The Alexandre Dumas Historical Novel book club starts on June 22!
Hello! I'm the creator of @monte-cristo-daily and on the 22nd of June, after we're done with The Count of Monte-Cristo, I'll start a new book club in which we'll learn history of France in a wrong way, but with lots of fun!
The project will take 3+ years and will be a one time thing, unlike @monte-cristo-daily that will hopefully return the next year.
We'll read the three Valois novels that describe the collapse of the dynasty in the late 16th century. Then, to see the 17th century in its splendour, we'll move on to the Musketeers trilogy. And finally, we'll finish with the long story of the French revolution, we'll look at the 18th century and follow the French monarchy to its end.
Three centuries one chapter a day. With notes and illustrations. Everything will be published in this blog.
The project will be run in English, if you have any suggestions on which translations to pick, reach out to me, @theniftycat
The list of novels is below:
The Queen Margot (the Valois trilogy) - June-August 2025
The Dame de Monsoreau (the Valois trilogy) - September-November 2025
The Forty Five (the Valois trilogy) - December 2025 - February 2026
The Three Musketeers (the Musketeers trilogy) - March-April 2026
Twenty Years Later (the Musketeers trilogy) - May-July 2026
Ten Years Later (the Musketeers trilogy) - August 2026 - April 2027
Joseph Balsamo (Memoirs of a Physician) - May-October 2027
The Queen's Necklace (Memoirs of a Physician) - November 2027 - January 2028
Ange Pitou (Memoirs of a Physician) - February-April 2028
The Countess de Charny (Memoirs of a Physician) - May-October 2028
The Chevalier de Maison-Rouge - November-December 2028
Jump on and jump off whenever you like! All the dates are approximate.
It was around six in the evening, and light the colour of opal, pierced by the golden rays of the autumn sun, spread over a bluish sea.
The heat of the day had gradually expired and one was starting to feel that light breeze which seems like the breath of nature awaking after the burning midday siesta: that delicious breath that cools the Mediterranean coast and carries the scent of trees from shore to shore, mingled with the acrid scent of the sea.
Over the huge lake that extends from Gibraltar to the Dardanelles and from Tunis to Venice, a light yacht, cleanly and elegantly shaped, was slipping through the first mists of evening. Its movement was that of a swan opening its wings to the wind and appearing to glide across the water. At once swift and graceful, it advanced, leaving behind a phosphorescent wake.
Bit by bit, the sun, whose last rays we were describing, fell below the western horizon; but, as though confirming the brilliant fantasies of mythology, its prying flames reappeared at the crest of every wave as if to reveal that the god of fire had just hidden his face in the bosom of Amphitrite, who tried in vain to hide her lover in the folds of her azure robe.
Though there was apparently not enough wind to lift the ringlets on a girl’s head, the yacht was travelling fast. Standing in its bow, a tall, bronzed man was staring wide-eyed at the dark, conical mass of land rising from the midst of the waves like a Catalan hat.
‘Is that Monte Cristo?’ asked the traveller, who appeared to be in command of the yacht, in a grave and melancholy voice.
‘Yes, Excellency,’ said the master. ‘We are just reaching the end of our journey.’
‘The end of our journey!’ the traveller muttered, with an indefinable note of dejection. Then he added under his breath: ‘Yes, this is port.’ And he relapsed into thoughts that expressed themselves in a smile sadder than tears.
A few minutes later he saw an onshore light that was immediately extinguished, and the sound of a gunshot reached the yacht.
‘Excellency,’ the master said, ‘that is the signal from onshore. Would you like to reply?’
‘What signal?’ he asked.
The master pointed towards the island, from the side of which a single whitish plume of smoke was rising, spreading and breaking up as it mounted into the sky.
‘Oh, yes,’ the traveller said, as if waking from a dream. ‘Give it to me.’
The master offered him a ready-loaded carbine. He took it, slowly raised it and fired into the air.
Ten minutes later they were furling the sails and dropping anchor five hundred yards outside a little port. The boat was already in the sea, with four oarsmen and a pilot. The traveller got in, but instead of sitting in the prow, which was furnished with a blue carpet, he remained standing with his arms crossed. The oarsmen waited, with their oars poised above the water, like birds drying their wings.
‘Go!’ said the traveller.
The eight oars dipped into the sea simultaneously without a single splash and the boat, driven forward, began to glide rapidly across the water. In no time they were in a small bay, formed by a natural fold in the rock. The boat grated on a fine sandy bottom.
‘Excellency,’ the pilot said, ‘climb on the shoulders of two of our men; they will take you ashore.’
The young man replied to the invitation with a gesture of complete indifference, put his legs over the side of the boat and slid into the water, which came up to his waist.
‘Oh, Excellency,’ the pilot muttered, ‘you are wrong to do that. The master will tell us off.’
The young man continued to plough forward towards the shore, following two sailors who chose the best route. After thirty paces they had landed. He shook his feet on dry land and looked around for the path that he would probably be told to follow, because it was quite dark.
Just as he was turning his head, a hand rested on his shoulder and he shuddered at hearing a voice say: ‘Good day, Maximilien. You are punctual. Thank you.’
‘It’s you, Count,’ the young man exclaimed, with a movement which could have been one of joy, grasping Monte Cristo’s hand in both of his.
‘Yes; as you see, as punctual as you. But you are soaking wet, my dear fellow. You must get changed, as Calypso used to say to Telemachus.[1] Come, I’ve got rooms all ready for you where you can forget tiredness and cold.’
Monte Cristo saw that Morrel was looking around. He waited. Indeed the young man was surprised that he had not heard a word from those who had brought him; he had not paid them, and yet they had left. He could even hear the plashing of the oars on the little boat taking them back to the yacht.
‘Ah, you’re looking for your sailors?’ said the count.
‘Yes, of course. They left without me giving them anything.’
‘Don’t bother about that, Maximilien,’ Monte Cristo said with a laugh. ‘I have a deal with the navy, so that there is no charge for passage to my island. I’m an account customer, as they say in civilized countries.’
Morrel looked at him with astonishment.
‘Count,’ he said, ‘you are not the same as you were in Paris.’
‘In what way?’
‘Why, here you laugh.’
Monte Cristo’s brow clouded immediately. ‘You are right to recall me to myself,’ he said. ‘Seeing you again was a pleasure for me and I forgot that every pleasure is transitory.’
‘Oh, no, no, Count!’ Morrel exclaimed, once more grasping his friend’s hand with both of his. ‘Please do laugh. Be happy and prove to me by your indifference that life is only a burden for those who suffer. Oh, you are generous, you are kind, you are good, my friend; and you pretend to be happy only to give me strength.’
‘You are wrong, Morrel,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘I really was happy.’
‘Then you have forgotten me. So much the better!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Because you know, my dear friend, I say to you, as the gladiator would say to the sublime emperor on entering the arena: “Those who are about to die salute you!”‘
‘You are not consoled, then?’ Monte Cristo asked, with a strange look.
‘Oh, did you really think I could be?’ Morrel answered, with one full of reproach.
‘Listen,’ the count said, ‘and listen carefully to what I am about to say. You don’t think I am some vulgar babbler, a rattle that gives out a crude and meaningless sound. When I asked you if you were consoled, I was speaking to you as a man for whom the human heart holds no secrets. Well, then, Morrel, let us sound the depths of your heart. Is it still that ardent impatience of pain that makes the body leap like a lion bitten by a mosquito? Is it still that raging thirst that can be sated only in the tomb? Is it that ideal notion of regret that launches the living man out of life in pursuit of death? Or is it merely the prostration of exhausted courage, the ennui that stifles the ray of hope as it tries to shine? Is it the loss of memory, bringing an impotence of tears? Oh, my friend, if it is that, if you can no longer weep, if you think your numbed heart is dead, if you have no strength left except in God and no eyes except for heaven — then, my friend, let us put aside words that are too narrow to contain the meanings our soul would give them. Maximilien, you are consoled, pity yourself no longer.’
‘Count,’ Morrel said, in a voice that was at once soft and firm. ‘Count, listen to me, as you would listen to a man pointing towards the earth and with his eyes raised to heaven. I came here to join you so that I might die in the arms of a friend. Admittedly there are those whom I love: I love my sister Julie, I love her husband, Emmanuel. But I need someone to open strong arms to me and smile at my last moments. My sister would burst into tears and faint; I should see her suffer and I have suffered enough. Emmanuel would seize the weapon from my hands and fill the house with his cries. You, Count, have given me your word; you are more than a man: I should call you a god if you were not mortal. You will lead me gently and tenderly, I know, to the gates of death…’
‘My friend,’ said the count, ‘I have one lingering doubt. Will you be so weak as to pride yourself on the exhibition of your grief?’
‘No, no, I am a plain man,’ Morrel said, offering the count his hand. ‘See: my pulse is not beating any faster or slower than usual. No, I feel I am at the end of the road; I shall go no further. You told me to wait and hope. Do you know what you have done, wise as you are? I have waited a month, which means I have suffered a month. I hoped — man is such a poor and miserable creature — I hoped, for what? I don’t know: something unimaginable, absurd, senseless, a miracle… but what? God alone knows, for it was He who diluted our reason with that madness called hope. Yes, I waited; yes, Count, I hoped; and in the past quarter of an hour, while we have been speaking, you have unwittingly broken and tortured my heart a hundred times, for each of your words proved to me that I have no hope left. Oh, Count! Let me rest in the sweet and voluptuous bosom of death!’
Morrel spoke the last words with an explosion of energy that made the count shudder.
‘My friend,’ he continued, when the count did not reply, ‘you named October the fifth as the end of the reprieve that you asked me to accept… And, my friend, this is the fifth…’
Morrel took out his watch. ‘It is nine o’clock. I have three hours left to live.’
‘Very well,’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘Come with me.’
Morrel followed mechanically, and they were already in the grotto before Morrel had realized it. He found carpets under his feet. A door opened, he was enveloped in perfumes and a bright light dazzled him. He stopped, reluctant to go on. He was wary of being weakened by the delights around him.
Monte Cristo pulled him gently forward. ‘Is it not appropriate,’ he said, ‘for us to spend the three hours we have left like those ancient Romans who, when they were condemned to death by Nero, their emperor and their heir, would sit at a table decked with flowers and breathe in death with the scent of heliotropes and roses?’
Morrel smiled and said: ‘As you wish. Death is still death, that is to say forgetfulness, rest, the absence of life and so the absence of pain.’
He sat down and Monte Cristo took his place in front of him.
They were in the wonderful dining-room that we have already described, where marble statues carried baskets full of fruit and flowers on their heads. Morrel had looked vaguely at all this, and had probably seen nothing of it.
‘Let’s speak man to man,’ he said, staring hard at the count.
‘Go on,’ the latter replied.
‘Count, you are an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, and you strike me as someone who has come down from a more advanced and wiser world than our own.’
‘There is some truth in that, Morrel,’ the count said with a melancholy smile that transfigured his face. ‘I have come from a planet called sorrow.’
‘I believe whatever you tell me, without trying to elucidate its meaning, Count. The proof is that you told me to live, and I have lived. You told me to hope, and I almost hoped. So I shall dare to ask you, as if you had already died once before: Count, does it hurt very much?’
Monte Cristo looked at Morrel with an infinite expression of tenderness. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, no doubt, it does hurt, if you brutally shatter the mortal envelope when it is crying out to live. If you make your flesh scream under the imperceptible teeth of a dagger; if you drive an insensitive bullet, always ready to meander on its way, through your brain — which suffers from the merest jolt; yes, indeed, you will suffer and leave life in the most horrifying way, in a desperate agony that will make you ready to think it better than rest bought at such a price.’
‘I understand,’ said Morrel. ‘Death has its secrets of pain and pleasure, like life; it is just a question of knowing what they are.’
‘Precisely, Maximilien: you have hit the nail on the head. Death, according to the care we take to be on good or bad terms with it, is either a friend which will rock us as gently as a nursing mother or an enemy which will savagely tear apart body and soul. One day, when our world has lived another thousand years, when people have mastered all the destructive forces of nature and harnessed them to the general good of mankind, and when, as you just said, men have learnt the secrets of death, then death will be as sweet and voluptuous as sleep in a lover’s arms.’
‘And you, Count, if you wanted to die, would you know how to die in that way?’
‘I should.’
Morrel reached out his hand. ‘Now I understand,’ he said, ‘why you have brought me here to this desolate island, in the midst of the ocean, to this subterranean palace, a tomb that a Pharaoh would envy. It was because you love me, wasn’t it, Count? You love me enough to give me one of those deaths that you spoke of just now, a death without agony, a death that will allow me to expire with Valentine’s name on my lips and your hand in mine?’
‘You are right, Morrel,’ the count said, simply. ‘That’s how I see it.’
‘Thank you. The idea that tomorrow I shall no longer suffer is like balm to my heart.’
‘Is there nothing you will miss?’ Monte Cristo asked.
‘No,’ Morrel replied.
‘Not even me?’ the count asked, with deep feeling.
Morrel stopped, his clear eye suddenly clouded, then shone with even greater brilliance. A large tear rolled from it and left a silver trace across his cheek.
‘What!’ the count exclaimed. ‘There is something you will regret leaving on earth, yet you want to die!’
‘Oh, I beg you,’ Morrel cried in a weak voice. ‘Not a word, Count, do not prolong my agony.’
The count feared that Morrel was weakening, and this belief momentarily revived the terrible doubt that had already once struck him in the Chateau d'If. ‘I am engaged in giving this man back his happiness,’ he thought. ‘I consider that restitution is a weight thrown back into the scales in the opposite tray from the one where I cast evil. Now, suppose I am wrong and this man is not unhappy enough to deserve happiness. Alas, what would happen to me — I, who am unable to atone for evil except by doing good?’
‘Listen to me, Morrel,’ he said. ‘Your grief is immense, I can see that; but you believe in God; perhaps you do not wish to risk the salvation of your soul?’
Morrel smiled sadly: ‘Count,’ he said, ‘you know that I do not exaggerate; but, I swear, my soul is no longer my own.’
‘Listen, Morrel,’ the count said. ‘I have no living relative, as you know. I have grown accustomed to thinking of you as my son. Well, to save my son, I would sacrifice my life and, even more readily, my fortune.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, Morrel, that you want to leave life because you do not know all the pleasures that life gives to the very rich. Morrel, I possess nearly a hundred million; you can have it. With that much money you could achieve anything you desire. Are you ambitious? Every career is open to you. Stir up the world, change it, commit any kind of folly, be a criminal if you must, but live!’
‘Count, I have your word,’ the young man replied coldly. ‘And,’ he added, taking out his watch, ‘it is half-past eleven.’
‘Could you do such a thing, Morrel, in my house, before my eyes?’
‘Then let me leave,’ Maximilien said, his face clouding. ‘Or I shall think you don’t love me for myself, but for you.’ And he got up.
‘Very well, then,’ said Monte Cristo, his face lightening at these words. ‘You want it, Morrel, and you are immovable. Yes, you are profoundly unhappy and, as you said, only a miracle could cure you. Sit down, and wait.’
The young man obeyed. Monte Cristo got up in his turn and went to open a carefully locked cupboard, the key to which he wore on a gold chain. He took out a little silver casket, magnificently sculpted and modelled with four arched figures at the four corners, like pining caryatids, shaped like women, symbols of angels reaching for heaven.
He put the casket down on the table, then opened it, taking out a little gold box, the lid of which was raised by pressure on a hidden spring.
This box contained a half-congealed, oily substance, its colour indefinable because of the shining gold and the sapphires, rubies and emeralds encrusting it. It was like a shimmering mass of blue, purple and gold.
The count took a small quantity of the substance on an enamelled spoon and offered it to Morrel, fixing his eyes on him. Only now could it be seen that the substance was green in colour.
‘This is what you asked me for,’ he said. ‘This is what I promised you.’
‘While I still have life,’ the young man said, taking the spoon from Monte Cristo’s hands, ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’
The count took a second spoon and dipped once more into the gold box.
‘What are you doing, my dear friend?’ Morrel asked, grasping his hand.
‘Why, Morrel,’ the other said, with a smile. ‘God forgive me, but I think that I am as weary of life as you are, and while the opportunity presents itself…’
‘Stop!’ the young man cried. ‘Oh, you who love and are loved, you who can trust in hope, oh, don’t you do what I am about to do. For you, it would be a crime. Farewell, my noble and generous friend. I shall tell Valentine all that you have done for me.’ And slowly, without any more hesitation than a pressure on the left hand which he was holding out to the count, Morrel swallowed — or, rather, savoured — the mysterious substance that Monte Cristo had offered him.
Then both men fell silent. Ali, noiseless and attentive, brought tobacco and pipes, served coffee and then vanished.
Little by little the lamps paled in the hands of the marble statues holding them and the perfume from the censers seemed less pervasive to Morrel. Opposite him, Monte Cristo was watching him through the dark, and he could see nothing except the burning of the count’s eyes.
The young man was overwhelmed with an immense pain. He felt the hookah fall from his hands and the objects around him gradually lost their shape and colour. His clouded eyes seemed to see doors and curtains opening in the walls.
‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I feel I am dying. Thank you.’
He made one last effort to hold out his hand, but it fell, powerless, beside him.
And now it seemed to him that Monte Cristo was smiling, no longer with that strange and terrifying smile that had several times allowed him to glimpse the mysteries of that profound soul, but with the tender compassion of a father towards the follies of his child.
At the same time the count was growing before his eyes. His figure almost doubled in size, outlined against the red hangings; he had thrown back his black hair and stood proudly like one of those avenging angels with which the wicked are threatened on Judgement Day.
Morrel, beaten, overwhelmed, slumped back in his chair. A silky torpor filled his every vein. His mind was refurnished, as it were, by a change of thoughts, just like a new pattern appearing in a kaleidoscope. Lying back, panting, excited, he felt nothing more living in him apart from this dream. He seemed to be plunging directly into the vague delirium that precedes that other unknown, called death.
Once again he tried to reach out to take the count’s hand, but this time his own would not even budge. He tried to utter a last goodbye, but his tongue turned heavily in his mouth, like a stone blocking the entrance to a sepulchre. Hard as he tried, he could not keep his languid eyes open; yet behind their lids there was an image that he recognized despite the darkness which he felt had enveloped him. It was the count, who had just opened the door.
At once, an immense burst of light flooded from an adjoining room - or, rather, a wonderful palace - into the room where Morrel was abandoning himself to his gentle death-throes. And then, on the threshold of that other chamber, between the two rooms, he saw a woman of miraculous beauty. Pale and sweetly smiling, she seemed like an angel of mercy casting out the angel of vengeance.
‘Is heaven already opening its gate to me?’ thought the dying man. ‘This angel is like the one I lost.’
Monte Cristo pointed the young woman to the sofa where Morrel was lying, and she stepped forward with her hands clasped and smiling lips. ‘Valentine! Valentine!’ Morrel cried, in the depths of his soul. But his throat did not utter a sound and, as though all his strength had been concentrated on that inner feeling, he gave a sigh and closed his eyes.
Valentine dashed forward. Morrel’s lips moved again.
‘He is calling you,’ said the count. ‘He is calling you from the depth of his sleep, the man to whom you have entrusted your fate and from whom death tried to separate you; but fortunately I was there and I overcame death. Valentine, from now on you must never be separated on this earth because, to rejoin you, he would leap into his grave. Without me, you would both have died. I give you back to one another; may God credit me with these two lives that I have saved!’
Valentine clasped Monte Cristo by the hand and, with an irresistible burst of joy, put it to her lips.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Thank me. Oh, tell me over and over again, never tire of telling me that I have made you happy. You do not know how much I need the certainty of that!’
‘Oh, yes, I thank you with all my soul!’ Valentine said. ‘And if you doubt the sincerity of my thanks, ask Haydée, ask my dear sister Haydée, who has made me wait patiently since our departure from France, talking to me of you, until this happy day that has now dawned.’
‘Do you love Haydée?’ Monte Cristo asked, with ill-disguised emotion.
‘Oh, yes, with all my heart!’
‘Then, Valentine, listen to me,’ said the count. ‘I have a favour to beg of you.’
‘Of me! Good heavens, am I fortunate enough for that?’
‘You called Haydée your sister. Let her be your sister indeed, Valentine. Give her everything that you think you owe to me. Protect her, you and Morrel, because…’ (and here the count’s voice was almost stifled in his throat) ‘… because from now on she will be alone in the world.’
‘Alone in the world!’ repeated a voice from behind the place where the count was standing. ‘Why?’
Monte Cristo turned and saw Haydée, pale and ice-cold, giving him a look of utter disbelief.
‘Because tomorrow, my child, you will be free,’ he replied. ‘Because you will resume your proper place in the world and because I do not want my fate to cloud your own. You are the daughter of a prince: I am restoring your father’s wealth and your father’s name to you!’
Haydée’s face was drained of colour. She opened her translucent hands like a virgin recommending her soul to God, and said, in a voice harsh with tears: ‘So, my Lord, you are leaving me?’
‘Haydée, Haydée, you are young and beautiful. Forget even my name, and be happy.’
‘Very well,’ said Haydée. ‘Your orders will be carried out, my lord. I shall forget even your name, and I shall be happy.’ And she took a pace backwards, to leave the room.
‘Oh, my God!’ cried Valentine, who was supporting Morrel’s numbed head on her shoulder. ‘Can’t you see how pale she is? Don’t you realize what she is suffering?’
Haydée addressed her with a heartrending expression on her face: ‘How do you expect him to understand me, my sister? He is my master, and I his slave. He has the right to see nothing.’
The count shuddered at the tone of this voice, which awoke the deepest fibres of his being. His eyes met those of the young woman and could not bear to look into them. ‘My God, my God!’ he said. ‘Can what you hinted to me be true? Haydée, would you be happy then not to leave me?’
‘I am young,’ she answered softly. ‘I love life, which you have always made so pleasant for me. I should be sorry to die.’
