Misery is diverse. Misfortune multiforme rife on earth. Deployed over the wide horizon like the rainbow, its colors are as varied as those of this one and also so different and so intimately united. Overreaching on the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I derived a kind of ugliness; of the alliance and peace, a simile of pain? But just as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in reality, joy is born of sorrow. Or the memory of the past beatitude is the anguish of today, or the agonies that are originate in the ecstasies that could have been. My first name is Egaeus; I will not mention my last name. However, there are no towers in my country more venerable than my melancholy and gray inheritance. Our lineage has been called a race of visionaries, and in many surprising details, in the character of the family mansion in the frescoes of the main hall, in the hangings of the bedrooms, in the reliefs of some pillars of the armory, but especially in the gallery of old paintings, in the style of the library and, finally, in the peculiar nature of his books, there are more than enough elements to justify this belief.

The memories of my early years are related to this room and its volumes, of which I will not speak again. There my mother died. There I was born. But it is simply idle to say that he had not lived before, that the soul does not have a previous existence. Do you deny it? We will not discuss the point. I am convinced, but do not try to convince. There is, however, a memory of aerial forms, of spiritual and expressive eyes, of musical sounds, although sad, a memory that will not be excluded, a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, undefined, insecure, and like a shadow too in the impossibility of getting rid of her while the sun of my reason shines. In that room I was born. When suddenly awakening from the long night of what seemed, without being, non-existence, to regions of fairies, to a palace of imagination, to the strange domains of monastic thought and erudition, it is not unusual for me to look at my around with amazed and burning eyes, that I wasted my childhood between books and dissipated my youth in reveries; but it is rare that years passed and the zenith of manhood still found me in my parents' mansion; Yes, it is amazing the paralysis that subjugated the sources of my life, amazing the total investment that occurred in the character of my most common thoughts. Terrestrial realities affected me as visions, and only as visions, while the strange ideas of the world of dreams turned, instead, into the pasture of my daily existence, but really into my single and entire existence.

Berenice and I were cousins ​​and we grew up together in the paternal estate. But we grew differently: I, sickly, wrapped in melancholy; she, agile, graceful, overflowing with strength; his were the walks on the hill; mine, the studies of the cloister; I, living locked in myself and given body and soul to the intense and painful meditation; she, wandering carelessly through life, without thinking about the shadows of the road or the silent flight of the hours of black wings. Berenice! I invoke his name ... Berenice! And from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous memories are moved to this sound. Oh, vivid now comes his image before me, as in the first days of his joy and his happiness! Ah, splendid and, nevertheless, fantastic beauty! Oh sylph among the bushes of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains! And then, then everything is mystery and terror, and a story that should not be told. The disease-a fatal disease-fell on her like the simun, and as I watched her, the spirit of the transformation swept through her, penetrating her mind, her habits and her character, and in the most subtle and terrible way she arrived. to disturb his identity. Oh! The destroyer came and went, and the victim, where was he? I did not know her, or at least I did not recognize her as Berenice. Among the numerous series of diseases caused by the first and fatal, which caused such a horrible revolution in the moral and physical being of my cousin, should be mentioned as the most afflicting and obstinate a kind of epilepsy that ended not rarely in catalepsy, state very similar to the effective dissolution and from which his way of recovering was, in many cases, abrupt and sudden. Meanwhile, my own illness - for I have been told not to give it another name - my own disease, I say, grew rapidly, assuming, finally, a monomaniacal character of a new and extraordinary species, which gained more and more vigor and, at last, he obtained an incomprehensible ascendancy over me. This monomania, if I should call it that, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind that the psychological science designates with the word