor. Had his father explained why the alchemists were wrong, the boy would have moved on; instead, he reads further. Agrippa leads him to Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. He spends the next four years, in his home library and on solitary walks, devouring the alchemists' search for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the principles of vivification.

At fifteen, a violent thunderstorm. A tree near the house is struck by lightning and reduced "to thin ribbons of wood." Victor watches a man of science explain to his father, the next day, the principles of electricity and galvanism. The encounter pulls him for a time toward modern natural philosophy and away from the alchemists. He reads Newton; he reads chemistry. But the older books have set the question. Modern science, as he encounters it at fifteen, seems to him narrower, less ambitious, less interested in the great questions the alchemists were asking. He goes back to them.

By seventeen Victor is preparing to leave for the University of Ingolstadt. He has lost his mother — Caroline dies of scarlet fever, contracted while nursing Elizabeth back to health — and has been told to delay his departure. The chapter ends with the death and the delay. When Victor finally arrives at Ingolstadt, he is a young man in mourning, with a partially shameful obsession with hidden knowledge, with a household waiting at home that he has already begun to neglect, and with no one at the university — yet — to redirect him.