‘Do you mean that if I were to leave you, Haydée…’
‘Yes, my Lord, I should die!’
‘Do you love me, then?’
‘Oh, Valentine, he asks if I love him! Tell him: do you love Maximilien?’
The count felt his breast swell and his heart fill. He opened his arms and Haydée threw herself into them with a cry. ‘Oh, yes! Oh, yes I love you!’ she said. ‘I love you as one loves a father, a brother, a husband! I love you as one loves life, and loves God, for you are to me the most beautiful, the best and greatest of created beings!’
‘Let it be as you will, my sweet angel!’ said the count. ‘God, who roused me against my enemies and gave me victory, God, I can see, does not wish my victory to end with that regret. I wished to punish myself, but God wants to pardon me. So, love me, Haydée! Who knows? Perhaps your love will make me forget what I have to forget.’
‘What are you saying, my Lord?’ the young woman asked.
‘I am saying that a word from you, Haydée, enlightened me more than twenty years of sage wisdom. I have only you left in the world, Haydée. It is through you that I am attached to life; through you I can suffer and through you I can be happy.’
‘Do you hear that, Valentine?’ Haydée cried. ‘He says that through me he can suffer! Through me, when I would give my life for him!’
The count thought for a moment. ‘Have I understood the truth? Oh, God! What matter! Reward or punishment, I accept my fate. Come, Haydée, come…’ And putting his arm round the young woman’s waist, he pressed Valentine’s hand and disappeared.
About an hour passed in which, breathing heavily and staring, unable to speak, Valentine remained by Morrel’s side. Finally she felt his heart beat, a barely perceptible breath passed his lips and the young man’s whole body was shaken by that slight shudder which indicates returning life. Finally his eyes opened, though at first they stared wildly. Then sight returned, sharp and true, and, with it, feeling; and, with feeling, pain.
‘Oh!’ he wailed in a desperate voice. ‘I am still alive! The count deceived me!’ And his hand reached for a knife on the table.
‘My friend,’ said Valentine, with her irresistible smile, ‘wake up and look towards me.’
Morrel gave a great cry and, delirious, full of doubt, dazzled as though by some celestial vision, he fell on both knees…
The next day, with the first rays of sunlight, Morrel and Valentine were walking arm in arm on the shore, Valentine telling Morrel how Monte Cristo had appeared in her room, how he had revealed everything to her, how he had made her unveil the criminal and, finally, how he had miraculously saved her from death, while letting everyone believe that she was dead.
They had found the door to the grotto open and had gone out. The last stars were still shining in the blue of the morning sky. And, in the half-light of a cluster of rocks, Morrel saw a man waiting for a sign to come over to them. He pointed him out to Valentine.
‘Oh, that’s Jacopo,’ she said, motioning to him to join them. ‘The captain of the yacht.’
‘Do you have something to tell us?’ Morrel asked.
‘I have this letter to give you on behalf of the count.’
‘From the count!’ the two young people exclaimed in unison.
‘Yes, read it.’
Morrel opened the letter and read:
MY DEAR MAXIMILIEN,
There is a felucca lying at anchor for you. Jacopo will take you to Leghorn where Monsieur Noirtier is awaiting his granddaughter, whom he wishes to bless before she follows you to the altar. Everything that is in this grotto, my friend, my house in the Champs- Elysées and my little country house in Le Tréport are a wedding present from Edmond Dantés to the son of his master, Morrel. Mademoiselle de Villefort must have half of it, because I beg her to give the poor people of Paris whatever money she has coming to her from her father, who has become mad, and her brother, who died last September with her stepmother.
Tell the angel who will watch over your life, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, momentarily thought himself the equal of God and who, with all the humility of a Christian, came to realize that in God’s hands alone reside supreme power and infinite wisdom. These prayers may perhaps ease the remorse that he takes with him in the depth of his heart.
As for you, Morrel, this is the whole secret of my behaviour towards you: there is neither happiness nor misfortune in this world, there is merely the comparison between one state and another, nothing more. Only someone who has suffered the deepest misfortune is capable of experiencing the heights of felicity. Maximilien, you must needs have wished to die, to know how good it is to live.
So, do live and be happy, children dear to my heart, and never forget that, until the day when God deigns to unveil the future to mankind, all human wisdom is contained in these two words: ‘wait’ and ‘hope’!
Your friend EDMOND DANTES Count of Monte Cristo.
While he was reading this letter, which informed her of her father’s madness and the death of her brother, neither of which she had known until then, Valentine went pale and gave a painful sigh; tears, no less touching for being silent, ran down her cheeks. She had purchased her happiness at a high price.
Morrel looked around him anxiously. ‘But the count really is being too generous,’ he said. ‘Valentine will be happy with my modest fortune. Where is the count, my friend? Take me to him.’
Jacopo pointed to the horizon.
‘Why! What do you mean?’ Valentine asked. ‘Where is the count? Where is Haydée?’
‘Look,’ said Jacopo.
The two young people looked in the direction towards which the sailor was pointing and, on the dark-blue line on the horizon that separated the sky from the Mediterranean, they saw a white sail, as large as a gull’s wing.
‘He is gone!’ cried Morrel. ‘Gone! Farewell, my friend! My father!’
‘Yes, he is gone,’ Valentine muttered. ‘Farewell, my friend! Farewell, my sister!’
‘Who knows if we shall ever see them again?’ Morrel said, wiping away a tear.
‘My dearest,’ said Valentine, ‘has the count not just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words — “wait” and “hope”?’
_________
NOTES
1. Calypso... Telemachus: In Fénélon’s novel Télémaque, Calypso welcomes the hero to her island and seems in effect to be telling him to slip into something more comfortable.
The next day, Danglars was hungry again. The air of this cave was decidedly stimulating to the appetite, but the prisoner thought that today he would have no further expense. Being a thrifty man, he had hidden half of his chicken and a piece of his bread in the corner of the cell. But no sooner had he eaten them than he was thirsty. He had not thought of that.
He struggled against his thirst until he felt his parched tongue sticking to his palate. Then, unable to resist the fire devouring him, he called out.
The sentry opened the door; it was a new face. Danglars felt that it would be better to deal with a more familiar one and called for Peppino.
‘Here I am, Excellency,’ the bandit said, arriving promptly (which seemed a good omen to the banker). ‘What would you like?’
‘Something to drink,’ the prisoner said.
‘Excellency, you know that wine is ridiculously expensive in the region around Rome.’
‘Then give me water,’ said Danglars, trying to parry the blow.
‘Oh, Excellency, water is even scarcer than wine. The drought has been so bad!’
‘I see,’ said Danglars. ‘It appears that we are going to start that again.’ Though he was smiling, to give the impression that he was joking, the wretch felt sweat beading on his forehead.
‘Now, now, friend,’ he continued, when Peppino made no response. ‘I’m asking you for a glass of wine. Will you refuse me?’
‘I've already told Your Excellency that we don’t sell retail or by the glass,’ said Peppino.
‘Very well, give me a bottle.’
‘Of which?’
‘The cheaper.’
‘They are both the same price.’
‘Which is… ?’
‘Twenty-five thousand francs a bottle.’
‘Tell me,’ said Danglars, with a bitterness that only Harpagon[1] could have noted on the scale of the human voice, ‘Tell me that you want to skin me alive, it would be quicker than devouring me piecemeal.’
‘Perhaps that is what the master intends,’ said Peppino.
‘Who is the master?’
‘The one to whom you were taken the day before yesterday.’
‘And where is he?’
‘Here.’
‘Let me see him.’
‘That’s easy.’
A moment later, Luigi Vampa was standing in front of Danglars. ‘Did you call for me?’ he asked his prisoner.
‘Are you the leader of those who brought me here, Monsieur?’
‘Yes, Excellency.’
‘What ransom do you want from me? Tell me.’
‘Just the five million you have on you.’
Danglars felt a dreadful shudder run through his heart. ‘That is all I have in the world, Monsieur,’ he said, ‘and the remains of a vast fortune. If you take that away from me, take my life.’
‘We have been forbidden to shed your blood, Excellency.’
‘By whom?’
‘By the person whom we obey.’
‘So you do obey somebody?’
‘Yes, a leader.’
‘I thought that you yourself were the leader.’
‘I am the leader of these men, but another is my leader.’
‘And does this leader obey anyone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whom?’
‘God.’
Danglars thought for a moment. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Possibly.’
‘Did the leader tell you to treat me in this way?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But my money will run out.’
‘Probably.’
‘Come, come,’ said Danglars. ‘Would you like a million?’
‘No.’
‘Two?’
‘No.’
‘Three million? Four? Come now, four million? I’ll give it to you on condition you let me go.’
‘Why do you offer us four million for something that is worth five?’ said Vampa. ‘That’s usury, Signor Banker, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘Take it all! Take it all, I say!’ Danglars said. ‘And kill me!’
‘Come, come, Excellency, calm yourself. You will whip up your blood, and that will give you an appetite to eat a million a day. Be more economical, please!’
‘But when I have no more money to pay you… !’ Danglars said in exasperation.
‘Then you'll go hungry.’
‘Go hungry?’ said Danglars, turning pale.
‘Quite probably,’ said Vampa with admirable equanimity.
‘But you said you did not wish to kill me?’
‘No.’
‘Yet you do want to let me starve to death?’
‘That’s different.’
‘Well, you wretches,’ Danglars cried, ‘I shall foil your vile schemes! If I have to die, I should rather get it over at once. Make me suffer, torture me, kill me, but you shall not have my signature again!’
‘As you wish, Excellency,’ said Vampa. And he left the cell.
With a roar of frustration Danglars threw himself down on his goatskin.
Who were these men? Who was their invisible leader? What plan were they carrying out against him? And when everyone else was able to buy freedom, why could he not do the same?
Oh, certainly, death, sudden and violent, was a good way to foil his implacable enemies, who seemed to be pursuing him with some incomprehensible desire for vengeance. Yes, but that meant dying! Perhaps for the first time in his long career, Danglars thought of death with a simultaneous desire and a fear of dying: the moment had come for him to look directly at the implacable spectre which hovers over every living creature and which, at every heartbeat, says to itself: You will die!
Danglars was like one of those wild animals that at first are excited by the hunt, then are driven to desperation and which sometimes, in their very desperation, manage to escape. It was of escape that Danglars was thinking.
But the walls were solid rock and in front of the only entrance to the cell a man was reading. Behind him could be seen the shapes of others with rifles, passing back and forth.
His determination not to sign lasted for two days, after which he asked for food and offered a million. He was served a magnificent dinner and they took his million.
From then on the unfortunate prisoner’s life was one of continual rambling. He had suffered so much that he no longer wished to expose himself to suffering and he gave in to every demand. After twelve days, one afternoon when he had just eaten as he used to in the days when he had been rich, he did his accounts and discovered that he had signed so many bills to bearer that he had only 50,000 francs left.
His reaction to this discovery was an odd one. Having just given up five million, he tried to save these last 50,000 francs. Rather than give up his 50,000 francs, he resolved to suffer a life of privation; he had glimmers of hope that were close to madness. Having long forgotten God, he recalled only that God had sometimes performed miracles: that the cave might collapse, that the pontifical carabinieri might discover this accursed retreat and come to his aid; that then he would have 50,000 francs left and that this was enough to prevent a man dying of hunger. He begged God to let him keep these 50,000 francs and, as he prayed, he wept.
Three days passed in which the name of God was constantly, if not in his heart, at least on his lips. From time to time he had moments of delirium in which he thought he could see, through the window, a miserable room in which an old man lay, dying, on a straw pallet. The old man too was dying of starvation.
On the fourth day he was no longer a man but a living corpse. He had grubbed up from the earth the smallest crumb from his previous meals and began to devour the matting which covered the earth.
Then he begged Peppino, as one might beg a guardian angel, to give him some food. He offered him a thousand francs for a mouthful of bread, but Peppino did not answer.
On the fifth day, he dragged himself to the door of the cell. ‘Aren’t you a Christian?’ he said, hauling himself to his knees. ‘Do you wish to murder a man who is your brother before God? Oh, my former friends, my former friends!’ he muttered. And he fell, face down, on the ground.
Then, raising himself with a sort of despair, he cried: ‘The leader! The leader!’
‘Here I am,’ said Vampa, suddenly appearing. ‘What do you want now?’
‘Take the last of my gold,’ Danglars stammered, offering his pocket-book. ‘And let me live here, in this cave. I am not asking for freedom, I am only asking to live.’
‘So are you really suffering?’ Vampa asked.
‘Oh, yes! I am suffering, cruelly!’
‘But there are men who have suffered more than you have.’
‘I cannot believe it.’
‘It is so! Those who died of hunger.’
Danglars thought of the old man whom he had seen through the windows of his mean room in his hallucinations, groaning on his bed. He beat his forehead against the ground, moaning: ‘It’s true, there are those who have suffered more than I do, but they at least were martyrs.’
‘Do you at least repent?’ asked a dark and solemn voice which made the hair stand up on Danglars’ head. His weakened eyes tried to make out things in the darkness, and behind the bandit he saw a man wrapped in a cloak and half hidden by the shadow of a stone pillar.
‘Of what must I repent?’ Danglars stammered.
‘Of the evil you have done,’ said the same voice.
‘Oh, yes, I do repent! I do!’ Danglars cried, and he beat his breast with his emaciated fist.
‘Then I pardon you,’ said the man, throwing aside his cloak and taking a step into the light.
‘The Count of Monte Cristo!’ Danglars said, terror making him more pale than he had been a moment before from hunger and misery.
‘You are mistaken. I am not the Count of Monte Cristo.’
‘Who are you then?’
‘I am the one whom you sold, betrayed and dishonoured. I am the one whose fiancée you prostituted. I am the one on whom you trampled in order to attain a fortune. I am the one whose father you condemned to starvation, and the one who condemned you to starvation, but who none the less forgives you, because he himself needs forgiveness. I am Edmond Dantès!’
Danglars gave a single cry and fell, prostrate.
‘Get up,’ said the count. ‘Your life is safe. The same good fortune did not attend your two accomplices: one is mad, the other is dead. Keep your last fifty thousand francs, I give them to you. As for the five million you stole from the almshouses, they have already been returned by an anonymous donor.
‘Now, eat and drink. This evening you are my guest. Vampa, when this man has had his fill, he will be free.’
Danglars remained prostrate, while the count walked away. When he looked up, he saw only a sort of shadow disappearing down the corridor, while the bandits bowed as it passed.
As the count had ordered, Vampa served Danglars: he brought him the best wine and finest fruits of Italy and, having put him into his post-chaise, left him on the road, with his back to a tree.
He stayed there until dawn, not knowing where he was.
When day broke, he found that he was near a stream. He was thirsty, so he dragged himself over to it. Leaning over the water to drink, he observed that his hair had turned grey.
_________
NOTES
1. Harpagon: The central character in Moliére’s play L’Avare.
Every sleep — apart from the one that Danglars feared — ends with an awakening.
Danglars woke up. For a Parisian who was accustomed to silk curtains, velvet hangings on the walls and the scent that rises from wood whitening in the chimney-piece or is wafted back from a ceiling lined in satin, to wake up in a chalky stone grotto must be like a dream in the worst possible taste. As he touched the goatskin curtains, Danglars must have thought he was dreaming about the Samoyeds or the Lapps. But in such circumstances it is only a second before the most intractable doubt becomes certainty.
‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘Yes, I’m in the hands of the bandits about whom Albert de Morcerf was telling us.’
His first impulse was to breathe, to make sure that he was not wounded: this was something that he had come across in Don Quixote, not perhaps the only book he had read, but the only one of which he could remember something.
‘No,’ he said. ‘They have not killed me or wounded me, but they may perhaps have robbed me…’
He quickly felt in his pocket. It had not been touched. The hundred louis that he had put aside for his journey from Rome to Venice were still in his trouser pocket, and the pocket-book with the letter of credit for five million, fifty thousand francs was still in the pocket of his frock-coat.
‘These are strange bandits,’ he thought, ‘to have left me my purse and my pocket-book. As I said yesterday when I went to bed, they will try to ransom me. Well, well! I still have my watch. Let’s see what time it is.’
Danglars’ watch, a masterpiece by Breguet which he had carefully wound up the previous day before setting out, sounded half-past five in the morning. Without it, Danglars would have had no idea of the time, since there was no daylight in his cell.
Should he ask the bandits to explain themselves? Should he wait patiently until they asked for him? The second alternative seemed the wiser, so Danglars waited.
He waited until noon.
Throughout this time a sentry had been stationed at his door. At eight in the morning, the guard was changed; and at this moment, Danglars felt a desire to find out who was guarding him.
He had noticed that rays of light — lamplight, not daylight — were managing to make their way through the ill-fitting planks of the door. He went across to one of these openings just at the moment when the bandit took a few gulps of brandy which, because of the leather bottle that contained it, exuded an odour that Danglars found quite repellent. ‘Ugh!’ he exclaimed, retreating to the far corner of the cell.
At noon the man with the brandy was replaced by another operative. Danglars was curious to see his new keeper, so he once more crept over to the gap in the boards. The new man was an athletic bandit, a Goliath with large eyes, thick lips, a broken nose and red hair which hung over his shoulders in twisted locks like vipers.
‘Oh, my God!’ Danglars said. ‘This one is more like an ogre than a human being. In any case, I am old and quite gristly: a fat white, not good to eat.’
As we may see, Danglars still had enough wits about him to joke.
At the same moment, as if to prove that he was no ogre, his guard sat down in front of the cell door, took a loaf of black bread out of his haversack, with some onions and cheese, which he forthwith began to devour.
‘Devil take me,’ Danglars said, observing the bandit’s dinner through the gaps in his door. ‘Devil take me if I can understand how anyone could eat such filth.’ He went and sat down on the goatskin, which reminded him of the smell of the first sentry’s brandy.
However, it was all very well for Danglars to think that, but the secrets of nature are beyond our understanding and it may be that the crudest of victuals can address a tangible invitation in quite eloquent terms to a hungry stomach.
Suddenly Danglars felt that at this moment his was a bottomless pit: the man seemed less ugly, the bread less black and the cheese less rancid.
Finally, those raw onions, the repulsive foodstuff of savages, began to evoke certain sauces Robert,[1] certain dishes of boiled beef and onions which his cook had adapted to more refined palates when Danglars would tell him: ‘Monsieur Deniseau, give us a spot of plain home cooking today.’
He got up and went to bang on the door. The bandit looked up. Danglars saw that he had been heard and banged louder.
‘Che cosa?’ the bandit asked.
‘I say, I say, my good fellow,’ Danglars said, tapping his fingers against the door. ‘Isn’t it about time someone thought of feeding me as well, eh?’
But either because he did not understand or because he had no orders regarding Danglars’ breakfast, the giant went back to his meal.
Danglars’ pride was wounded and, not wishing to compromise himself any further with this brute, he lay down once more on the goatskin without uttering another word.
Four hours went by. The giant was replaced by another bandit. Danglars, who was suffering dreadful stomach cramps, quietly got up, put his eye to the door and recognized the intelligent face of his guide. It was indeed Peppino who was preparing to enjoy his guard duty in as much comfort as possible, sitting down opposite the door and placing between his legs an earthenware casserole which contained some chick peas tossed in pork fat, hot and redolent. Beside these chick peas, Peppino set down another pretty little basket of Velletri grapes and a flask of Orvieto wine. Peppino was something of a gourmet.
Danglars’ mouth began to water as he watched these gastronomic preparations. ‘Ah, ha,’ he thought. ‘Let’s see if this one is any more amenable than the last.’ And he hammered gently on his door.
‘On y va,’ the bandit said. Thanks to his association with Signor Pastrini’s house, he had eventually learned even idiomatic French; so he came and opened the door.
Danglars recognized him as the man who had shouted at him in such an enraged tone: ‘Put your head in!’ However, this was no time for recriminations. On the contrary, he adopted his most pleasant manner and said, with a gracious smile: ‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur, but am I not also to be given some dinner?’
‘What!’ Peppino exclaimed. ‘Is Your Excellency hungry, by any chance?’
‘I like that “by any chance”, Danglars thought. ‘It is now fully twenty-four hours since I last ate anything.’ And he added aloud, shrugging his shoulders: ‘Yes, I am hungry; in fact, very hungry.’
‘So would Your Excellency like to eat?’
‘Immediately, if possible.’
‘Nothing simpler,’ said Peppino. ‘Here one can get whatever one wishes, if one pays, of course, as is customary among honest Christians.’
‘Of course,’ said Danglars. ‘Though the fact is that people who arrest you and throw you in jail should at least feed their prisoners.’
‘Oh, Excellency,’ Peppino replied, ‘that’s not customary.’
‘That’s no argument,’ Danglars said, hoping to tame his keeper with his good humour. ‘But I shall have to make do with it. Now then, let me have something to eat.’
‘At once, Excellency. What is your pleasure?’ And Peppino put his bowl on the ground so that the fumes found their way directly into Danglars’ nostrils. ‘Give me your order.’
‘Do you have kitchens here, then?’ the banker asked.
‘What! Do we have kitchens? The finest kitchens.’
‘And cooks?’
‘Superb cooks.’
‘Well, then: fowl, fish or flesh - anything, as long as I can eat.’
‘As Your Excellency pleases. Shall we say a chicken?’
‘Yes, a chicken.’
Peppino drew himself up and cried as loudly as he could: ‘A chicken for His Excellency!’ His voice was still echoing under the vaults when a young man appeared, handsome, slim and half naked, like a fish porter in Antiquity. He bore in the chicken on a silver plate, balancing it on his head.
‘This is just like the Café de Paris,’ Danglars muttered.
‘Here we are, Excellency,’ Peppino said, taking the chicken from the young bandit and putting it down on a worm-eaten table which, with a stool and the goatskin bed, made up the entire furniture of the cell.
Danglars asked for a knife and fork.
