Page 7 - Edgar Allan Poe

show me their affection they came to find themselves in my way. But evil took more and more ground in me ... because what disease is comparable to alcohol? One evening, back home drunk from one of my usual hangouts in the city, it seemed to me that the cat avoided me. I grabbed him: in his fear of my violence, he made me, with his teeth, a small wound in his hand. Instantly the fury of a demon invaded. I was no longer me. My true spirit seemed to have invaded4 from my body; a wickedness more than diabolical, fed by the gin, it quivered in every fiber of my being. I took a penknife from my breast pocket; I opened it, grabbed the poor beast by the throat, and, deliberately, got her eye out of orbit! I blush, I burn and together I shudder to report this damned atrocity. Meanwhile the cat slowly recovered; the orbit of the lost eye presented, it is true, a fearful aspect, but it seemed that the beast did not suffer anymore. He came and went home as usual, but, as was to be expected, he ran away terrified as I approached. I had enough heart to feel afflicted by this obvious antipathy on the part of a creature who had once loved me so much. But soon this feeling gave way to irritation. And then, as in my final and irrevocable fall, the spirit of perversity manifested itself. It was this mysterious nostalgia of the spirit of "torturing", of doing violence to one's own nature, of doing evil for the love of evil, which pushed me to continue and finally to bring to completion the torture5 that I had inflicted on that poor harmless beast . One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose up my neck and placed it on a tree branch; and I had eyes full of tears and bitter remorse in my heart; I hanged him "because" I knew he had loved me so much, and "because" I felt he had never given me reason to be offended; I hanged him "because" I knew that by doing so I committed a sin, a mortal sin that would have compromised my immortal soul so much as to reduce it if such a thing were possible, out of the mercy of the most merciful and most terrible God. On the night that followed the day of this cruel action, I was awakened by the cry "To the fire!" The curtains on my bed were on fire. The whole house burned. It was with great difficulty that I, my wife and a service person managed to save ourselves. The destruction was complete. All my possessions were swallowed up; since then I abandoned myself to despair. The day after the fire, I toured the ruins. The walls, except for one exception, had fallen. One night, as I was sitting half stupid in one of these infamous rooms, my attention was drawn to a black object that stood on top of one of the large barrels of gin or rum that made up the main furniture in the room. I went over and touched it with my hand. He was a black cat, - a huge specimen - at least as big as Pluto, which resembled him at every point less than in one: Pluto had no white hair on his body; this, on the other hand, had a large stain, however indefinite, which covered almost the entire chest. I had just touched him that he got up, started to purr loudly, rubbed against my hand and seemed very pleased with my attention. I continued to caress him, and