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The smiling Frenchman had no just cause for walling me up alive. My alleged “thousand injuries,” as well as my supposed “insult,” never existed but in Montresor’s fevered fancy; or were, at most, the merest trifles. That I, however, had just cause to seek revenge upon him, no reasonable spirit could deny.
him,Yet it is more difficult than one might imagine for a mere phantom to wreak vengeance, no matter how justified, upon a still-living persecutor. From my sealed niche in the nitred catacombs beneath the House of Montresor, I wailed and shook my chains—to no avail. He heard them not; his senses suffered from no morbid acuteness.
hisDetaching their ghostly shadows from the granite—the physical links themselves no human strength could have pulled free, let alone the immaterial powers