‘There you are, Excellency,’ Peppino said, offering him a little knife with a rounded end and a boxwood fork. Danglars took the knife in one hand and the fork in the other, and set to work cutting up the piece of poultry.
‘Excuse me, Excellency,’ Peppino said, putting a hand on the banker’s shoulder. ‘Here we pay before eating: the customer may not be happy when he leaves…’
‘Oh, I see,’ thought Danglars. ‘It’s not like in Paris, quite apart from the fact that they are probably going to fleece me; but let’s do things in style. Come now, I’ve always been told how cheap it is living in Italy. A chicken must be worth some twelve sous in Rome.’
‘Here you are,’ he said, throwing a louis to Peppino.
Peppino picked up the louis, and Danglars again put the knife on the bird.
‘One moment, Excellency,’ said Peppino, getting up. ‘Your Excellency still owes me something.’
‘Didn’t I say they would fleece me?’ Danglars muttered. But, resolving to make the best of this extortion, he asked: ‘So, how much do I still owe you for this skinny old boiler?’
‘Your Excellency has given me a louis on account.’
‘A louis, on account, for a chicken?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘Come, you're joking.’
‘That leaves only four thousand, nine hundred and ninety- nine louis that Your Excellency still owes me.’
Danglars stared wide-eyed at the announcement of this enormous pleasantry. ‘Oh, very funny,’ he muttered. ‘Very funny indeed.’ He was about to go back to cutting up the chicken, but Peppino grasped his right hand with his own left hand, while holding out the other.
‘Come,’ he said.
‘Youre not joking?’ Danglars asked.
‘We never joke, Excellency,’ said Peppino, as serious as a Quaker.
‘What! A hundred thousand francs for this chicken!’
‘Excellency, you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to raise poultry in these confounded caves.’
‘Come, come,’ said Danglars. ‘I find this very entertaining… Very amusing, I must say. But, as I’m hungry, let me eat. Here, there’s another louis for yourself, my friend.’
‘Then that will be only four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight louis,’ Peppino said, with unaltered equanimity. ‘If we are patient, we'll get there in the end.’
‘Now, see here,’ said Danglars, disgusted by this persistent determination to make fun of him, ‘as far as that goes, never. Go to hell! You don’t know the person you're dealing with.’
Peppino made a sign, and the young boy reached out and snatched away the chicken. Danglars threw himself back on the goatskin bed and Peppino shut the door, then went back to eating his chick peas.
Danglars could not see what Peppino was doing, but the clatter of the bandit’s teeth left the prisoner in no doubt as to the nature of the exercise he was engaged in. It was quite clear that he was eating, and even that he was eating very noisily, like a badly brought-up young man.
‘Brute!’ Danglars said. Peppino pretended not to hear. Without even turning around, he went on eating at a very sensible pace. Danglars’ stomach seemed to have as many holes in it as the barrel of the Danaids.[2] He couldn’t believe that he would ever manage to fill it. However, he lasted for another half-hour, though it is true to say that that half-hour seemed to him like a century.
Then he got up again and went to the door.
‘Come, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Don’t keep me on tenterhooks like this any longer. Just tell me straight away what you want of me.’
‘But, Excellency, why not rather say what you want of us? Give us your orders and we shall carry them out.’
‘Well, first, open the door.’
Peppino opened it.
‘I want,’ Danglars said, ‘by God, I want to eat!’
‘You’re hungry?’
‘As you very well know.’
‘What would Your Excellency like to eat?’
‘A piece of dry bread, since chicken is priceless in these accursed caves.’
‘Bread! Very well,’ said Peppino. And he called out: ‘Ho, there, bring some bread!’
A young boy brought a roll.
‘There you are,’ said Peppino.
‘How much?’ Danglars asked.
‘Four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight louis: You have two louis’ credit.’
‘What! A bread roll is a hundred thousand francs?’
‘A hundred thousand,’ said Peppino.
‘But you asked me the same price for a chicken.’
‘We don’t offer an à la carte menu; only prix fixe. Whether you eat a lot or a little, ask for ten dishes or just one, it’s still the same amount.’
‘This joke again! My good friend, I tell you, this is absurd, it’s ridiculous! Why not tell me at once that you want me to die of starvation: it would be quicker.’
‘No, Excellency. You are the one who wants to commit suicide. Pay up and eat up.’
‘What can I pay with, you frightful creature?’ Danglars said in exasperation. ‘Do you think I carry a hundred thousand francs around in my pocket?’
‘You have five million and fifty thousand francs in your pocket, Excellency,’ said Peppino. ‘That is a hundred chickens at a hundred thousand francs and half a chicken at fifty thousand.’
Danglars shuddered and the scales fell from his eyes. It was still a joke, but he understood it at last. It is even true to say that he found it more piquant than he had a moment before.
‘Come, come, now,’ he said. ‘If I give you those hundred thousand francs, will you at least consider us quits and let me eat in peace?’
‘Of course,’ said Peppino.
‘But how can I give them to you?’ Danglars asked, breathing more freely.
‘Nothing could be easier. You have a credit with Messrs Thomson and French, Via dei Banchi, in Rome. Give us a bill for four thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight louis on those gentlemen, and our banker will cash it for us.’
Danglars at least wanted to show willing. He took the pen and paper which Peppino offered him, wrote out the order and signed it.
‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s a bill, payable to bearer.’
‘And that’s your chicken.’
Danglars cut into the fowl with a sigh. It seemed to him very thin for such a large sum of money. As for Peppino, he read the paper carefully, put it in his pocket and went on eating his chick peas.
_________
NOTES
1. sauces Robert. An onion sauce which Dumas, in his Grand dictionnaire de cuisine, describes as highly appetizing, as well as highly flavoured.
2. the barrel of the Danaids: The fifty daughters of the king of Argos were betrothed to the fifty sons of Aegyptus, but their father, to avert a prophecy that he would be killed by one of his sons-in-law, made them promise to murder their husbands. They were condemned to spend eternity in hell filling barrels full of holes.
At the very same moment as the count’s steamship was vanishing behind the Cap Morgiou, a man, travelling by the mail on the road from Florence to Rome, had just left the little town of Aquapendente. Doing some of the journey on foot, he covered a lot of ground without attracting suspicion.
Dressed in a frock-coat or, rather, an overcoat, much worn by travel but showing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour sewn on to it, still bright and shining, the man was recognizably French, not only by his dress and his decoration, but also by the accent in which he addressed the postilion. Another proof that he had been born in that land, with its universal language, was that he knew no other Italian words except those pertaining to music which, like Figaro’s ‘goddam’,[1] can stand in for all the subtleties of a particular tongue.
‘Allegro!’ he cried to the coachmen as they went up a hill. ‘Moderato!’ he cried every time they went down.
God knows, there are plenty of hills, up and down, between Florence and Rome along the road through Aquapendente.
The two words, of course, caused enormous hilarity among the good fellows to whom they were addressed.
Once in the presence of the Eternal City, that is to say on arriving at La Storta, the point from which one may catch sight of Rome, the traveller did not experience the feeling of fervent curiosity that impels every foreigner to rise from his seat in an attempt to see the famous dome of Saint Peter’s, which can be glimpsed long before anything else. No. He merely took a portfolio from his pocket and, from the portfolio, a piece of paper folded four times, which he unfolded and refolded with an intensity that was close to respect, saying only: ‘Good, I still have it.’
The carriage entered through the Porta del Popolo, turned left and stopped at the Hôtel de Londres.
Our old friend Signor Pastrini greeted the traveller on the doorstep, cap in hand. The traveller got down, ordered a good dinner and asked for the address of the firm of Thomson and French, which was instantly pointed out to him, since the firm was one of the best known in Rome. It was situated in the Via dei Banchi, near Saint Peter’s.
In Rome, as anywhere else, the arrival of a stage-coach is an event. Ten young descendants of Marius and the Gracchi,[2] barefoot and with holes at their elbows, but with one hand on their hip and the other arm picturesquely bent above their head, watched the traveller, the post-chaise and the horses. These typical Roman ragazzi had been joined by some fifty idlers from the Papal States, of the sort who make rings on the water by spitting into the Tiber from the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, when there is water in the river.
Now since the ragazzi and street urchins of Rome, unlike the gamins of Paris, understand every language, especially French, they heard the traveller ask for rooms, order dinner and finally enquire as to the address of Thomson and French.
The result was that, when the new arrival came out of the hotel with his inevitable guide, a man emerged from the group of onlookers and, without being observed by the traveller (or, apparently, by the guide), walked a short distance behind the foreigner, tailing him with as much skill as a Parisian detective.
The man was in such a hurry to visit Thomson and French that he had not bothered to wait for the horses to be harnessed. The carriage was to pick him up on the way or wait for him at the door of the bank. He got there before the coach reached him.
The Frenchman went in, leaving his guide in the antechamber, where he immediately got into conversation with two or three of those businessmen who have no business (or, if you prefer, have a thousand businesses), who in Rome hang around at the doors of banks, churches, ruins, museums or theatres.
At the same moment, the man who had left the group of onlookers at the hotel also went in. The Frenchman rang at the window in the front office and came through into the first room. His shadow did likewise.
‘Messrs Thomson and French?’ the foreigner asked.
A sort of lackey got up at a sign from a confidential clerk, the solemn guardian of the first office.
‘Whom should I announce?’ asked the lackey, preparing to precede the foreigner.
‘Baron Danglars,’ the traveller replied.
‘Follow me,’ said the lackey.
A door opened. The lackey and the baron vanished through it. The man who had come in behind Danglars sat down on a bench to wait.
The clerk went on writing for roughly five minutes. During this time the seated man remained absolutely still and silent.
Then the clerk’s quill stopped scratching across the paper. He looked up, searched carefully all around him and, after reassuring himself that they were alone, said: ‘Ah! So there you are, Peppino.’
‘Yes,’ the man replied laconically.
‘Did you see the chance of anything good from that fat man?’
‘There’s not much to be had out of him: we’ve been informed.’
‘So you know what he’s here for, snooper?’
‘Why, he’s come to make a withdrawal; the only thing is, we don’t know how much.’
‘You'll find out soon enough, my friend.’
‘Good, but don’t do as you did the other day and give me misinformation.’
‘What do you mean? What are you thinking of? Is it the Englishman who went away with three thousand écus a few days ago?’
‘No, he really did have three thousand écus and we found them. I’m talking about that Russian prince.’
‘What of him?’
‘Well, you told us thirty thousand livres and we only found twenty-two.’
‘You probably didn’t look hard enough.’
‘Luigi Vampa did the search in person.’
‘In that case, either he had paid his debts…’
‘A Russian?’
‘Or spent the money.’
‘I suppose that’s possible.’
‘It’s definite. But let me go to my post, or the Frenchman will have done his business before I can discover the precise amount.’
Peppino nodded and, taking a rosary out of his pocket, began to mutter some prayer or other, while the clerk vanished through the same door that had opened for the lackey and the baron.
Ten minutes later, he reappeared, with a broad smile.
‘Well?’ Peppino asked.
‘Stand by! It’s a princely sum.’
‘Five or six millions, I believe?’
‘Yes. How do you know the figure?’
‘Against a bill signed by His Excellency, the Count of Monte Cristo?’
‘You know the count?’
‘Credited on Rome, Venice and Vienna.’
‘Just so!’ the clerk exclaimed. ‘How are you so well informed?’
‘I told you that we had advance information.’
‘So why did you come to me?’
‘To be sure that this is really our man.’
‘It’s him all right. Five million… A fine sum, eh, Peppino?’
‘Yes.’
‘We'll never have as much for ourselves.’
‘At least we’ll get some crumbs of it,’ Peppino said philosophically.
‘Hush! Here he comes.’
The clerk took up his pen and Peppino his rosary. When the door opened, the one was writing and the other praying. Danglars appeared, in fine spirits, together with the banker, who accompanied him to the door.
As agreed, the carriage that was to meet Danglars was waiting in front of the House of Thomson and French. The guide held the door open: a cicerone is a very accommodating creature, who can be put to all sorts of uses.
Danglars leapt into the carriage with the spring of a twenty- year-old. The guide shut the door and got up beside the driver.
Peppino climbed on to the rear box.
‘Would Your Excellency like to see Saint Peter’s?’ the guide asked.
‘What for?’ the baron replied.
‘Why, just to see it!’
‘I didn’t come to Rome to see anything,’ Danglars said aloud; then, with an avaricious smile, he said under his breath: ‘I came to touch.’ And he meaningfully touched his portfolio, in which he had just enclosed a letter.
‘So, Your Excellency is going…’
‘To the hotel.’
‘Casa Pastrini,’ the guide said to the coachman, and the carriage set off as briskly as a racing gig.
Ten minutes later, the baron had returned to his rooms and Peppino had taken up his place on the bench running along the front of the hotel, after whispering a few words to one of those descendants of Marius and the Gracchi whom we noted at the start of this chapter, the boy in question setting off down the road for the Capitol as fast as his legs could carry him.
Danglars was weary, satisfied and sleepy. He went to bed, put his pocket-book under the bolster and fell asleep.
Peppino had plenty of time, however. He played morra[3] with some porters, lost three écus and in consolation drank a flagon of Orvieto.
The next day, Danglars woke late, even though he had gone to bed early. For the previous five or six nights he had slept badly, if at all. He had an ample breakfast and not being, as he had said, much inclined to enjoy the beauty of the Eternal City, he asked for his post-horses to be brought at noon.
However, Danglars had not counted on the formalities of the police and the idleness of the postmaster. The horses arrived only at two o’clock and the guide did not bring back the passport, with its visa, until three.
All these preparations had drawn a fair crowd of onlookers to the door of Signor Pastrini’s, and there was no lack of descendants of the Gracchi and Marius among them. The baron walked in triumph through these groups of idlers who called him ‘Excellency’, to get a baiocco.
Danglars, who was a very democratic fellow as we know, had up to then been content to be addressed as ‘Baron’, and had not yet been called ‘Excellency’; he found the title flattering and threw a few pauls to the mob, which was quite ready, for a further dozen or so of the same, to nominate him ‘Your Royal Highness’.
‘What road?’ the postilion asked in Italian.
‘To Ancona,’ the baron replied.
Signor Pastrini translated the request and the reply, and the carriage set off at a gallop.
Danglars intended to go to Venice and draw out part of his fortune, then from Venice to Vienna, where he would withdraw the rest. Then his idea was to settle in the latter city which, he had been assured, was one offering many pleasures.
Hardly had they done three leagues through the Roman campagna than night began to fall. Danglars had not realized that they were leaving so late; otherwise he would have stayed in Rome. He asked the postilion how long it would be before they arrived in the next town.
‘Non capisco,’ the man replied.
Danglars nodded, to indicate ‘Very good’, and the carriage drove on.
‘I can stop at the first post,’ Danglars thought.
He still felt some traces of that well-being which he had experienced on the previous day and which had given him such a good night’s sleep. He was comfortably installed in a solid English coach with double springs. He felt himself being pulled forward at a gallop by two strong horses, and he knew that the relay was seven leagues on. What is one to do when one is a banker and one has successfully gone bankrupt?
For ten minutes he thought of his wife, who was still in Paris; and for another ten minutes he considered his daughter, who was running round the globe with Mlle d’Armilly. He devoted a further ten minutes to his creditors and how he would spend their money. Then, having nothing left to think about, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
From time to time, however, shaken by a jolt which was harder than the rest, Danglars would momentarily re-open his eyes and feel himself carried along at the same speed through the same Roman campagna, among a scattering of broken aqueducts which looked like granite giants petrified as they ran. But the night was cold, dark and rainy, and it was far better for a man who was half asleep to stay at the back of the coach, with his eyes closed, than to put his head out of the door and ask where he was - from a postilion whose only answer would be: ‘Non capisco.’ So Danglars went on sleeping, thinking that it would be time enough to wake up when they arrived at the relay.
The carriage stopped. Danglars thought he had at last reached his much-desired goal.
He opened his eyes and looked through the glass, expecting to find himself in the middle of some town, or at least of some village. But he could see nothing except a kind of isolated hovel, with three or four men coming and going like shadows.
He waited for a moment, expecting the postilion who had finished his relay to come and ask him for his pay. He thought he could take advantage of the opportunity to ask for some information from his new driver. But the horses were unharnessed and replaced without anyone coming to ask the traveller for money. Astonished, Danglars opened the door, but a firm hand immediately slammed it shut, and the carriage set off again.
The baron woke up completely at this, and in some astonishment.
‘Hey!’ he called to the postilion. ‘Hey, mio caro!’
This was more bel canto Italian that he had learnt when his daughter used to sing duos with Prince Cavalcanti. But mio caro did not reply. So Danglars opened the window.
‘I say, my good friend! Where are we going?’ he said, putting his head out.
‘Dentro la testa!’ cried a serious and commanding voice, accompanied by a threatening gesture.
Danglars understood dentro la testa: ‘put your head in!’ As we can see, he was making rapid progress in Italian. He obeyed, but with some misgivings. And, since his anxiety was increasing minute by minute, after a few moments his mind, instead of the void that it had contained on setting out, which had brought sleep… his mind, as we say, filled with a large quantity of thoughts, each more likely than the previous one to keep a traveller on his toes, especially one finding himself in Danglars’ situation.
In the darkness his eyes took on that degree of acuity that strong emotions tend to give them at first, only for the effect to be reversed later through overuse. Before one is afraid, one sees clearly; while one is afraid, one sees double; and after being afraid, one sees dimly.
Danglars saw a man wrapped in a cloak galloping beside the right-hand door.
‘Some gendarme,’ he said. ‘Have I been denounced to the pontifical authorities by the French telegraph?’
He decided to resolve his uncertainties. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked.
‘Dentro la testa!’ the same voice repeated, in the same threatening tone.
Danglars looked over at the left-hand door. Another man on horseback was galloping alongside it.
‘Definitely,’ said Danglars. ‘I have definitely been arrested.’ And he slumped back into the seat, this time not to sleep but to think.
A moment later the moon rose.
From the back of the carriage he looked out at the countryside and saw the huge aqueducts, stone phantoms which he had noticed in passing; but now, instead of being on his right, they were on the left.
He realized that the carriage had turned round and that he was being taken back to Rome.
‘Oh, wretch that I am,’ he muttered. ‘They must have obtained an order for my extradition.’
The carriage continued to dash forward at a terrifying speed. A dreadful hour went by, because every new indication that appeared proved beyond doubt that the fugitive was being taken back the way he had come. Finally, he saw a dark mass against which it seemed that the carriage was about to crash; but it turned aside and continued parallel to the dark shape, which was nothing other than the ring of ramparts encircling Rome.
‘Oh, oh!’ Danglars muttered. ‘We’re not going into the city, so I am not being arrested after all. Good heavens, I’ve just thought: could it be…’
His hair stood on end, because he recalled those interesting stories of Roman bandits which were taken with such a large pinch of salt in Paris. Albert de Morcerf had told some of them to Mme Danglars and Eugénie when it had been a matter of the young viscount becoming the son-in-law of the first and the husband of the latter.
‘Perhaps they are thieves!’ he thought.
Suddenly the carriage was running over something harder than a sanded roadway. Danglars ventured to look out on both sides of the road and saw oddly shaped monuments. Thinking about Morcerf’s story, which was now coming back to him in every detail, he thought that he must be on the Appian Way.
On the left of the carriage, in a sort of dip, could be seen a circular excavation. It was the Circus of Caracalla.[4]
At a word from the man who was galloping by the right- hand door the carriage stopped. At the same time the left-hand door opened and a voice ordered: ‘Scendi!’
Danglars got down without further ado. He could still not yet speak Italian, but he was already understanding the language. More dead than alive, he looked around him. He was surrounded by four men, apart from the postilion.
‘Di qua,’ one of the four said, going down a little path that led from the Appian Way to the middle of the irregular mounds that break up the topography of the Roman campagna. Danglars followed his guide without debate, and did not need to turn around to confirm that the other three men were following him. But it seemed to him that these men were stopping like sentries at more or less equal distances.
After they had walked for some ten minutes, in which Danglars did not exchange a single word with his guide, he found himself standing between a small hillock and a tall bush. Three silent men standing around him formed a triangle, with himself at its centre. He tried to speak, but his tongue refused to obey.
‘Avanti,’ said the same sharp and commanding voice.
This time Danglars doubly understood. He understood both by word and by gesture, because the man who was walking behind him pushed him forward so roughly that he nearly collided with his guide. The guide was our friend Peppino, who advanced into the high bushes along a winding track that only the ants and the lizards could have recognized as a pathway.
Peppino stopped in front of a rock surmounted by a thick bush. This rock, half open like an eyelid, swallowed up the young man, who disappeared into it like a devil into the pit in one of our fairy tales.
The voice and gestures of the man behind Danglars ordered him to do the same. There could be no further doubt: the French bankrupt was in the hands of Roman bandits.
Danglars did as he was told like a man caught between two frightful perils, made brave by fear. Despite his stomach, which was not built for wriggling through cracks in the Roman campagna, he slipped in behind Peppino and, letting himself drop with his eyes closed, he fell on his feet. As he did so, he re-opened his eyes.
The track was wide but dark. Peppino, making no effort to conceal himself now that he was at home, struck a flame from a tinder box and lit a torch. Two other men came down behind Danglars, taking up the rear, and, pushing Danglars if he ever happened to stop, drove him down a gentle slope to the centre of a sinister-looking crossroads.
Here were white stone walls, hollowed out to make coffins, superimposed one above the other, which seemed like the deep black eyes of a skull. A sentry was tapping the barrel of his carbine against his left hand. ‘Friend or foe?’ he asked.
‘Friend,’ said Peppino. ‘Where is the captain?’
‘There,’ the sentry said, indicating over his shoulder a sort of large room hollowed out of the rock, its light shining into the corridor through wide arched openings.
‘Good prey, Captain, good prey,’ Peppino said in Italian, seizing Danglars by the collar of his frock-coat and dragging him towards an opening like a door, through which one could gain access to the room in which the captain appeared to have made his lodging.
‘Is this the man?’ he asked, looking up from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander which he had been reading attentively.
‘That’s him, Captain, that’s him.’
‘Very well. Show him to me.’
On this rather impertinent order, Peppino brought his torch so sharply up to Danglars’ face that he leapt back, afraid of having his eyelashes burned. His face, pale and distraught, showed all the signs of frightful terror.
‘This man is tired,’ the captain said. ‘Let him be shown to his bed.’
‘Oh!’ Danglars murmured. ‘This bed is probably one of the coffins around the walls, and that sleep is the sleep of death that one of the daggers I can see shining in the darkness will bring me.’
Indeed, in the black depths of the vast hall, rising off their beds of dry grass or wolf’s skin, one could see the companions of the man whom Albert de Morcerf had found reading Caesar’s Commentaries and whom Danglars found reading The Life of Alexander.
The banker emitted a dull groan and followed his guide. He did not try either to pray or to cry out. He was without strength, will, power or feeling. He went because he was taken.
He tripped against a step and, realizing that there was a stairway in front of him, he bent down instinctively so as not to strike his head and found himself in a cell cut out of the sheer rock. It was clean, if bare, and dry, even though situated an immeasurable depth below the surface of the ground. A bed of dry grass, covered with goatskins, was not standing, but spread out in a corner of this cell. Seeing it, Danglars thought he saw the glowing symbol of his salvation.
‘Oh, God be praised!’ he murmured. ‘It’s a real bed!’
This was the second time in the last hour that he had called on the name of God, something that had not happened to him for ten years.
‘Ecco,’ the guide said. And, pushing Danglars into the cell, he shut the door behind him. A bolt grated and Danglars was a prisoner.
In any case, even if there had been no lock, it would have taken Saint Peter, guided by a heavenly angel, to pass through the midst of the garrison which guarded the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian, camped around its leader, in whom the reader will surely have recognized the celebrated Luigi Vampa.
Danglars had most certainly recognized the bandit, though he had not wanted to believe in the man’s existence when Morcerf had tried to introduce him in France. He had recognized not only him but also the cell in which Morcerf had been imprisoned and which, in all probability, was a lodging reserved for foreigners.
These memories which, as it happened, Danglars recalled with some joy brought back a feeling of calm. Since they had not killed him at once, the bandits did not intend to kill him at all. They had captured him in order to rob him, and since he had only a few louis on him, he would be ransomed.
He recalled that Morcerf had been taxed at around 4,000 écus. As he considered himself a good deal more important than Morcerf, he mentally settled his own price at 8,000 écus. And 8,000 écus was equivalent to 48,000 livres.
He would still be left with something in the region of 5,050,000 francs. With that, he could manage anywhere.
So, feeling more or less sure that he would survive the adventure, especially since there was no case in which a man had ever been held for a ransom of 5,050,000 livres, Danglars lay down on his bed and, after turning around two or three times, fell asleep, as easy in his mind as the hero whose story Luigi Vampa was reading.
_________
NOTES
1. Figaro’s ‘goddam’: In Beaumarchais’Le Mariage de Figaro, Act II, Scene 5.
2. Marius and the Gracchi: Gaius Marius (155-86 Bc) was a Roman general; the two Gracchi were political reformers who tried to redistribute wealth, but were murdered successively in 133 Bc and 121 Bc. Dumas seems to be using the names simply as representative early citizens of Rome.
3. morra: A game in which one player tries to shout out the number of fingers shown on the hand of the other, who quickly raises and lowers them.
4. Circus of Caracalla: The baths and circus of the Emperor Caracalla (188-217) still survive on the outskirts of Rome.
The count came away heavy-hearted from this house where he was leaving Mercédès, in all probability never to see her again.
Since the death of little Edouard, a great change had overtaken Monte Cristo. Having reached the summit of his vengeance by the slow and tortuous route that he had followed, he had looked over the far side of the mountain and into the abyss of doubt.
There was more than that: the conversation that he had just had with Mercédès had awoken so many memories in his heart that these memories themselves needed to be overcome.
A man of the count’s stamp could not long exist in that state of melancholy which may give life to vulgar souls by endowing them with an appearance of originality, but which destroys superior beings. The count decided that if he had reached the stage where he was blaming himself, then there must be some mistake in his calculations.
‘I think ill of the past,’ he said, ‘and cannot have been mistaken in that way. What! Could the goal that I set myself have been wrong? What, have I been on the wrong road for the past ten years? What, can it be that in a single hour the architect can become convinced that the work into which he has put all his hopes was, if not impossible, then sacrilegious?
‘I cannot accept that idea, because it would drive me mad. What my thinking today lacks is a proper assessment of the past, because I am looking at this past from the other end of the horizon. Indeed, as one goes forward, so the past, like the landscape through which one is walking, is gradually effaced. What is happening to me is what happens to people who are wounded in a dream: they look at their wound and they feel it but cannot remember how it was caused.
‘Come, then, resurrected man; come, extravagant Croesus; come, sleepwalker; come, all-powerful visionary; come, invincible millionaire, and, for an instant, rediscover that dread prospect of a life of poverty and starvation. Go back down the roads where fate drove, where misfortune led and where despair greeted you. Too many diamonds, gold and happiness now shine from the glass of the mirror in which Monte Cristo gazes on Dantés. Hide the diamonds, dull the gold, dampen the rays. Let the rich man rediscover the poor one, the free man the prisoner, and the resurrected man the corpse.’
Even as he was saying this to himself, Monte Cristo went down the Rue de la Caisserie. This was the same street down which, one night twenty-four years before, he had been led by a silent guard. These houses, now bright and full of life, had then been dark, silent and shuttered.
‘Yet they are the same,’ Monte Cristo muttered. ‘The difference is that then it was night and now it is full daylight. It is the sun that brings light and joy to all this.’
He went down on to the quays along the Rue Saint-Laurent and walked towards the Consigne. This was the point on the port from which he had been brought to the ship. A pleasure- boat was going past with its superstructure covered in cotton twill. Monte Cristo called the master, who immediately turned the boat towards him with the eagerness shown in such circumstances by a boatman who senses a good tip in the offing.
The weather was splendid, the journey a delight. The sun was setting on the horizon, blazing red in the waters that caught fire as it descended towards them. The sea was flat as a mirror, but wrinkled from time to time by leaping fish, chased by some unseen enemy, that jumped out of the water to look for safety in another element. Finally, on the horizon could be seen the fishing boats on their way to Les Martigues or the merchant ships bound for Corsica or Spain, passing by as white and elegant as travelling gulls.
Despite the clear sky and the finely shaped ships, despite the golden light flooding the scene, the count, wrapped in his cloak, recalled one by one all the details of the dreadful journey: the lone light burning in Les Catalans, the sight of the Chateau d’If that told him where he was being taken, the struggle with the gendarmes when he tried to jump into the water, his despair when he felt himself overcome, and the cold 0touch of the muzzle of the carbine pressed to his temple like a ring of ice.
Little by little, just as the springs that dry up in the summer heat are moistened bit by bit when the autumn clouds gather and begin to well up, drop by drop, so the Count of Monte Cristo also felt rising in his breast the old overflowing gall that had once filled the heart of Edmond Dantes.
From now on there was no more clear sky, or graceful boats, or radiant light for him. The sky was clouded over with a funereal veil and the appearance of the black giant known as the Chateau d’If made him shudder, as though he had suddenly seen the ghost of a mortal enemy.
They were about to arrive. Instinctively the count shrank to the far end of the boat, even though the master told him in his most unctuous voice: ‘We are about to land, Monsieur.’
Monte Cristo recalled that on this same spot, on this same rock, he had been violently dragged by his guards, who had forced him to go up the ramp by digging him in the side with the point of a bayonet.
The journey seemed long then to Dantés. Monte Cristo had found it quite short: every stroke of the oars threw up a million thoughts and memories in the liquid dust of the sea.
Since the July Revolution[1] there had been no more prisoners in the Chateau d’If. Its guardhouse was inhabited only by a detachment of men who were meant to discourage smugglers, and a concierge waited for visitors at the door to show them round this monument of terror which had become a monument of curiosity.
Yet, even though he knew all this, when he passed under the vault, went down the dark staircase and was taken to see the dungeons that he had asked to visit, a cold pallor swept across his brow and its icy sweat flowed back into his heart.
The count asked if any former doorkeeper remained from the time of the Restoration. All had retired or gone on to other work. The concierge who showed him round had been there only since 1830.
He was taken to see his own dungeon.
He saw the pale light seeping through the narrow window; he saw the place where the bed had stood (though it had since been removed); and, behind the bed, now blocked, but still visible because of the newness of the stones, the opening made by Abbé Faria. Monte Cristo felt his legs give way under him. He took a wooden stool and sat down.
‘Do they tell any stories about this castle, apart from those to do with Mirabeau’s imprisonment[2] here?’ he asked. ‘Is there any tradition connected with these dismal haunts in which one can hardly believe that men once shut up their fellow creatures?’
‘Yes, Monsieur,’ said the concierge. ‘The doorkeeper Antoine even told me one story about this very cell.’
Monte Cristo shuddered. This doorkeeper Antoine was his doorkeeper. He had almost forgotten the name and the face but, on hearing the name, he saw the face, its features ringed by a beard, and the brown jacket and the bunch of keys: it seemed to him that he could hear them rattle still. He even turned around and thought he could see the man in the corridor, in shadows made even darker by the light of the torch that burned in the concierge’s hands.
‘Would the gentleman like me to tell him the story?’ the man asked.
‘I would,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Tell me.’ And he put a hand on his chest to repress the beating of his heart, terrified at hearing his own story.
‘Tell me,’ he repeated.
‘This dungeon,’ the concierge said, ‘was inhabited by a prisoner, a long time ago, who was a very dangerous man and, it appears, all the more dangerous since he was very industrious. Another man was held in the chateau at the same time as him, but he was not a wicked man, just a poor priest, and mad.’
‘Yes, I see. Mad,’ Monte Cristo repeated. ‘What form did his madness take?’
‘He offered millions to anyone who would give him his freedom.’
Monte Cristo raised his eyes heavenwards but could not see the heavens: there was a veil of stone between him and the firmament. He considered that there had been no less impenetrable a veil between the eyes of those to whom Abbé Faria had offered his treasures and the treasures which he was offering them.
‘Could the prisoners meet one another?’ he asked.
‘Oh, no, Monsieur, that was expressly forbidden. But they got round the prohibition by digging a tunnel between one dungeon and the other.’
‘And which of the two dug this tunnel?’
‘Oh, it must surely have been the young one,’ said the concierge. ‘He was industrious and strong, while the poor abbé was old and weak. In any case, his mind wandered too much for him to concentrate on one idea.’
‘How blind!’ Monte Cristo murmured.
‘So it was,’ the concierge went on, ‘that the young man drove this tunnel — how, no one knows — but he did drive it through, and the proof is that you can still see the marks: there, do you see?’ And he brought his torch up to the wall.
‘Ah, yes, indeed,’ said the count, his voice choked with emotion.
‘The outcome was that the two prisoners could communicate with one another, no one has any idea for how long. Then, one day, the old man fell ill and died. And guess what the young one did?’ he said, interrupting his narrative.
‘Tell me.’
‘He took away the body of the dead man, put him in his own bed with his face turned towards the wall, then returned to the empty dungeon, blocked the hole and slipped into the dead man’s winding-sheet. Can you imagine such a thing?’
Monte Cristo closed his eyes and felt again every sensation that he had undergone when the rough cloth rubbed against his face, still cold from the corpse.
The keeper went on: ‘You see, this was his plan: he thought that they buried dead bodies in the Chateau d’If and, as he guessed that they would not go to the expense of a coffin for the prisoners, he imagined he would be able to lift up the earth with his shoulders. But unfortunately there was a custom here on the island that upset his plans: the dead weren’t buried, they just had a cannonball fastened around their legs and were thrown into the sea. And that’s what happened. Our man was thrown into the water from the top of the gallery. The next day, they found the real body in his bed and guessed everything, because the burial party said something that they had not dared to admit up to then, which was that at the moment when the body was thrown out into the void, they heard a dreadful cry, instantly smothered beneath the water into which he was thrown.’
The count had difficulty breathing; sweat was pouring down his forehead and his heart was gripped with anguish.
‘No!’ he muttered. ‘No! That doubt which I experienced was the sign that I was starting to forget; but here the heart is mine once more and feels once more a hunger for revenge.’
‘And this prisoner,’ he asked, ‘did anyone hear of him again?’
‘Never, not a word. You see, there are only two possibilities. Either he fell flat and, since he was falling from fifty feet, he would have been killed instantly…’
‘You said that they tied a cannonball to his feet: in that case, he would have fallen standing up.’
‘Or else he fell standing up,’ the concierge went on, ‘and in that case the weight on his feet would have dragged him to the bottom, and there he stayed, poor fellow.’
‘Do you pity him?’
‘Good heavens, yes, even though he was in his element.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘The rumour was that the poor man had once been a naval officer, arrested for Bonapartism.’
‘Ah, Truth,’ the count muttered, ‘God made you to float above the waves and the flames. So the poor sailor does live in the memory of some storytellers; they retell his dreadful tale at the fireside and shudder at the moment when he flew through the air and was swallowed up by the sea.’
‘Did they ever know his name?’ he asked aloud.
‘What?’ said the keeper. ‘Oh, yes. He was only known as number thirty-four.’
‘Villefort, Villefort!’ Monte Cristo muttered. ‘That is what you must often have told yourself when my spectre haunted your sleepless nights.’
‘Would the gentleman like to continue the tour?’ the concierge asked.
‘Yes, and I’d particularly like to see the poor abbé’s room.’
‘Ah, number twenty-seven?’
‘Yes, number twenty-seven.’ It seemed he could still hear Abbé Faria’s voice when he asked him his name, and the abbé called back that number through the wall.
‘Come.’
‘Wait,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Let me cast a final glance over every aspect of this dungeon.’
‘Just as well,’ said the guide. ‘I forgot to bring the key to the other.’
‘Then go and fetch it.’
‘I'Il leave you the torch.’
‘No, take it with you.’
‘But you will have to stay here without a light.’
‘I can see in the dark.’
‘Why, just like him!’
‘Like whom?’
‘Number thirty-four. They say he was so used to the dark that he could have seen a pin in the darkest corner of his cell.’
‘It took him ten years to reach that point,’ the count muttered as the guide went off, carrying the torch.
The count was right. He had hardly been a few moments in the dark before he could see everything as if in broad daylight. So he looked all round him and truly recognized his dungeons.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is the stone on which I used to sit. There is the trace of my shoulders where they have worn their imprint in the wall. There is the mark of the blood that flowed from my forehead, the day when I tried to dash out my brains against the wall. Oh, those figures! I remember! I made them one day when I was calculating the age of my father to know if I would find him alive, and the age of Mercédès to know if I should find her free… I had a moment’s hope after doing those sums… I had not counted on starvation and infidelity.’
A bitter laugh escaped him. As if in a dream, he had just seen his father being taken to the tomb and Mercédés walking to the altar!
He was struck by an inscription on the far wall. Still white, it stood out against the greenish stones: ‘My God!’ he read. ‘Let me not forget!’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘That was my only prayer in my last years. I no longer asked for freedom, I asked for memory, and was afraid I should become mad and forget. My God, you did preserve my memory and I have not forgotten. Thank you, God, thank you.’
At that moment the light of the torch was reflected off the walls: the guide had returned.
Monte Cristo went to meet him. ‘Follow me,’ the man said; and, without needing to return to the daylight, he took him down an underground corridor which led to another entrance.
Here, too, Monte Cristo was overwhelmed with a host of thoughts. The first thing that struck him was the meridian on the wall by which Abbé Faria counted the hours. Then there were the remains of the bed on which the poor prisoner died.
At the sight of this, instead of the anguish he had felt in his own dungeon, a sweet and tender feeling, a feeling of gratitude, filled his heart, and two tears rolled down his cheeks.
‘Here,’ said the guide, ‘is where they kept the mad priest. And there is the place through which the young man came to join him.’ And he showed Monte Cristo the opening to the tunnel which, on this side, had been left uncovered. ‘By the colour of the stone,’ he went on, ‘a scientist realized that they must have been in communication with each other for about ten years. Poor folk, how miserable they must have been, those ten years!’
Dantès took a few louis from his pocket and handed them to the man who, for the second time, had felt sorry for him without knowing who he was.
The concierge accepted the money, thinking that it must be a few small coins; then, in the light of the torch, he realized how much the visitor had given him.
‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘you’ve made a mistake.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You have given me gold.’
‘I know that.’
‘What! You know?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you intended to give me this gold?’
‘Yes.’
‘So I can keep it in all conscience?’
‘Yes.’
The concierge looked at Monte Cristo in amazement.
‘And honesty,’ the count said, like Hamlet.[3]
‘Monsieur,’ the concierge said, not daring to believe in his good fortune, ‘I do not understand your generosity.’
‘It’s simple enough, my friend,’ said the count. ‘I used to be a sailor, and your story touched me more than it might another person.’
‘So, Monsieur,’ the guide said, ‘as you are so generous, you deserve a present.’
‘What can you give me, friend? Seashells, straw dolls? No thank you.’
‘Not at all, Monsieur; something that has to do with the story I just told you.’
‘Really?’ the count exclaimed. ‘What is it?’
‘Listen,’ the concierge said. ‘Here’s what happened. I thought to myself, there’s always something to be found in a room where a prisoner has lived for fifteen years, so I began to tap the walls.’
‘Ah!’ Monte Cristo said, remembering the abbé’s double hiding-place. ‘As you say…’
‘So by looking,’ the concierge went on, ‘I discovered that there really was a hollow sound at the head of the bed and under the hearth.’
‘Yes,’ Monte Cristo said. ‘Yes…’
‘I lifted the stones, and I found…’
‘A rope ladder and tools?’ the count cried.
‘How did you know that?’ the concierge asked in astonishment.
‘I don’t know; I guessed,’ the count said. ‘Those are the sort of things that one usually finds in prisoners’ hiding-places.’
‘Yes, Monsieur,’ the guide said. ‘A rope ladder and some tools.’
‘Do you still have them?’ Monte Cristo asked eagerly.
‘No, Monsieur. I sold the various things, which were very unusual, to visitors. But I do have something else.’
‘What is that?’ the count asked impatiently.
‘I have a sort of book, written on strips of cloth.’
‘Oh!’ Monte Cristo cried. ‘You have such a book?’
‘I don’t know if it is a book,’ said the concierge. ‘But I do have what I told you.’
‘Go and fetch it, my friend,’ said the count. ‘Go, and if it’s what I think, don’t worry.’
‘I'm going, Monsieur.’ And the guide left.
At this, the count went to kneel piously in front of the remains of the bed which death had made an altar for him.
‘Oh, my second father,’ he said. “You who gave me liberty, knowledge, riches; you who, like those beings of some higher essence than ourselves, had an understanding of good and evil, if in the depths of the tomb something remains of us which still shudders to hear the voices of those who have remained on earth; if in the transfiguration undergone by the body in death, something animate remains in the places where we have greatly loved or greatly suffered, noble heart, supreme spirit, profound soul, I beg you by some word, some sign or some revelation, in the name of the paternal love which you gave me and the filial respect that I returned to you, take away this remaining doubt that, if it does not become a certainty, will turn into remorse.’
The count bent his head and clasped his hands.
‘Here, Monsieur!’ said a voice behind him. He started and turned around. The concierge was holding out the strips of cloth to which Abbé Faria had entrusted all the fruits of his wisdom. This was the manuscript of Abbé Faria’s great work on the monarchy in Italy.
The count seized it eagerly and the first thing his eyes met was the epigraph, which read: ‘You will pull the dragon’s teeth and trample the lions underfoot, said the Lord.’
‘Ah!’ he cried. ‘There is my answer! Thank you, father, thank you.’
Taking out of his pocket a small wallet containing ten banknotes of a thousand francs each, he said: ‘Here, take this.’
‘Are you giving it to me?’
‘Yes, on condition that you do not look inside it until after I have gone.’
Placing the relic which he had just found against his chest — a relic which for him was worth the most precious treasure — he hurried out of the underground tunnel and stepped back into the boat, with the order: ‘To Marseille!’
As they were pulling away, he looked back towards the grim fortress and said: ‘Woe betide those who had me shut up in that awful place and those who forgot that I was imprisoned there.’
As they sailed back past Les Catalans, the count turned away, wrapped his head in his cloak and muttered a woman’s name. The victory was complete. Twice he had driven away his doubts. And the name which he spoke with an expression of tenderness that was close to love, was that of Haydée.
On reaching land, Monte Cristo set off for the cemetery where he knew he would find Morrel. Ten years earlier, he too had piously searched out a tomb in this graveyard, but he had searched in vain. Returning to France a millionaire, he had been unable to find the tomb of his father, who had starved to death. Morrel had indeed arranged for a cross to be raised, but the cross had fallen and the gravedigger had burned it, as gravediggers do with old pieces of wood lying around in cemeteries.
The worthy merchant had been luckier. He died in the arms of his children, who laid him to rest beside his wife, who had preceded him by two years into eternity.
Two large slabs of marble bearing their names lay, one beside the other, in a little plot surrounded by an iron railing, in the shade of four cypress-trees. Maximilien was leaning against one of these, staring at the two graves but seeing nothing. His agony was profound and he was in almost a state of distraction.
‘Maximilien,’ the count said, ‘that is not where you should be looking, but there!’ And he pointed to heaven.
‘The dead are all around us,’ said Morrel. ‘Isn’t that what you told me yourself when you took me away from Paris?’
‘Maximilien,’ the count said, ‘during the journey you asked me to stop for a few days in Marseille: is that still what you want?’
‘I no longer want anything, Count. But I feel that I shall wait with less displeasure here than elsewhere.’
‘So much the better, Maximilien, because I am leaving you, but taking your word of honour with me, I think?’
‘Oh, I shall forget it, Count,’ said Morrel. ‘I shall forget it.’
‘No, you will not forget, because before all else you are a man of honour, Morrel, because you have sworn and because you must swear again.’
‘Please, Count, have pity on me! I am so unhappy!’
‘I once knew a man who was more unhappy than you, Morrel.’
‘Impossible!’
‘Alas,’ said Monte Cristo, ‘our poor species can pride itself on the fact that every man thinks himself unhappier than another unfortunate, weeping and moaning beside him.’
‘What can be more unhappy than a man who had lost the only thing in the world that he loved and desired?’
‘Listen, Morrel,’ Monte Cristo said, ‘and concentrate for a moment on what I am about to tell you. I knew a man who, like you, placed all his expectations of happiness in a woman. He was young and had an old father whom he loved and a fiancée whom he adored. He was about to marry her when suddenly one of those twists of fate — which would make us doubt the existence of God if God did not reveal himself later by demonstrating that everything is to Him a means by which to lead us to His infinite oneness… when suddenly a twist of fate took away his freedom, his fiancée, and the future he dreamed of, which he believed was his (blind as he was, he could only read the here-and-now), and threw him in the depths of a dungeon.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Morrel said. ‘But people come out of dungeons — after a week, or a month, or a year.’
‘He stayed there for fourteen years, Morrel,’ the count said, putting his hand on the young man’s shoulder.
Maximilien shuddered. ‘Fourteen years!’ he murmured.
‘Fourteen years,’ the count repeated. ‘And he too, in those fourteen years, had many moments of despair. He too, like you, Morrel, thinking himself the most unhappy of men, wanted to kill himself.’
‘And?’ Morrel asked.
‘And at the very last moment God revealed himself to him by human means; because God no longer performs miracles. Perhaps at first (because eyes clouded by tears need some time to clear entirely), he did not understand the infinite mercy of the Lord. But he was patient and waited. One day he miraculously emerged from his tomb, transfigured, rich, powerful, almost a god. His first thought was for his father, but his father was dead.’
‘My father too is dead,’ said Morrel.
‘Yes, but he died in your arms, loved, happy, honoured, rich and full of years. This man’s father died poor, desperate, doubting God; and when, ten years after his death, his son looked for the grave, even that had vanished, and no one could tell him: “Here is where the heart that loved you so sleeps in the Lord.”’
‘Oh,’ said Morrel.
‘So, as a son, he was unhappier than you are, Morrel; he did not even know where to find his father’s grave.’
‘Yes,’ said Morrel, ‘but he did still have the woman whom he loved.’
‘You are wrong, Morrel. The woman…’
‘Was she dead?’ Maximilien cried.
‘Worse. She had been unfaithful and married one of her fiancé’s tormentors. So you see, Morrel, the man was more unfortunate even than you are.’
‘And did God send him consolation?’ Morrel asked.
‘He did at least send him tranquillity.’
‘And might he still be happy one day?’
‘He hopes so, Maximilien.’
The young man bowed his head and, after a moment’s silence, said: ‘You have my promise; but, remember…’ And he offered Monte Cristo his hand.
‘On October the fifth, Morrel, I shall expect you on the island of Monte Cristo. On the fourth a yacht will be waiting for you in the port at Bastia. The yacht will be called the Eurus. You will tell the master your name and he will bring you to me. That’s agreed, isn’t it, Maximilien?’
‘Agreed, Count, and I shall do as we have agreed. But remember that on October the fifth…’
‘Child, who does not yet know what a man’s promise means! I have told you twenty times that on that day, if you still want to die, I shall help you. Now, farewell.’
‘Are you leaving me?’
‘Yes, I have business in Italy. I am leaving you alone, alone with your grief, alone with that powerful eagle which the Lord sends to his elect to transport them to his feet. The story of Ganymede[4] is not a fable, Maximilien, but an allegory.’
‘When will you leave?’
‘Immediately. The steamship is waiting for me, and in an hour I shall already be far away. Will you come with me to the port?’
‘I am entirely at your disposal, Count.’
‘Embrace me.’
Morrel walked with the count down to the port. Already a huge plume of smoke was pouring out of the black tube which cast it upwards towards the skies. Shortly afterwards the boat set out, and an hour later, as Monte Cristo had said, the same trail of smoke was barely visible, streaking an eastern horizon darkened by the first shades of night.
_________
NOTES
1. Since the July Revolution: In 1830. See note 1 to Chapter xtv.
2. Mirabeau’s imprisonment: See note 1 to Chapter vii.
3. like Hamlet: Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1.
4. Ganymede: A Trojan youth who ‘became the cup-bearer of the gods in the place of Hebe. Some say that he was carried away by an eagle, to satisfy the shameful and unnatural desires of Jupiter’ (Lemprière, Classical Dictionary).
All Paris was engrossed in what had just taken place. Emmanuel and his wife discussed it, with quite understandable surprise, in their little house on the Rue Meslay; and they drew comparisons between the three disasters, all as sudden as they were unexpected, that had struck Morcerf, Danglars and Villefort.
Maximilien, who had come to visit, listened to their conversation; or, at least, he was present while they talked, plunged into his usual state of insensibility.
‘Really, Emmanuel,’ said Julie, ‘wouldn’t you think that all these rich people, so happy only a short while ago, had built their fortunes, their happiness and their social position, while forgetting to allow for the wicked genie; and that this genie, like the wicked fairy in Perrault’s stories[1] who is not invited to some wedding or christening, had suddenly appeared to take revenge for that fatal omission?’
‘So many disasters!’ Emmanuel said, thinking of Morcerf and Danglars.
‘So much suffering!’ said Julie, remembering Valentine, though her woman’s instinct told her not to mention the name in front of her brother.
‘If God did strike them,’ Emmanuel said, ‘that’s because God, who is goodness itself, could find nothing in the past life of these people which would justify a mitigation of sentence: it means that they were indeed damned.’
‘Isn’t that a rather rash judgement?’ said Julie. ‘When my father had a pistol in his hand and was ready to blow out his brains, if someone had said, as you are now doing, “That man deserves his punishment”, wouldn’t that person have been wrong?’
‘Yes, but God did not allow our father to succumb, just as he did not allow Abraham to sacrifice his son. He sent the Patriarch — and us — his angel, who cut the wings of Death in mid-flight.’
He had just said this when the bell rang. This was the signal from the concierge that a visitor had arrived. Almost at the same instant the drawing-room door opened and the Count of Monte Cristo appeared on the threshold. The two young people gave a double cry of joy.
Maximilien looked up, then let his head fall back.
‘Maximilien,’ the count said, apparently unaware of the different reactions of his hosts to his arrival, ‘I have come to look for you.’
‘For me?’ said Morrel, as if waking from a dream.
‘Yes,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Didn’t we agree that I should take you, and did I not ask you to be ready to leave?’
‘Here I am,’ said Maximilien. ‘I had come to say goodbye to them.’
‘Where are you going, Count?’ Julie asked.
‘First of all, to Marseille, Madame.’
‘To Marseille?’ both the young people said together.
‘Yes, and I’m taking your brother.’
‘Alas, Count, bring him back to us, cured!’
Morrel turned his blushing face away from them.
‘Did you notice that he was unwell?’ asked the count.
‘Yes,’ the young woman replied. ‘I am afraid that he is not happy with us.’
‘I shall distract him,’ said the count.
‘I am ready, Monsieur,’ said Maximilien. ‘Farewell, my good friends! Adieu, Emmanuel! Julie, adieu!’
‘What: adieu?’ Julie exclaimed. ‘Are you leaving like that, at once, with no preparations and no passports?’
‘Delays double the pain of parting,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘And Maximilien, I am sure, must have prepared everything in advance. I advised him to do so.’
‘I have my passport, and my trunks are packed,’ Morrel said, in a dull monotone.
‘Excellent,’ said Monte Cristo with a smile. ‘That is the punctiliousness of a good soldier.’
‘So you are leaving us like that?’ said Julie. ‘Immediately? Won’t you give us another day, or an hour?’
‘My carriage is at the door, Madame. I must be in Rome in five days.’
‘Surely Maximilien isn’t going to Rome?’ said Emmanuel.
‘I shall go wherever it pleases the count to take me,’ Morrel said, with a sad smile. ‘I belong to him for another month.’
‘Oh, my God! He says that in such a voice, Count!’
‘Maximilien is accompanying me,’ the count said in his reassuringly pleasant manner. ‘Don’t worry about your brother.’
‘He worries me so much with his nonchalance,’ said Julie. ‘Oh, Maximilien, Maximilien, you are hiding something from us.’
‘Pooh!’ said Monte Cristo. ‘When you see him again, he will be happy, smiling and joyful.’
Maximilien gave the count a look that was almost contemptuous, and almost irritated.
‘Let’s go,’ said the count.
‘Before you do, Count,’ said Julie, ‘will you let me tell you that the other day…’
‘Madame,’ the count said, taking both her hands, ‘anything that you might have to say to me will never be worth what I can read in your eyes, what your heart has thought and mine felt. Like a benefactor in a novel, I should have left without seeing you again; but such conduct was beyond my feeble powers, because I am a weak and vain man, and because a joyful and tender look from one of my fellow-creatures does me good. Now I am leaving, and I shall take selfishness to the point of saying to you: Don’t forget me, my friends, because you will probably never see me again.’
‘Not see you again!’ Emmanuel cried, while two large tears rolled down Julie’s cheeks. ‘Not see you again! This is not a man, but a god who is leaving us, and this god will return to heaven after appearing on earth to do good.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Monte Cristo said urgently. ‘My friends, don’t ever say that. Gods never do ill, gods stop when they want to stop. Chance is not stronger than they are and it is they, on the contrary, who dictate to chance. No, Emmanuel, on the contrary, I am a man and your admiration is as unjust as your words are sacrilegious.’
He pressed Julie’s hand to his lips and she fell into his arms, while he offered his other hand to Emmanuel. Then, tearing himself away from this house, a sweet and welcoming nest, he made a sign to Maximilien, who followed him, passive, unfeeling and bewildered as he had been since the death of Valentine.
‘Make my brother happy again!’ Julie whispered in Monte Cristo’s ear. He pressed her hand, as he had done eleven years earlier on the staircase leading to Morrel’s study.
‘Do you still trust Sinbad the Sailor?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Well, you may sleep in peace and trust in the Lord.’
As we have said, the post-chaise was waiting. Four lively horses were shaking their manes and impatiently pawing the road.
At the bottom of the steps, Ali waited, his face shining with sweat. He looked as though he had just run a long way.
‘Well?’ the count asked, in Arabic. ‘Did you go to the old man’s?’
Ali nodded.
‘And you showed him the letter, in front of his eyes, as I told you?’
‘Yes,’ the slave repeated, respectfully.
‘And what did he say — or, rather, do?’
Ali stood under the light, so that his master could see him and, with his intelligent devotion, imitated the old man’s face, closing his eyes as Noirtier did when he meant ‘yes’.
‘Very good, he accepts,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Let’s go.’
Hardly had he said the words than the carriage began to move and the horses’ hoofs struck a shower of sparks from the cobbles. Maximilien settled into his corner without saying a word.
After half an hour, the coach suddenly stopped: the count had just tugged on the silver thread attached to Ali’s finger. The Nubian got down and opened the door.
The night was shining with stars. They were at the top of the Montée de Villejuif, on the plateau from which Paris is a dark sea shimmering with millions of lights like phosphorescent waves; and waves they are, more thunderous, more passionate, more shifting, more furious and more greedy than those of the stormy ocean, waves which never experience the tranquillity of a vast sea, but constantly pound together, ever foaming and engulfing everything!
The count stayed alone and motioned for the carriage to come forward. Then he stood for a long time with his arms crossed, contemplating this furnace in which all the ideas that rise, boiling, from the depths to shake the world melt, twine and take shape. Then, when he had turned his powerful gaze on this Babylon which inspires religious poets as it does materialistic sceptics, he bent his head and clasped his hands as if in prayer, and murmured: ‘Great city, it is less than six months since I came through your gates. I think that the spirit of God brought me here and takes me away triumphant. To God, who alone can read my heart, I confided the secret of my presence within your walls. He alone knows that I am leaving without hatred and without pride, but not without regret. He alone knows that I employed the power with which He had entrusted me, not for myself, nor for any idle purpose. O great city! In your heaving breast I found what I was looking for; like a patient miner, I churned your entrails to expel the evil from them. Now my work is complete, my mission accomplished; now you can offer me no further joys or sorrows. Farewell, Paris! Farewell!’
His eyes, like those of some spirit of the night, swept once more across the vast plain. Then, mopping his brow, he got back into the carriage, closing the door behind him, and they had soon vanished down the far side of the hill in a welter of dust and noise. They covered two leagues in utter silence. Morrel was dreaming, Monte Cristo watching him dream.
‘Morrel,’ the count asked, ‘do you regret coming with me?’
‘No, Count; but leaving Paris, perhaps…’
‘If I had thought that happiness awaited you in Paris, Morrel, I should have left you there.’
‘But it is in Paris that Valentine rests, and leaving Paris is to lose her for the second time.’
‘Maximilien,’ the count said, ‘the friends whom we have lost do not rest in the earth, they are buried in our hearts, and that is how God wanted it, so that we should always be in their company. I have two friends who are always with me, in that way: one is the man who gave me life, the other is the one who gave me understanding. The spirit of both lives in me. I consult them when I am in doubt and, if I have done any good, I owe it to their advice. Look into your heart, Morrel, and ask it if you should continue to show me that sorry face.’
‘My friend,’ said Maximilien, ‘the voice of my heart is sad indeed and promises only misfortune.’
‘Only a weak spirit sees everything from behind a dark veil. The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is overcast, and that is why the sky seems stormy to you.’
‘That may be true,’ Maximilien said, then he reverted to his reverie.
The journey was accomplished with that astonishing speed that was a peculiar talent of the count’s. Towns passed by like shadows on the road; the trees, shaken by the first winds of autumn, seemed to rise up before them like dishevelled giants and fled rapidly into the distance as soon as they had caught up with them. The next morning they arrived at Chalon, where the count’s steamship was waiting. Without wasting an instant, the carriage was put on board and, even before that, the two travellers had embarked.
The ship was built for speed, like an Indian dugout. Its two paddle-wheels were like two wings on which it skimmed the water — a migrating bird. Morrel himself experienced that heady intoxication of speed, and at times the wind, lifting his hair, seemed also for a moment nearly to lift the cloud from his brow.
As for the count, the further he moved away from Paris, the more a sort of inhuman serenity appeared to envelop him like an aura. It was as though an exile was returning home.
Soon Marseille — white, warm, throbbing with life; Marseille, twin sister of Tyre and Carthage, their successor as ruler of the Mediterranean; Marseille, ever younger, the older she grows — Marseille appeared before them. For both men the scene was rich in memories: the round tower, the Fort Saint-Nicholas, Puget’s town hall and the port with its brick quays where both of them had played as children.
So, by common agreement, they stopped on the Canebiére.
A ship was leaving for Algiers. The packages, the passengers crowded on the deck, the host of friends and relations saying goodbye, shouting, weeping, made a spectacle that is always moving, even for those who see it every day; but even this commotion could not take Maximilien’s mind off something that had struck him as soon as he set foot on the broad stones of the quay.
‘Look,’ he said, taking Monte Cristo’s arm. ‘This is the place where my father stopped when the Pharaon came into port. Here the good man whom you saved from death and dishonour threw himself into my arms. I can still feel his tears on my face — and he did not weep alone. Many other people were in tears when they saw us.’
Monte Cristo smiled.
‘I was there,’ he said, showing Morrel the corner of a street.
As he said this, from the direction towards which the count was pointing they heard a painful groan and saw a woman waving to a passenger on the boat that was about to leave. The woman was veiled. Monte Cristo watched her with an emotion that Morrel would easily have perceived if, unlike the count’s, his eyes had not been fixed on the boat.
‘Oh, my God!’ he cried. ‘I'm right! That young man waving his hat, the one in uniform: it’s Albert de Morcerf!’
‘Yes,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘I recognized him.’
‘How could you? You were looking in the opposite direction.’
The count smiled, as he did when he did not want to reply; and his eyes turned back to the veiled woman, who disappeared round the corner of the street. Then he turned back to Morrel.
‘Dear friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t you have something to do in town?’
‘I must go and weep on my father’s grave,’ Morrel replied softly.
‘Very well. Go, and wait for me there. I shall join you.’
‘Are you leaving me?’
‘Yes. I too have a pious duty to perform.’
Morrel placed a limp hand in the one the count offered him. Then, with an indescribably melancholy movement of the head, he left his companion and walked towards the east of the town. Monte Cristo let him go, remaining on the same spot until he had disappeared, before turning towards the Allées de Meilhan, going back to the little house that our readers must remember from the start of this story.
The house was still standing in the shadow of the great avenue of lime-trees which serves idle Marseillais as a place to stroll, furnished with huge curtains of vines which cross their arms, blackened and shredded by age, on stones turned yellow by the burning southern sun. Two stone steps, worn down by passing feet, led to the door, which consisted of three planks, repaired every year but never touched by putty or paint, patiently waiting for the damp to reunite them.
Old as it was, the house was charming, joyful despite its evident poverty, and still the same as the one where Old Dantés had once lived. The difference was that the old man used to occupy the attic, and the count had put the entire house at Mercédès’ disposal.
The woman whom Monte Cristo had seen leaving the departing ship came here and was shutting the door just as he appeared at the corner of the street, so that he saw her vanish almost as soon as he caught up with her. The worn steps were old acquaintances and he knew better than anyone how to open the old door, its inner latch raised by a broad-headed hook. He went in without knocking or calling, like a friend, like a guest.
At the end of a passage paved in brick lay a little garden, bathed in warmth, sun and light. Here, at the place he had mentioned, Mercédès had found the money that the count had considerately put there twenty-five years earlier. The trees of this garden could be seen from the street door. As he reached the threshold, Monte Cristo heard a sigh which was like a sob. This sigh guided his eyes to a leafy arbour of jasmine with long purple flowers, where he saw Mercédès sitting, weeping.
She had raised her veil and, alone in the sight of heaven, her face hidden in her hands, she freely abandoned herself to the sighs and tears that she had repressed for so long in her son’s presence.
Monte Cristo took a few steps forward, the sand crunching under his feet. Mercédés looked up and cried out in terror at seeing a man in front of her.
‘Madame,’ the count said, ‘I am no longer able to bring you happiness, but I can give you consolation. Would you accept it, as from a friend?’
‘Indeed,’ said Mercédès, ‘I am very unhappy, and alone in the world. I only had my son and he has left me.’
‘He did the right thing,’ the count replied. ‘He has a noble heart. He realized that every man owes some debt to his country: some give their talents, others their hard work; some watch, others bleed. Had he stayed with you, he would have wasted a life that had become useless to him and would have been unable to accustom himself to your grief. The frustration would have filled him with hatred. Now he will become great and strong by struggling against adversities that he will change into good fortune. Let him rebuild the future for both of you, Madame. I can promise that he is in good hands.’
‘Alas,’ the poor woman murmured, sadly shaking her head, ‘I shall not enjoy this good fortune that you speak of and which with all my heart I pray God to give him. So much has been broken in me and around me that I feel I am near to my grave. You did well, Count, in bringing me close to the place where I was so happy: one should die in the place in which one was happy.’
‘Madame!’ Monte Cristo exclaimed. ‘Every one of your words falls, bitter and burning, on my heart, and all the more so since you have cause to hate me. I am responsible for all your misfortunes. Why do you not pity me instead of accusing me? You would make me still more unhappy…’
‘Hate you, Edmond! Accuse you! Am I to hate the man who saved my son’s life — because it was your deadly and bloody intent, was it not, to kill the son of whom Monsieur de Morcerf was so proud? Oh, look at me and see if there is the glimmer of a reproach in me.’
The count looked up and fixed his eyes on Mercédés who, half standing, was holding both hands towards him.
‘Look at me,’ she went on, with a feeling of profound melancholy. ‘Today, a man can bear to see the sparkle in my eyes. The days have gone when I used to smile at Edmond Dantés, as he waited for me up there, by the window of the garret where his old father lived… Since then, many sad days have gone by, digging a gulf between me and that time. Accuse you, Edmond! Hate you, my friend! No, it is myself that I accuse and hate! Oh, wretch that I am!’ she cried, clasping her hands and raising her eyes to heaven. ‘Have I been punished enough! I had religion, innocence and love, the three gifts that make angels, and, wretch as I am, I doubted God.’
Monte Cristo took a step towards her and silently offered his hand; but she gently drew back her own. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, my friend, do not touch me. You have spared me, but of all those whom you have struck, I was the most guilty. The others acted out of hatred, greed or selfishness, but I was a coward. They wanted something, I was afraid. No, don’t squeeze my hand, Edmond. I can see that you are about to say something kind; but don’t… Keep it for someone else, I no longer deserve your affection. See…’ (she completely removed her veil) ‘See: misfortune has turned my hair grey and my eyes have shed so many tears that there are dark rings round them; and my forehead is furrowed. But you, Edmond, you are still young, still handsome and still proud. You did have faith, you had strength, you trusted in God, and God sustained you. I was a coward, I denied Him, so God abandoned me; and here I am!’
Mercédés burst into tears, her heart breaking under the weight of memory.
Monte Cristo took her hand and kissed it respectfully, but she herself felt that the kiss was passionless, as if his lips were pressing the marble hand of the statue of some saint.
‘Some lives,’ she continued, ‘are predestined, so that a single error destroys all that is to come. I thought you dead, I should have died. What was the sense in eternally mourning for you in my heart? Nothing, except to make a woman of fifty out of one of thirty-nine. What good did it do that, once I had recognized you, of everyone I managed to save only my son? Should I not also have saved the man, guilty though he was, whom I had accepted as my husband? Yet I let him die — oh, God! What am I saying! I contributed to his death by my cowardly insensitivity and my contempt, forgetting, or not wanting to remember, that it was for my sake that he became a perjurer and a traitor. Finally, what is the use in my having accompanied my son here if I let him leave alone, if I abandon him, if I deliver him to the hungry land of Africa? Oh, I tell you, I was a coward. I disowned my love and, like a turncoat, I bring misfortune to all those around me.’
‘No, Mercédès, Monte Cristo said. ‘No, think better of yourself. You are a noble and devout woman, and your grief disarmed me. But behind me was God, an invisible, unknown and jealous God, whose envoy I was and who did not choose to restrain the lightning bolt that I unleashed. Oh, I implore that God, at whose feet I have prostrated myself every day for ten years, and I call on Him to witness that I did sacrifice my life to you and with it all the plans that depended on it. But - and I say this with pride, Mercédès - God needed me, and I lived. Look at the past, look at the present, try to divine the future and consider whether I am not the instrument of the Lord. The most frightful misfortunes, the most cruel suffering, the abandonment of all those who loved me and persecution by those who did not know me: this was the first part of my life. Then, suddenly, after captivity, solitude and misery, air, freedom and a fortune so brilliant, so imposing and so extravagant that, unless I was blind, I must have thought that God had sent it to me for some great purpose. From then on, that fortune seemed to me a holy vocation; from then on, there was not one further thought in me for that life, the sweetness of which you, poor woman, have sometimes partaken. Not an hour of calm, not a single hour. I felt myself driven like a cloud of flame through the sky to destroy the cities of the plain. Like those adventurous captains who set off on some dangerous voyage or prepare for a perilous expedition, I got together my supplies, I loaded my weapons and I gathered the means of attack and defence, making my body used to the most violent exercise and my soul to the roughest shocks, teaching my arm to kill, my eyes to see suffering and my mouth to smile at the most dreadful of spectacles. Kind, trustful and forgiving as I was, I made myself vengeful, secretive and cruel — or, rather, impassive like fate itself, which is deaf and blind. Then I launched myself down the road that I had opened, plunging forward until I reached my goal. Woe betide whomsoever I met on my path!’
‘Enough!’ Mercédès cried. ‘Edmond, enough! You may believe that the only person to recognize you was also the only one who could understand. But, Edmond, the woman who recognized and understood you, even if you had found her standing in your way and broken her like glass, would have had to admire you, Edmond! Just as there is a gulf between me and the past, so there is a gulf between you and other men, and my most painful torture, I can tell you, is to make comparisons. There is no one in the world your equal; there is nothing that resembles you. Now, say farewell to me, Edmond, and let us be parted.’
‘Before I go, what do you want, Mercédés?’ Monte Cristo asked.
‘Only one thing, Edmond: for my son to be happy.’
‘Pray God, who alone holds the lives of men in His hands, to spare him from death, and I shall take care of the rest.’
‘Thank you, Edmond.’
‘And you, Mercédès?’
‘I need nothing. I am living between two tombs. One is that of Edmond Dantès, who died so long ago — I loved him! The word is no longer appropriate on my shrunken lips, but my heart still remembers and I would not exchange that memory of the heart for anything in the world. The other is that of a man whom Edmond Dantès killed. I approve of the murder, but I must pray for the dead man.’
‘Your son will be happy, Madame,’ the count repeated.
‘Then I shall be as happy as I can be.’
‘But… what will you do?’
Mercédès smiled sadly.
‘If I were to tell you that I should live in this place as Mercédès once did, that is to say by working, you would not believe me. I can no longer do anything except pray, but I do not need to work. The little treasure that you buried was still in the place that you mentioned. People will wonder who I am, and ask what I do, and have no idea how I live; but that is of no significance! It is between God, yourself and me.’
‘Mercédés,’ the count said, ‘I am not reproaching you, but you did make too much of a sacrifice when you gave up the whole of the fortune that Monsieur de Morcerf had accumulated: at least half of it was rightly yours, because of your good management and your vigilance.’
‘I know what you are about to suggest, but I cannot accept, Edmond. My son would forbid me.’
‘And I will be careful not to do anything for you that would not have Monsieur Albert de Morcerf’s approval. I shall find out what he intends and act accordingly. But, if he accepts what I want to do, would you cheerfully do the same?’
‘You know, Edmond, I am no longer a thinking creature. I have no further resolve except that of never again being resolved about anything. God has so shaken me with storms that I have lost all willpower. I am in His hands, like a sparrow in the claws of an eagle. Since I am alive, He does not want me to die. If He sends me any succour, it will be because He wants it, and I shall accept.’
‘Take care, Madame,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘That is not how God should be worshipped. He wants us to understand and debate His power: that is why He gave us free will.’
‘Wretch!’ Mercédés cried. ‘Don’t speak like that to me. If I believed that God had given me free will, what would remain to save me from despair!’
Monte Cristo paled slightly and bowed his head, overwhelmed by the extremity of her suffering.
‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to me?’ he asked, holding out his hand.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Mercédès said, solemnly pointing to heaven. ‘I will say au revoir, to prove to you that I still hope.’
She touched the count’s hand with her own, trembling, then ran up the stairs and vanished from his sight.
Monte Cristo slowly left the house and turned back towards the port. Mercédès did not see him leave, even though she was at the window of the little room that had been his father’s. Her eyes were searching the distant horizon for the ship taking her son across the open sea. But her voice, almost involuntarily, muttered softly: ‘Edmond, Edmond, Edmond!’
_________
NOTES
1. Perrault’s stories: Charles Perrault (1628-1703) was the author of the original versions of many of the best-known fairy-tales. In this case the reference is to Sleeping Beauty.
The crowd, closely packed though it was, opened to let M. de Villefort pass. Great sorrow is so august that, even in the most unfortunate times, there is no case recorded when the first reaction of the mass has not been to sympathize with a great catastrophe. Many hated people have been killed by the mob, but rarely has anyone unfortunate, even a criminal, been attacked by the men who were present when he was condemned to death.
Thus Villefort was able to pass through the ranks of spectators, guards and officials of the courts, and to walk away, having admitted his guilt but protected by his grief.
There are some situations which men instinctively comprehend but are unable to comment on intellectually. In such cases, the greatest poet is the one who emits the most powerful and the most natural cry. The crowd takes this cry for a complete story, and it is right to be satisfied with that, and still more so to find it sublime when it is truthful.
In any case, it would have been impossible to express the state of stupefaction in which Villefort found himself on leaving the courts, or to describe the fever that made every artery throb, tensed every fibre, swelled every vein to bursting and dissected every point of his mortal body in millions of agonies.
He dragged himself along the corridors, guided solely by habit. He threw the magistrate’s gown off his shoulders, not because he felt it was proper for him to quit it, but because it had become an overwhelming burden, a shirt of Nessus,[1] full of torments.
Staggering, he reached the Cour Dauphine, saw his carriage, woke the coachman by opening the door himself and slumped back against the cushions, while pointing towards the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The coachman set off.
The full weight of his devastated fortune had come down upon his head and this weight was crushing him. He did not know what the outcome would be, he had not measured it; he felt it, but did not assess the legal consequences like a cold murderer commenting on the letter of the law.
God was in the depth of his heart.
‘God!’ he murmured, without even knowing what he was saying. ‘God, God!’
He could only see the hand of God behind the maelstrom that had overwhelmed him.
The carriage sped along. Writhing on his cushions, Villefort felt something underneath them.
He reached for it: it was a fan that Mme de Villefort had lost between the cushion and the back wall of the carriage. The fan woke some memory, and the memory was like a flash of lightning in the dark.
Villefort thought of his wife.
‘Oh!’ he cried, as if a hot iron had traversed his heart.
For the past hour he had had only one side of his misfortune before his eyes; now, suddenly, his mind saw another, and one no less terrible than the first.
He had just assumed the role of implacable judge with this woman, condemning her to death; and she, stricken with terror, crushed with remorse and sunk beneath the shame that he had aroused in her with the eloquence born of his own spotless virtue, she, a poor, feeble woman, defenceless against this absolute and supreme authority, might perhaps at this very moment be preparing to die.
An hour already had elapsed since her condemnation: no doubt she was going over all her crimes in her memory, asking for God’s mercy and writing a letter to humbly beg forgiveness of her virtuous husband, a favour that she would purchase at the cost of her life… Villefort gave another roar of pain and fury.
‘Oh!’ he cried, writhing on the satin upholstery of his carriage. ‘This woman only became a criminal because she touched me. I am oozing with crime. She caught it off me as one may catch typhus, or cholera, or the plague! And I am punishing her! I dared to tell her: “Repent and die…” I! No, no, she shall live! She will follow me. We will flee, leave France, wander as far as the earth will carry us. I spoke to her of the scaffold! Good Lord! How did I dare utter the word! The scaffold waits also for me. We shall flee… I shall confess all to her. Yes, every day I shall tell her, prostrating myself, that I too have committed a crime. What a marriage of the tiger and the snake — worthy wife of a husband such as I! She must live! My infamy must make hers pale into insignificance!’
And Villefort slammed down the window in the front of the carriage, rather than opening it, crying: ‘Faster! Faster!’ in a voice that made the coachman leap up on his seat. The horses, carried forward by fear, flew to the house.
‘Yes, yes,’ Villefort repeated as he drew closer to home. ‘The woman must live; she must repent and bring up my son, my poor child, the only one apart from the indestructible old man, who has survived the destruction of the family. She loved him: everything she did was for him. One must never despair of the heart of a mother who loves her child; she will repent. No one will know that she was guilty: the crimes that were committed in my house, which now trouble people’s thoughts, will be forgotten in time; or, if some enemies of mine do remember them, they will add them to the list of my crimes. One, two, three more: what does it matter! My wife will escape, taking some money with her or, and above all, taking my son, far from the abyss into which I feel everyone must tumble with me. She will live, she will be happy again, since all her love is invested in her son and her son will never leave her. I shall have done a good deed; my heart grows lighter at the thought.’ The crown prosecutor breathed more freely than he had for a long time.
The carriage drew up in the courtyard of the house. Villefort leapt from the running board on to the steps. He saw that the servants were surprised at his early return. He read nothing else on their faces; no one said anything to him. They stopped in his path, as usual, to let him pass; nothing more.
He passed Noirtier’s room and, through the half-open door, he saw as it were two shadows; but he did not concern himself about the other person who was with his father: all his thoughts were drawing him somewhere else.
‘Come,’ he said, climbing the little stairway leading to his wife’s apartments and Valentine’s empty room. ‘Come, nothing here has changed.’
He took particular care to close the landing door.
‘No one must bother us here,’ he said. ‘I must be able to speak freely to her, to accuse myself before her, to tell her everything…’
He approached the door and reached out for the glass handle. The door opened.
‘Not locked! Oh, good, very good,’ he muttered, entering the little drawing-room where in the evenings they would put up Edouard’s bed. Though he was at a boarding school, the child returned home every evening: his mother did not want to be separated from him.
In a single glance, he took in the little drawing-room.
‘No one,’ he said. ‘She must be in her bedroom.’
He rushed to the door, but this one was locked. He stopped, trembling.
‘Héloise!’ he shouted, and thought he heard a piece of furniture move.
‘Héloise!’ he said, a second time.
‘Who is there?’ said the voice of the woman he was calling. It seemed to him that this voice was weaker than usual.
‘Open up! Open up!’ Villefort cried. ‘It is I.’
Despite the anguished tone in which this order was given, the door did not open. Villefort broke the lock with a kick.
Mme de Villefort was standing in the doorway to her boudoir, pale, drawn, looking at him with a terrifying stare.
‘Héloise, Héloise!’ he said. ‘What is it? Speak to me!’
She held out a rigid, ghastly white hand towards him. ‘It is done, Monsieur,’ she said, with a croaking sound that seemed to tear her throat. ‘What more do you want?’ And she fell full length on the carpet.
Villefort ran to her and grasped her hand. The hand was convulsively clasping a crystal flask with a gold stopper.
Mme de Villefort was dead.
Senseless with horror, Villefort shrank back to the door of the room and looked at the body. Then suddenly he cried: ‘My son! Where is my son? Edouard, Edouard!’ And he rushed from the room, shouting the boy’s name in such anguished tones that the servants came running.
‘My son! Where is my son?’ Villefort asked. ‘Someone must take him away… Don’t let him see…’
‘But Monsieur Edouard is not downstairs, Monsieur,’ the valet replied.
‘He must be playing in the garden. Go and find him!’
‘No, Monsieur. Madame called her son about half an hour ago. Monsieur Edouard went into Madame’s room and has not come down since then.’
An icy sweat poured across Villefort’s brow, his feet stumbled on the floor and his thoughts began to whirl in his head like the disordered works of a broken watch. ‘To Madame’s room!’ he muttered. “To Madame’s…’ And he slowly retraced his steps, wiping his forehead with one hand and supporting himself with the other against the wall.
Going back into the room meant once more seeing the unhappy woman’s body. Calling Edouard meant reawakening the echo of this room which had become a coffin: to speak was to violate the silence of a tomb. Villefort’s tongue seemed to be paralysed in his throat.
‘Edouard,’ he stammered. ‘Edouard…’
The child did not reply. So where was he if, as the servants said, he had gone into his mother’s room and not come out?
Villefort stepped forward.
Mme de Villefort’s body was lying across the doorway to the boudoir in which Edouard must be: the body seemed to be keeping watch on the threshold with staring, open eyes and with a frightful and mysterious look of irony on the mouth.
Behind the body, the curtain was lifted to reveal part of the boudoir, a piano and the end of a blue satin sofa.
Villefort took three or four steps forward and saw his child lying on the divan. No doubt the boy was sleeping.
The unfortunate man had a sudden feeling of unspeakable joy. A ray of pure light had shone into the hell in which he was writhing. It was merely a matter of stepping over the body into the boudoir, taking the child in his arms and fleeing with him a long, long way away.
Villefort was no longer the man whose exquisite corruption made a model of civilized man. He was a mortally wounded tiger leaving its broken teeth in its last wound. He was no longer afraid of prejudice, but of ghosts. He took a running jump over the body, as if he had been leaping across a blazing fire.
He picked the child up in his arms, holding him close, shaking him, calling to him; the child did not reply. He pressed his eager lips to his cheeks, but the cheeks were livid and ice-cold. He massaged his stiffened limbs, he put his hand to his heart, but the heart was no longer beating.
The child was dead.
A sheet of folded paper fluttered from Edouard’s breast. Devastated, Villefort dropped on his knees. The child fell from his lifeless arms and rolled over towards his mother. Villefort picked up the paper, recognized his wife’s handwriting and perused it eagerly. This is what he read:
‘You know that I was a good mother, since it was for the sake of my child that I became a criminal. A good mother does not go away without taking her son with her!’ Villefort could not believe his eyes; Villefort could not believe his own reason. He dragged himself towards Edouard’s body and examined it with the minute attention that a lioness gives to the study of a dead cub. Then he gave a heart-rending cry.
‘God!’ he cried. ‘As ever, God!’
The two victims appalled him. Within himself he could feel rising the horror of a solitude peopled by two corpses.
A moment before, he had been sustained by fury, that huge resource for a strong man; and by despair, the supreme virtue of grief, which drove the Titans to climb the heavens and Ajax to brandish his fist at the gods.[2]
Villefort bent his head under the weight of sorrows, rose up on his knees, shook his hair, which was damp with sweat and standing on end with horror, and this man, who had never had pity on anyone, went to seek out the old man, his father, just so that in his weakness he might have someone to whom to tell his misfortune and someone with whom to weep.
He went down the staircase that we already know and came into Noirtier’s.
When Villefort entered, Noirtier seemed to be listening, attentively and as affectionately as his paralysis allowed, to Abbé Busoni, who was as calm and emotionless as ever.
Seeing the abbé, Villefort put his hand to his forehead. The past returned to him like one of those waves which in its rage raises more foam than any of its fellows. He recalled the visit that he had paid to the abbé the day after the dinner in Auteuil and the visit that the abbé had paid him on the day of Valentine’s death.
‘Are you here, Monsieur!’ he said. ‘And do you never appear except in the company of Death?’
Busoni rose to his feet. Seeing the look on the lawyer’s face and the fierce light burning in his eyes, he realized, or thought he realized, that the events at the assizes had taken place. He knew nothing of the rest.
‘I came to pray over the body of your daughter,’ Busoni replied.
‘And today? Why are you here today?’
‘I have come to tell you that you have paid your debt to me and that from now on I shall pray God that He will be satisfied, as I am.’
‘My God!’ Villefort cried, shrinking back with a horrified look on his face. ‘That voice! It is not Abbé Busoni’s!’
‘No.’
The abbé tore off his tonsured wig and shook his head, so that his long black hair fell freely across his shoulders, framing his masculine features.
‘That is the face of Monte Cristo!’ Villefort exclaimed, looking aghast.
‘Not quite, Monsieur. Look harder, and further back.’
‘That voice! That voice! Where did I hear it for the first time?’
‘You heard it first in Marseille, twenty-three years ago, on the day of your wedding to Mademoiselle de Saint-Méran. Look in your files.’
‘You are not Busoni? You are not Monte Cristo? My God, you are that hidden enemy, deadly and implacable! I did something to harm you, something in Marseille! Oh, woe is me!’
‘Yes, you are right, you are absolutely right,’ the count said, crossing his arms over his broad chest. ‘Think! Think!’
‘But what did I do to you?’ Villefort cried, his mind already hovering on the borderline between reason and madness, in that mist which is no longer a dream but not yet wakefulness. ‘What did I do to you? Tell me! Speak!’
‘You condemned me to a slow and frightful death, you killed my father and you deprived me of love at the same time as you deprived me of freedom, and of fortune as well as love!’
‘Who are you? Then who are you? My God!’
‘I am the spectre of an unfortunate man whom you locked up in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If. When this spectre finally emerged from its tomb, God put on it the mask of the Count of Monte Cristo and showered it with diamonds and gold so that you should not recognize it until today.’
‘Ah! I recognize you, I do recognize you!’ the crown prosecutor said. ‘You are…’
‘I am Edmond Dantès!’
‘You are Edmond Dantès!’ cried the crown prosecutor, grasping the count by the wrist. ‘Then, come with me!’
He dragged him down the staircase, and Monte Cristo followed him, amazed, not himself knowing where he was being taken, but with a premonition of some further catastrophe.
‘There, Edmond Dantès! he said, showing the count the bodies of his wife and child. ‘There! Look! Are you fully avenged?’
Monte Cristo paled at this terrible spectacle. He realized that he had exceeded the limits of vengeance, he realized that he could no longer say: ‘God is for me and with me.’
With an inexpressible feeling of anguish, he threw himself on the child’s body, opened the eyes, felt the pulse and dashed with it into Valentine’s room, double-locking the door behind him…
‘My child!’ Villefort cried. ‘He is stealing my child’s body! Accursed man! Woe betide you!’
He tried to rush after Monte Cristo but, as if in a dream, felt his feet rooted to the ground, his eyes bursting out of their sockets and his fingers gradually burying themselves in his chest until blood reddened his nails. The veins of his temples swelled with boiling ferments that tried to burst the narrow vault of his skull and drown his brain in a deluge of fire. This paralysis lasted for several minutes, until the frightful commotion in his mind was stilled.
Then he gave a great cry, followed by a long burst of laughter, and dashed down the stairs.
A quarter of an hour later, the door to Valentine’s room opened and Monte Cristo reappeared, pale, leaden-eyed and heavy in heart. All the features of his face, which was usually so calm and noble, were distorted with pain. In his arms he held the child whom no measure had succeeded in restoring to life. Monte Cristo knelt on one knee and reverently set him down beside his mother, his head resting on her breast.
After that, he got up and went out. Coming across a servant, he said: ‘Where is Monsieur de Villefort?’
The servant did not answer but merely pointed towards the garden.
Monte Cristo went down the steps and proceeded towards the place where the man had pointed. There, with his servants making a circle around him, he saw Villefort, a spade in his hand, digging the ground in a kind of fury. ‘It’s not here,’ he was saying. ‘And it’s not here, either.’ After which he would dig a little further on.
Monte Cristo went over to him and said quietly, in what was almost a humble voice: ‘Monsieur, you have lost a son, but…’
Villefort interrupted. He had neither listened nor heard. ‘Oh, I'll find him,’ he said. ‘Even though you say he’s not here, I'll find him, even if I have to look until Judgement Day.’
Monte Cristo shrank back in horror, exclaiming: ‘He is mad!’ And, as if fearing that the walls of the accursed house might fall in on him, he rushed out into the street, wondering for the first time whether he had had the right to do what he had done.
‘Enough!’ he said. ‘Let that be enough, and we will save the last one.’
On arriving home, Monte Cristo met Morrel, who was wandering around the house in the Champs-Elysées, silent as a ghost waiting for the moment appointed by God for it to return to the tomb.
‘Get ready, Maximilien,’ the count said, smiling. ‘We’re leaving Paris tomorrow.’
‘Have you nothing more to do here?’ Morrel asked.
‘No,’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘Pray God that I have not already done too much.’
_________
NOTES
1. a shirt of Nessus: The garment, poisoned with the blood of the centaur Nessus, which caused the death of Hercules.
2. Titans... Ajax... at the gods: In Greek mythology, the Titans were giants who challenged the gods. Ajax, son of Oileus, was saved from drowning and boasted that he had survived without the help of the gods; for this impiety, Neptune cast him back into the water.
The judges took their seats in the midst of utter silence. The jury filed into their places. M. de Villefort, in his ceremonial headgear, the object of general attention and, one might almost say, admiration, sat down in his chair, looking around him imperturbably.
Everyone was astonished to see this grave and severe face, which seemed immune in its impassivity to a father’s grief, and there was a sort of awe as they considered this man who was a stranger to human emotions.
‘Gendarmes! said the presiding judge. ‘Bring up the accused.’
At this, the public became more alert and all eyes turned towards the door through which Benedetto would enter. Soon the door opened and the accused appeared. The impression was the same on everyone, and no one mistook the look on his face.
His features bore no sign of that deep emotion that drives the blood back to the heart and discolours the forehead and cheeks. His hands, elegantly posed, one on his hat, the other in the opening of his white quilted waistcoat, did not shake; his eyes were calm and even bright. Hardly was he in the chamber than the young man began to examine the ranks of the judges and the rest of the crowd in court, pausing longer on the presiding judge and longer still on the crown prosecutor.
Beside Andrea was his lawyer, who had been appointed by the court, since Andrea had not bothered to concern himself with such details, apparently attaching no importance to them. This lawyer was a young man with lustreless blond hair, his face reddened with an inner turmoil that was a hundred times more evident than the defendant’s.
The presiding judge asked for the indictment to be read; as we know, it had been composed by M. de Villefort’s adroit and implacable pen.
The reading lasted a long time. The effect on anyone else would have been devastating, and, throughout, every eye was on Andrea, who bore the weight of the charges against him with the merry indifference of a Spartan warrior.
Never, perhaps, had Villefort been more pithy or more eloquent. The crime was described in the liveliest colours, while the accused man’s antecedents, his transformation and his progress, step by step, since quite an early age were deduced with all the talent that experience of life and a knowledge of the human heart could supply in a mind as elevated as that of the crown prosecutor.
This indictment itself was enough to damn Benedetto for ever in public opinion, leaving nothing for the law except to punish him in a more tangible way.
Andrea did not pay the slightest attention to the succession of charges raised, then laid on his head. M. de Villefort, who frequently studied his reaction, no doubt continuing the psychological analyses that he had so often had the opportunity to make of men in the dock, could not once persuade him to lower his eyes, however fixedly and penetratingly he stared at him.
Finally the reading was concluded. ‘Defendant,’ the presiding judge said, ‘what is your name?’
Andrea rose to his feet. ‘Forgive me, Monsieur le Président,’ he said, in the purest and clearest of tones, ‘but I see that you are going to pursue an order of questioning which I shall not be able to follow. I claim that it is up to me, later, to justify being considered an exception to the general run of accused persons; so I beg you to let me reply to your questions in a different order, though I shall in fact answer all of them.’
The presiding judge looked in astonishment at the jury, who looked at the crown prosecutor. A wave of surprise ran through the whole assembly; but Andrea did not seem in the slightest bit concerned.
‘How old are you?’ the presiding judge asked. ‘Will you answer that question?’
‘Like the rest, I shall, Monsieur, but in its turn.’
‘How old are you?’ the judge repeated.
‘Twenty-one; or, rather, I shall be in just a few days, since I was born on the night of September the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth, 1817.’
M. de Villefort, who was taking notes, looked up on hearing the date.
‘Where were you born?’ the presiding judge continued.
‘In Auteuil, near Paris,’ Benedetto answered.
M. de Villefort looked up again and gave Benedetto the sort of look he might have given the head of Medusa. The colour drained from his face.
As for Benedetto, he passed the embroidered corner of a fine lawn handkerchief across his lips with an elegant gesture.
‘What is your profession?’ the judge asked.
‘Firstly, I was a counterfeiter,’ Andrea said, as cool as a cucumber. ‘Then I took up the profession of thief and quite recently I have become a murderer.’
A murmur, in fact a storm of indignation and astonishment, erupted from every corner of the room. Even the judges exchanged looks of amazement, while the jury exhibited the most profound disgust for such cynicism, which was not what it expected from a well-turned-out man.
M. de Villefort put a hand to his forehead which, having been pale, was now red and feverish. He leapt abruptly to his feet and looked around him like a man who had lost his way. He was gasping for breath.
‘Are you looking for something, prosecutor?’ Benedetto asked, with his most obliging smile.
M. de Villefort said nothing but sat down - or, rather, fell back into his chair.
‘Prisoner, will you now agree to tell us your name?’ asked the presiding judge. ‘The brutal manner in which you have enumerated your various crimes which you describe as professions, making it as it were a point of honour, something for which, in the name of morality and respect for humankind, the court must severely reprimand you, all these may well be the reason why you have so far declined to give us your name. You wish to enhance the name by first giving your titles.’
‘It’s extraordinary, Monsieur le Président,’ Benedetto said, in the most condescending tone of voice and with the politest of manners, ‘how clearly you have read my mind. That was indeed precisely why I asked you to change round the order of questions.’
The amazement was at its height. The accused’s words showed no trace of boasting or cynicism, and a stunned audience sensed that there was some burst of lightning gathering in the depths of this dark cloud.
‘Very well,’ said the judge. ‘What is your name?’
‘I cannot tell you my name, because I do not know it; but I know the name of my father and I can tell you that.’
Villefort was blinded by a flash of pain. Bitter drops of sweat could be seen falling rapidly from his cheeks on to the papers which he was shuffling with distraught and convulsive hands.
‘Then tell us the name of your father,’ the judge said.
Not a breath or a sigh broke the silence: the whole of this vast assembly was hushed and waiting.
‘My father is a crown prosecutor,’ Andrea replied calmly.
‘A crown prosecutor!’ the judge said in astonishment, without noticing the shocked expression on Villefort’s face. ‘A crown prosecutor!’
‘Yes, and since you ask me his name, I shall tell you. His name is de Villefort.’
The outburst that had for so long been contained by the respect that is paid to the law while a court is in session erupted, like a peal of thunder, from every breast. The court itself did not even consider trying to repress this movement in the crowd. There were interjections, insults shouted at Benedetto (who remained impassive), violent gestures, commotion among the gendarmes and the sniggering of that baser element which in any crowd rises to the surface in times of disturbance or scandal. All this lasted five minutes, before the judges and ushers could manage to restore calm.
In the middle of all this noise, the presiding judge’s voice could be heard shouting: ‘Prisoner! Are you making fun of the law? Do you dare to give your fellow citizens the spectacle of a degree of corruption which is hitherto unequalled even in an age which has had more than its fair share of the same?’
Ten people flocked round the crown prosecutor, who was sitting, completely overwhelmed, and offered him consolation, encouragement and assurances of their entire sympathy.
Order was finally restored, except at one place in the room where a fairly large group continued to call out and agitate. It appeared that a woman had fainted. She was offered smelling salts and came back to her senses.
Throughout all this commotion, Andrea had turned a smiling face on the crowd. Then, at last resting one hand on the oak handle of his bench, in the most elegant posture, he said: ‘Gentlemen, God forbid that I should try to insult the court or, before such an august company, try to cause any unnecessary scandal. I was asked what age I am, and I answered; I was asked where I was born, and I replied; I was asked my name, and I cannot say it, because my parents abandoned me. But, even without saying my name, since I have none, I can say that of my father; so, I repeat, my father is called Monsieur de Villefort and I am ready to prove it.’
The young man’s voice carried a certainty, a conviction and a power that reduced everyone to silence. For a moment every eye turned towards the crown prosecutor who remained as motionless in his seat as a man who had just been struck dead by lightning.
‘Gentlemen,’ Andrea said, with a tone and a gesture that demanded silence, ‘I owe you proof of my words and an explanation for them.’
‘But,’ snapped the presiding judge, ‘you declared in the preliminary hearings that you were called Benedetto and that you were an orphan, describing Corsica as your homeland.’
‘I said at that hearing what was convenient for me to say then, because I did not want anyone to weaken or even prevent the solemn repercussions of my words - and this would surely have been done.
‘I now repeat that I was born in Auteuil, in the night of September the twenty-seventh to the twenty-eighth, 1817, and that I am the son of Crown Prosecutor de Villefort. Now, do you want some details? Here they are.
‘I was born on the first floor of Number twenty-eight, Rue de la Fontaine, in a room hung with red damask. My father took me in his arms, telling my mother that I was dead, wrapped me in a towel marked with an “H” and an “N”, and carried me down to the garden, where he buried me alive.’
A shudder went through the whole room when they saw that the prisoner’s confidence was growing, to keep pace with M. de Villefort’s horror.
‘But how do you know all these details?’ the judge asked.
‘I shall tell you, Monsieur le Président. That very same night, in the garden where my father had just buried me, a man who was his mortal enemy had entered, having long waited and watched in order to carry out an act of Corsican vengeance against him. The man had hidden himself in a clump of bushes. He saw my father bury something in the ground and struck him with a knife while he was still engaged in the operation. Then, thinking that the object must be some treasure, he dug up the hole and found me, still alive. The man took me to the orphanage, where I was admitted under the number fifty-seven. Three months later, his sister travelled from Rogliano to Paris to fetch me, claimed me as her son and took me away. This is how, even though I was born in Auteuil, I was brought up in Corsica.’
There was a moment’s silence, but a silence so profound that, had it not been for the tension that seemed to be exhaled from a thousand breasts, you would have thought the room empty.
‘Continue,’ said the presiding judge.
‘No doubt,’ Benedetto went on, ‘I could have been happy with these good people who adored me; but my perverse nature gained the upper hand over all the virtues that my adoptive mother tried to instil in my heart. I grew up badly and turned to crime. One day, when I was cursing God for making me so wicked and giving me such a dreadful fate, my adoptive father said: “Don’t blaspheme, you wretch! God was generous in giving you life. The evil comes not from you but from your father — the father who doomed you to hell should you die, and to misery if some miracle should give you life!”
‘From then on, I ceased to blaspheme God, but I cursed my father. That is why I have come here and spoken the words for which you have reproached me, Monsieur le Président. That is why I caused the commotion from which this gathering has still not recovered. If that is a further crime, punish me for it. But if I have convinced you that from the day of my birth my fate has been mortal, tormented, bitter and lamentable, then pity me!’
‘And what about your mother?’ the judge asked.
‘My mother thought me dead; my mother is not guilty. I have never wanted to know my mother’s name, and I do not know it.’
At that moment, a shrill cry, ending in a sob, rang out from the midst of the group which, as we have said, included a woman. She fell to the ground in a violent fit of hysteria and was taken out of the room. As she was being helped out, the thick veil hiding her face slipped aside and they recognized Mme Danglars. Though nearly paralysed by nervous exhaustion, and despite the humming in his ears and the sort of madness that had seized his brain, Villefort too recognized her and rose to his feet.
‘Proof!’ cried the presiding judge. ‘Proof! Prisoner, do you realize that this tissue of horrors must be supported by the most incontrovertible proof?’
‘Proof?’ Benedetto said, with a laugh. ‘Do you want proof?’
‘We do.’
‘Then look at Monsieur de Villefort, and ask me for further proof.’
Everyone turned towards the crown prosecutor who, beneath the weight of a thousand eyes turned towards him, stepped forward into the well of the court, staggering, his hair awry and his face blotchy from the pressure of his fingernails.
The whole room heaved a long murmur of astonishment.
‘Father, they are asking me for proof,’ said Benedetto. ‘Do you wish me to provide it?’
‘No,’ M. de Villefort stammered, in a strangled voice. ‘No, there is no need.’
‘What do you mean, no need?’ cried the judge.
‘I mean,’ said the crown prosecutor, ‘that I should struggle in vain against the deadly fate that holds me in its grasp. Gentlemen, I realize that I am in the hands of a vengeful God. No proof, there is no need. Everything this young man has just said is true!’
A dark and heavy silence, such as precedes some natural catastrophe, wrapped its leaden cloak around all those who heard these words, and the hair stood up on their heads.
‘What! Monsieur de Villefort,’ the judge cried, ‘are you sure you are not dreaming? Are you really in full command of your faculties? One might believe that such a strange accusation, so dreadful and so unexpected, must have troubled your mind. Come, now, pull yourself together.’
The crown prosecutor shook his head. His teeth were chattering violently like those of a man eaten up with fever; and yet he was deathly pale.
‘I am in full command of my faculties, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Only my body is unwell, as you may well understand. I admit my guilt for everything that the young man has accused me of, and I shall henceforth remain at home at the disposal of the crown prosecutor, my successor.’
After saying which, in a dull and almost inaudible voice, M. de Villefort staggered towards the door, which the duty usher automatically opened for him.
The whole company was left speechless and appalled by this revelation and this confession, making such a dreadful conclusion to all the various incidents that had shaken Parisian society over the preceding fortnight.
‘Well!’ Beauchamp said. ‘Let anyone now deny that drama is only in art and not in nature!’
‘Good Lord,’ said Chateau-Renaud. ‘I'd really much rather end like Monsieur de Morcerf: a pistol-shot is a kindness beside such a disaster.’
‘And it does kill you,’ said Beauchamp.
‘Just think! I briefly considered marrying his daughter,’ said Debray. ‘Poor child: my God, she did well to die!’
‘The session is ended, gentlemen,’ said the presiding judge. ‘The case will be adjourned to the next assizes. The matter must be investigated afresh and entrusted to another counsel.’
As for Andrea — calm as ever and much more interesting — he left the room, escorted by the gendarmes, who involuntarily showed him some sign of respect.
‘So, what do you think of that, my good man?’ Debray asked the sergeant-at-arms, slipping a louis into his hand.
‘They’ll find extenuating circumstances,’ he answered.
The Benedetto Affair, as it was called in the courts and in society, had created an enormous sensation. A frequenter of the Café de Paris, the Boulevard de Gand and the Bois de Boulogne, the pseudo-Cavalcanti, while he had been in Paris and for the two or three months that his glory had lasted, had met a host of people. The newspapers had described the accused in his different incarnations, in society and in prison, so there was tremendous curiosity on the part of everyone who had personally been acquainted with Prince Andrea Cavalcanti. It was these above all who had decided to risk anything to get a glimpse of M. Benedetto, murderer of his fellow-convict, while he stood in the dock.
To many people, Benedetto was, if not a victim of the law, at least of a judicial error. M. Cavalcanti, the father, had been seen in Paris and they expected him to appear once more to claim his illustrious offspring. Several people, who had never heard speak of the famous Polishwoman with whom he arrived at the Count of Monte Cristo’s, had been struck by the imposing air, perfect good manners and urbanity shown by the old nobleman who, it must be admitted, appeared a flawless aristocrat, provided he was not doing his sums or talking about them.
As for the accused man himself, many people remembered him as so pleasant, so handsome and so generous that they preferred to believe in some machination by an enemy of the kind that is found in that portion of society where great wealth increases the means to do ill or to do good to such a fabulous extent, and the power to do these things to an unheard-of degree.
So everyone was hastening to the assizes, some to enjoy the spectacle, others to comment on it. A queue started to form outside the gates at seven o’clock in the morning and, one hour before the session began, the courtroom was already full of those who had some leverage there.
Before the judge enters, and often even afterwards, a courtroom on the day of some great trial resembles a drawing-room in which a lot of people recognize one another, meet when they are close enough not to lose their seats or make gestures at each other when they are separated by too many spectators, lawyers or gendarmes.
It was one of those splendid autumn days that sometimes compensate for the lack of the preceding summer, or its brevity. The clouds that M. de Villefort had seen passing in front of the sun had dispersed as though by magic and allowed one of the last and sweetest September days to shine in all its purity.
Beauchamp was one of the kings of the press and consequently had his throne everywhere. Eyeing the crowd to right and left, he noticed Chateau-Renaud and Debray, who had just won the favour of a sergeant-at-arms, who had decided to stand behind them instead of blocking their view, as was his right. The good fellow had scented the presence of a secretary at the ministry and a millionaire, and was showing himself full of consideration for his fine neighbours, even allowing them to go and see Beauchamp, while promising to keep their places.
‘Well, then,’ Beauchamp said, ‘have we come to see our friend?’
‘Heavens, yes, we have!’ Debray replied. ‘A fine prince he was! Devil take these Italian princes!’
‘A man who had Dante for his genealogist and could trace his line back to the Divine Comedy.’
‘The nobility of the rope,’ Chateau-Renaud said coolly.
‘He will be condemned, I suppose?’ Debray asked Beauchamp.
‘My dear fellow,’ the journalist replied, ‘I should think you were the person one should ask about that. You know the political climate better than we do. Did you see the president at the last soirée in your ministry?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Something that will surprise you.’
‘Well, then, do tell me, quickly, my dear chap. It’s so long since I heard anything that did that.’
‘Well, he told me that Benedetto, who’s considered a firebird of subtlety and a giant of cunning, is only a very subordinate, very naive rogue, quite undeserving of the experiments which will be made on his phrenological organs once he is dead.’
‘Pooh!’ Beauchamp said. ‘He played the prince well enough for all that.’
‘For you, perhaps, Beauchamp: you hate those poor princes so much that you are delighted if they misbehave. But I can sniff out a true gentleman straight away and spring an aristocratic family, whatever it may be, like a heraldic bloodhound.’
‘So, you never believed in his principality?’
‘In his principality, yes; but in his princedom? No.’
‘Not bad,’ said Debray. ‘But I assure you that he could get by with anyone else… I saw him with the ministers.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Chateau-Renaud. ‘For all that your ministers know about princes!’
‘There are some good things in what you have just said,’ Beauchamp answered, bursting into laughter. ‘The phrase is short, but rather fine. I ask your permission to use it in my report.’
‘Take it, my dear Monsieur Beauchamp,’ said Château- Renaud. ‘You can have my phrase, for what it’s worth.’
‘But if I spoke to the president,’ Debray said to Beauchamp, ‘you must have spoken to the crown prosecutor.’
‘Impossible: Monsieur de Villefort has locked himself away for the past week; it’s quite natural, after that odd series of domestic misfortunes, culminating in the strange death of his daughter.’
‘The strange death! What do you mean, Beauchamp?’
‘Oh, yes, pretend to know nothing, on the grounds that all this is taking place among the peerage,’ Beauchamp said, putting his pince-nez to his eye and forcing it to stay up by itself.
‘My dear sir,’ said Chateau-Renaud, ‘let me tell you that, as far as the pince-nez is concerned, you cannot hold a candle to Debray. Debray, do give Monsieur Beauchamp a lesson.’
‘Look,’ Beauchamp said. ‘I’m sure I’m not mistaken.’
‘What about?’
‘It’s her.’
‘Her, who?’
‘They said she had gone.’
‘Mademoiselle Eugénie?’ Chateau-Renaud asked. ‘Is she back already?’
‘No, not her; her mother.’
‘Madame Danglars?’
‘Come, come!’ said Chateau-Renaud. ‘It can’t be. Ten days after her daughter has run off and three days after her husband’s bankruptcy?’
Debray blushed slightly and followed Beauchamp’s eyes. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘That’s a veiled woman, a stranger, some foreign princess, perhaps Prince Cavalcanti’s mother. But you were saying, or rather about to say, something really interesting, I think, Beauchamp.’
‘I was?’
‘Yes, you were talking about Valentine’s strange death.’
‘Yes, so I was. But why isn’t Madame de Villefort here?’
‘Poor woman!’ said Debray. ‘No doubt she is making balm for the hospitals and inventing cosmetics for herself and her friends. You know she spends two or three thousand écus at that game, so they assure me. And you're right: why isn’t she here? I should have been very pleased to see her. I like her very much.’
‘And I hate her,’ said Chateau-Renaud.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Why does one love or hate? I hate her for reasons of antipathy.’
‘Or instinctively, of course…’
‘Perhaps. But let’s get back to what you were saying, Beauchamp.’
‘Well, are you not curious to know, gentlemen, why they are dying so repetitiously in the Villefort family?’
‘I like that “repetitiously”,’ said Chateau-Renaud.
‘You'll find the word in Saint-Simon.’[1]
‘And the thing in Monsieur de Villefort’s house; so tell us about it.’
‘Good Lord!’ Debray said. ‘I must confess I have not taken my eyes off that house which has been dressed in mourning for three whole months, and only the day before yesterday, on the subject of Valentine, Madame was saying…’
‘Madame is who precisely?’ Chateau-Renaud asked.
‘Why, the minister’s wife, of course!’
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ said Chateau-Renaud. ‘I do not frequent ministers. I leave that to princes.’
‘You used merely to be handsome, but now you are starting to blaze with glory. Have pity on us, Baron, or you will burn us like a second Jupiter.’
‘I shall not say another word,’ said Chateau-Renaud. ‘But for God’s sake, have pity on me. Don’t cap every remark I make.’
‘Come, come, let’s try to finish what we were saying, Beauchamp. Now I was telling you that Madame asked me about the matter the day before yesterday. You tell me, I'll tell her.’
‘Well, gentlemen, if people are dying in the Villefort family so repetitiously — and I stick by the word — that means there is a murderer in the house!’
The two young men shuddered, because the same idea had struck them more than once.
‘And who is the murderer?’ they asked.
‘Young Edouard.’
The speaker was not at all put out by a burst of laughter from his audience, but went on: ‘Yes, gentlemen, young Edouard, an infant phenomenon, who is already killing as well as his parents ever did.’
‘This is a joke?’
‘Not in the slightest. Yesterday I took on a servant who has just left the Villeforts’. And listen to this…’
‘Were listening.’
‘I shall sack him tomorrow, because he eats a vast quantity to make up for the terrified abstinence that he imposed on himself while he was there. Well, it appears that the dear child got his hands on some flask of a drug which he uses from time to time against those who displease him. Firstly, it was grandpa and grandma Saint-Méran who annoyed him and he poured them three drops of his elixir. Three were enough. Then it was good old Barrois, grandpa Noirtier’s old servant, who would occasionally scold the dear little imp, so the little imp gave him three drops of the elixir. The same was the fate of poor Valentine, not because she scolded him — she didn’t — but because he was jealous of her. He gave her three drops of his elixir and her day was done, as it was for the rest.’
‘What fairy story is this you are telling us?’ Chateau-Renaud asked.
‘Yes,’ Beauchamp said. ‘A tale of the Beyond.’
‘It’s absurd,’ said Debray.
‘There!’ Beauchamp said. ‘You see? You’re already playing for time. Dammit! Ask my servant; or, rather, the man who won’t be my servant tomorrow. Everyone in the family talked about it.’
‘But where is this elixir? What is it?’
‘Of course, the child hides it.’
‘Where did he get it?’
‘In his mother’s laboratory.’
‘Does his mother have poisons in her laboratory?’
‘How do I know! You’re interrogating me like the crown prosecutor. All I can say is what I’ve been told, and I’m giving you my source: I can’t do better than that. The poor devil was too terrified to eat.’
‘Incredible!’
‘No, my good chap, not incredible at all. You saw that child in the Rue Richelieu last year who entertained himself by killing his brothers and sisters by sticking a pin in their ears while they were asleep. The generation after our own is very precocious, old boy.’
‘I am prepared to bet that you don’t believe a word of it,’ Chateau-Renaud said. ‘But I don’t see the Count of Monte Cristo. How can he not be here?’
‘He’s blasé,’ Debray said. ‘He wouldn’t want to appear here in front of everyone, after he’d been taken in by all these Cavalcantis who came to him, apparently, with false letters of credit, with the result that he has a mortgage of a hundred thousand francs on the principality.’
‘By the way, Monsieur de Chateau-Renaud,’ Beauchamp asked, ‘how is Morrel?’
‘Do you know,’ he answered, ‘I’ve been round to his house three times, and found neither hide nor hair of Morrel. But his sister didn’t seem too worried about it and told me, quite calmly, that she had not seen him for two or three days either, but that she was sure he was well.’
‘I've just thought: Monte Cristo can’t be here,’ said Beauchamp.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s part of the case.’
‘Has he killed someone?’ Debray asked.
‘No. On the contrary, he’s the one somebody tried to kill. You know that it was while he was coming out of Monte Cristo’s that that fine fellow Caderousse was murdered by young Benedetto. Moreover it was in the count’s house that they found the famous waistcoat in which there was the letter that interrupted the signing of the marriage contract. Can you see the famous waistcoat? There it is, all bloody, on the desk, as evidence.’
‘Oh, wonderful!’
‘Hush! Gentlemen, the court is in session. Take your places.’
There was some commotion in the court. The sergeant-at-arms called his two protégés with a loud hem! And the usher, appearing on the threshold of the counsel chamber, cried out — in that yelping voice that ushers had already acquired in Beaumarchais’ time: ‘Gentlemen! All rise!’
_________
NOTES
Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, GE (16 January 1675 – 2 March 1755), was a French courtier and memoirist, who also spent time as a soldier and diplomat.
It will be recalled that Abbé Busoni had remained alone with Noirtier in the funerary chamber and that it was the old man and the priest who had taken on the task of watching over the young girl’s body.
Perhaps the abbé’s Christian exhortations, or his gentle charity, or his winning words had restored the old man’s courage because, as soon as he had the opportunity to confer with the priest, instead of the despair that had at first overwhelmed him, everything in Noirtier spoke of great resignation; and this calm was all the more surprising to those who remembered the deep affection that he felt for Valentine.
M. de Villefort had not seen the old man since the morning of her death. The whole household had been renewed: another valet was hired for himself, another servant for Noirtier; two women had come into Mme de Villefort’s service; and all of them, right down to the concierge and the chauffeur, provided new faces which had, so to speak, risen up between the different masters in this accursed household and interposed themselves in the already quite cold relationships between them. In any case, the assizes opened in three days and Villefort, shut up in his study, was feverishly working on the indictment against Caderousse’s murderer. This affair, like all those in which the Count of Monte Cristo was involved, had caused a great stir in Paris. The evidence was not conclusive, since it relied on a few words written by a dying convict, a former fellow-inmate of the man he was accusing, who might be acting out of hatred or for revenge. The magistrate was morally certain, but nothing more. The crown prosecutor had eventually succeeded in acquiring for himself the dreadful certainty that Benedetto was guilty, and this difficult victory was to reward him with one of those satisfactions to his vanity which were the only pleasures that still touched the fibres of his icy heart.
So the trial opened, thanks to Villefort’s unending work. He wanted to make it the first case to be heard at the next assizes, so he had been obliged to hide himself away even more than usual in order to avoid answering the huge number of demands for tickets to the hearing that were addressed to him.
Moreover, so little time had passed since poor Valentine had been laid to rest. The family’s grief was still so recent that no one was surprised to see the father so totally absorbed in his duties, that is to say in the only thing that might take his mind off his sorrow.
Only once, the day after Benedetto had received a second visit from Bertuccio, the one when he was to tell him the name of his father, in fact the day after that, which was Sunday — only once, as we say, did Villefort notice his father. This was at a moment when the magistrate, overcome with tiredness, had gone down into the garden of his house and, dark, bent beneath some implacable thought, like Tarquin[1] cutting the heads off the tallest poppies with his cane, M. de Villefort was knocking down the long, dying stems of the hollyhocks that rose on either side of the path like the ghosts of those flowers that had been so brilliant in the season that had just passed away.
He had already more than once reached the end of the garden, that is to say the famous gate overlooking the abandoned field, from which he would always return by the same path, resuming his walk at the same pace and repeating the same gestures, when he looked up, mechanically, towards the house, where he could hear his son playing noisily. The boy had come home from boarding school to spend Sunday and Monday with his mother.
At that moment, he saw M. Noirtier at one of the open windows. The old man had had his chair brought up to that window to enjoy the last rays of the still warm sun as it came to bid farewell to the dying convolvulus flowers and the reddened leaves of the vines entwined around the balcony.
The old man’s eye was fixed as it were on a point which Villefort could only imperfectly distinguish. His look was so full of hatred and savagery, and burned with such impatience, that the crown prosecutor, accustomed to interpreting every nuance of the features that he knew so well, stepped aside from his route to see who could have attracted such a powerful look.
Under a group of lime-trees, almost entirely bare of leaves, he saw Mme de Villefort, sitting with a book in her hand and looking up from her reading at intervals to smile at her son or to throw back the rubber ball which he insisted on throwing from the drawing-room into the garden.
Villefort paled, knowing what the old man wanted.
Noirtier was still looking at the same spot, but his eyes often turned from the wife to the husband, and then Villefort himself had to suffer the onslaught of those devastating eyes which, as they switched from one object to another, also changed in meaning, though without losing any of their threatening expression.
Mme de Villefort, quite unaware of these passions beamed back and forth above her head, was at that moment holding her son’s ball and motioning him to come and fetch it with a kiss; but Edouard took a lot of persuading: a kiss from his mother probably seemed insufficient reward for the trouble he would have to take. Finally he made up his mind, jumped out of the window into a bed of asters and heliotropes and ran over to Mme de Villefort, his forehead bathed in sweat. Mme de Villefort wiped it dry, put her lips to the damp ivory and sent the child off with his ball in one hand and sweets in the other.
Villefort, drawn by an invisible magnet, like a bird fascinated by a snake, came towards the house. As he approached, Noirtier’s eyes were lowered to follow him and the fire in his pupils seemed to reach such a degree of incandescence that Villefort felt it eating into the depths of his heart. There was indeed a fearsome reproach to be read in those eyes, as well as a dreadful threat. Then Noirtier’s eyes and eyelids were raised towards heaven, as if reminding his son of a forgotten oath.
‘Very well, Monsieur!’ Villefort replied, stepping into the courtyard. ‘Very well! Be patient for one day more. I shall do as I said.’
Noirtier seemed to be calmed by these words and his eyes turned indifferently away. Villefort swiftly unbuttoned the frock-coat that was stifling him, passed a pale hand across his brow and went back into his study.
The night passed, cold and calm. Everyone went to bed and slept as usual in the house. Only Villefort (as usual) did not go to bed with the rest but worked until five in the morning, running over the last interrogations carried out the day before by the investigating magistrates, studying the evidence of witnesses and clarifying the language of his own opening speech, one of the most powerful and subtly written that he had ever made.
The first session of the assizes was to take place on the following day, Monday. Villefort saw that day dawn, sinister and sickly pale, its bluish light reflecting off the lines on the paper, written in red ink. The judge had fallen asleep for a moment while his lamp burned itself out. He was woken by its spluttering, his hands damp and ink-stained as if he had dipped them in blood.
He opened his window: a wide orange band crossed the distant horizon, cutting across the slender poplars outlined in black against the sky. In the field of alfalfa, beyond the wall by the chestnut-trees, a skylark winged its way into the heavens, followed by its clear morning song. The damp air of dawn flooded over Villefort’s head, awakening his memory.
‘Today will be the day,’ he forced himself to say. ‘Today the man who is to hold the sword of justice must strike wherever the guilty one may be.’
Involuntarily his eyes turned towards Noirtier’s window, which was at right angles to his: the window where he had seen the old man the evening before. The curtain was drawn. Yet the image of his father was so clear in his mind that he spoke to the closed window as if it had been open, and through the opening he could see the threatening old man. ‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t worry.’
His head fell back on his chest and, with it bowed, he walked a few times round his study before finally throwing himself, fully dressed, on a sofa, not so much to sleep as to loosen his limbs which were stiff with tiredness and the chill of work which reached right to the marrow of the bones.
Little by little, everyone woke up. Villefort, in his study, heard the successive noises that, as it were, made up the life of the house: the doors opening and closing; the ringing of Mme de Villefort’s bell, summoning her maid; the first cries of the child, who got up merrily as one does at that age.
Villefort himself rang. His new valet came in, bringing the newspapers together with a cup of chocolate.
‘What’s that you’re bringing me?’ Villefort asked.
‘A cup of chocolate.’
‘I didn’t ask for it. Who is taking such care of me?’
‘Madame. She said that Monsieur would no doubt have to speak a good deal today in that matter of the murder and that he needed to build up his strength.’ And the valet put down the vermeil cup on the table beside the sofa — a table which, like the rest, was covered in papers. Then he went out.
Villefort looked grimly for a moment at the cup, then suddenly grabbed it and drank down the contents in a single draught. It was as though he hoped that the liquid was some deadly poison and that he was calling on death to release him from a duty that was ordering him to do something much more difficult than dying. Then he got up and walked round his study with a sort of smile which would have been terrible to see, had there been anyone to see it.
The chocolate was harmless and M. de Villefort felt no ill-effects.
When breakfast time arrived, M. de Villefort did not appear at table. The valet came back to the study. ‘Madame wishes to inform Monsieur that eleven o’clock has just struck,’ he said, ‘and that the session opens at midday.’
‘So?’ said Villefort.
‘Madame’s toilet is complete. She is quite ready and wishes to know if she will be accompanying Monsieur?’
‘Where?’
‘To the law courts.’
‘What for?’
‘Madame says that she would very much like to be present at the session.’
‘Ah!’ Villefort said, in almost terrifying tones. ‘Does she really!’
The servant shrank back and said: ‘If Monsieur would like to go out alone, I shall inform Madame.’
For a moment Villefort said nothing, but scratched his cheek — pale, in contrast to his ebony-black beard.
‘Tell Madame,’ he said finally, ‘that I should like to speak to her and that she should expect me in her rooms.’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
‘Then come back to shave and dress me.’
‘Immediately.’
The valet disappeared briefly, then returned to shave Villefort and solemnly dress him in black. When he had finished, he said: ‘Madame says that she will expect Monsieur as soon as he is ready.’
‘I am going.’ With his dossiers under his arm and his hat in his hand, Villefort set off towards his wife’s apartments.
At the door, he stopped for a moment and wiped away the sweat that was running down his livid white forehead. Then he pushed open the door.
Mme de Villefort was sitting on an ottoman, impatiently leafing through some newspapers and brochures that young Edouard was tearing in pieces even before his mother had had time to finish reading them. She was completely dressed to go out. Her hat was waiting for her on a chair and she had her gloves on.
‘Ah! Here you are, Monsieur,’ she said quite calmly, in her ordinary voice. ‘Good heavens, how pale you are! Have you been working all night again? Why didn’t you come to have luncheon with me? So, are you going to take me, or shall I go on my own with Edouard?’
As one can see, Mme de Villefort had asked one question after another, in order to get some response; but M. de Villefort remained cold and silent as a statue at every enquiry.
‘Edouard,’ he said, fixing the child with a commanding look. ‘Go and play in the drawing-room. I have something to say to your mother.’
This cold stare, resolute voice and unexpected introduction made Mme de Villefort shudder. Edouard had looked up at his mother and, when she did not confirm M. de Villefort’s orders, went back to cutting the heads off his lead soldiers.
‘Edouard!’ M. de Villefort shouted, so harshly that the child leapt up on the carpet. ‘Do you hear me? Go!’
The child, unaccustomed to such treatment, got up, ashen- faced — though it was hard to say whether from anger or fear. His father went over to him, took his arm and kissed his forehead. ‘Go on, child,’ he said. Edouard went out.
M. de Villefort walked over to the door and locked it.
‘My heavens!’ the young woman said, looking deep into her husband’s soul and starting to form a smile, which was frozen by Villefort’s impassive stare. ‘What is the matter?’
‘Madame, where do you keep the poison that you habitually use?’ the magistrate said, clearly and unambiguously, standing between his wife and the door.
Mme de Villefort felt what a lark must feel when it sees the tightening circle of the kite above its head. A harsh, broken sound, somewhere between a cry and a sigh, burst from her chest and she went as white as a sheet. ‘Monsieur,’ she said. ‘I… I don’t understand.’
She had leapt up in a paroxysm of terror and now, in a second paroxysm that seemed even stronger than the first, she collapsed back on to the cushions on the sofa.
‘I asked you,’ Villefort said in a perfectly calm voice, ‘where you keep the poison with which you killed my father-in-law, Monsieur de Saint-Méran, my mother-in-law, Barrois and my daughter, Valentine.’
‘Oh, Monsieur!’ Mme de Villefort cried, clasping her hands. ‘What are you saying?’
‘It is not your place to question me, but to reply.’
‘To the husband or the judge?’ Mme de Villefort stammered.
‘To the judge, Madame; to the judge!’
The woman’s pallor, her anguished expression and the trembling that shook her whole body were dreadful to behold.
‘Oh, Monsieur,’ she muttered. ‘Oh, Monsieur…’ Nothing more.
‘You do not answer me, Madame!’ said her terrible questioner. Then he added, with a smile that was even more terrifying than his anger: ‘It is true that you don’t deny it!’
She shrank back.
‘And you cannot deny it,’ Villefort added, stretching his hand towards her as if to seize her in the name of justice. ‘You carried out these different crimes with impudent skill, though it could only have deceived those whose affection for you predisposed them to blindness where you were concerned. After Madame de Saint-Méran’s death, I knew that there was a poisoner in my house. Monsieur d’Avrigny had warned me of it. After the death of Barrois, God forgive me, my suspicions turned towards someone, towards an angel… those suspicions which, even when no crime has been committed, are always smouldering in the depth of my heart. But after Valentine’s death, I could have no further doubt, Madame. And not only I, but others. So your crime, which is known now to two people and suspected by many, will be made public. As I said to you a moment ago, Madame, it is no longer your husband who is speaking to you, but your judge!’
The young woman hid her face in both hands. ‘Oh, Monsieur,’ she stammered, ‘I beg you, don’t be misled by appearances!’
‘Can you be a coward?’ Villefort cried, in a contemptuous voice. ‘I have indeed always noticed that poisoners are cowards. But are you a coward, who had enough frightful courage to watch two old people and a girl die in front of you, when you had killed them?
‘Can you be a coward?’ he continued, in growing excitement. ‘You, who have counted out one by one the minutes of four death agonies? You who have concocted your infernal plans and your criminal potions with such miraculous skill and precision? You who have so devised all that so well, could you have forgotten to calculate one thing: namely, where the revelation of your crimes might lead? No, that’s impossible! You must have kept some sweeter, subtler and more lethal poison to escape from your just deserts… I hope at least you have done that?’
Mme de Villefort wrung her hands and fell to her knees.
‘I know, I know,’ he said, ‘you confess. But a confession made in court, a last-minute confession, a confession when the facts can no longer be denied: such a confession does not in any way mitigate the punishment inflicted on the guilty party.’
‘Punishment!’ Mme de Villefort cried. ‘Punishment! Monsieur, this is twice that you have spoken that word, I think?’
‘Indeed so. Is it because you are four times guilty that you thought you would escape scot-free? Is it because you are the wife of him who demands punishment that you thought to evade it? Whoever she may be, the scaffold awaits the poisoner, especially, as I have just said, if she did not take care to reserve a few drops of her most lethal poison for herself.’
Mme de Villefort gave a wild cry, and hideous and uncontrollable terror swept over her ravaged features.
‘Oh, do not fear the scaffold, Madame,’ the magistrate said. ‘I do not wish to dishonour you, because that would be to dishonour myself. No, on the contrary, if you have fully understood what I said, you will realize that you cannot die on the scaffold.’
‘No, I have not understood. What do you mean?’ the unhappy woman stammered, completely aghast.
‘I mean that, by her infamy, the wife of the chief magistrate of Paris will not soil a name which has so far been without blemish, or dishonour her husband and her child.’
‘No! Oh, no!’
‘Very well, Madame. That will be a fine action on your part, and I thank you for it.’
‘Thank me? What for?’
‘For what you have just said.’
‘What I have said! My head is reeling! I don’t understand anything any more! Oh, my God! My God!’ And she looked up, her hair dishevelled, her lips foaming.
‘You have not replied, Madame, to the question which I put you on entering this room: where is the poison which you habitually use, Madame?’
Mme de Villefort raised her arms towards heaven and convulsively wrung her hands.
‘No!’ she cried. ‘No! You cannot want that!’
‘What I do not want, Madame, is for you to perish on the scaffold,’ said Villefort. ‘Do you understand that?’
‘Oh, Monsieur, spare me!’
‘What I do want is for justice to be done. I have been put on earth to punish, Madame,’ he added, his eyes blazing. ‘To any other woman, even a queen, I should send the executioner. But on you I shall have mercy. To you, I shall say: is it not true, Madame, that you have kept a few drops of your gentlest, quickest and most infallible poison?’
‘Oh, forgive me, Monsieur! Let me live!’
‘She was a coward!’ said Villefort.
‘Consider that I am your wife!’
‘You are a poisoner.’
‘In heaven’s name… !’
‘No!’
‘In the name of the love you once had for me!’
‘No! No!’
‘In the name of our child! Oh, for our child’s sake, let me live!’
‘No, no, no, I tell you! One day, if I should let you live, you might kill him as you did the others.’
‘I! Kill my son!’ the mother cried, wildly hurling herself on Villefort. ‘I, kill my Edouard! Oh, oh!’ And the sentence ended in a terrible laugh, a demonic laugh, the laugh of a madwoman, and was drowned by a bloody croak. Mme de Villefort had fallen at her husband’s feet.
Villefort went over to her. ‘Consider this, Madame,’ he said. ‘If, on my return, justice has not been done, I shall denounce you with my own lips and arrest you with my own hands.’
She listened, panting, exhausted, crushed. Only her eye still lived, smouldering with an awful fire.
‘Do you hear me?’ Villefort asked. ‘I am going there to demand the death penalty against a murderer… If I come back to find you still alive, you will sleep in the conciergerie this evening.’
Mme de Villefort gave a sigh, her nerves gave way and she fell, a broken woman, on the carpet.
The crown prosecutor seemed to feel a pang of pity. He looked at her less severely and, bending gently over her, said slowly: ‘Adieu, Madame! Adieu!’
This last farewell fell like the fatal blade on Mme de Villefort. She fainted. The crown prosecutor left the room and, after doing so, double-locked the door.
_________
NOTES
1. Tarquin: Tarquin the Proud (534-510 Bc), King of Rome, who indicated to his son, Tarquinius Sextus, how he wanted him to treat the leading citizens of the beseiged town of Gabii by knocking the heads off some flowers.
One sector of La Force,[1] the one that contains the most dangerous prisoners and those accused of the worst crimes, is called Saint Bernard’s Court. But the prisoners have renamed it — in their expressive slang — ‘The Lions’ Pit’, probably because the captives’ teeth often gnaw the bars and sometimes the warders.
This is a prison within a prison: the walls are twice as thick as elsewhere. Every day a doorkeeper carefully tests the massive railings, and one can see from the Herculean stature and cold, penetrating eyes of the warders here that they have been chosen for their physical and mental ability to inspire fear.
The exercise yard for this section is enclosed in vast walls across which the sun shines obliquely when it deigns to penetrate into this gulf of spiritual and physical ugliness. It is on these stones that, from dawn onwards, careworn, wild-eyed and wan, like ghosts, those men wander whose necks justice has bent beneath the sharpening blade.
They can be seen crouching, hugging whichever wall holds most warmth. There they remain, talking in pairs, but more often alone, constantly glancing towards the door which opens to call one or other inhabitant forth from this grim place, or to fling into the gulf some new piece of detritus thrown out of the melting pot of society.
St Bernard’s Court has its own visiting-room: a long rectangle, divided in two by two parallel grilles set three feet apart, so that the visitor cannot shake hands with the prisoner or pass him anything. The interview room is dark, dank and in every way repellent, especially when one considers the appalling secrets that have passed between the grilles and rusted the iron bars. But this place, ghastly though it is, is a paradise in which men whose days are numbered come to recall a society that they long for and savour: so rare is it for anyone to emerge from the Lions’ Pit to go anywhere except to the Barriére Saint-Jacques,[2] to the penal colony or to the padded cell!
In the courtyard we have just described, dripping with dank humidity, a young man was walking, with his hands in the pockets of his coat — a young man who was looked on by the inhabitants of the pit with a good deal of curiosity.
He would have passed for something of a dandy, thanks to the cut of his clothes, if these clothes had not been in rags. However, they were not worn out: the cloth, fine and silken where it still remained intact, would soon regain its lustre when the prisoner stroked it with his hand, trying to restore his coat.
He applied the same care to holding together a lawn shirt that had considerably faded in colour since he entered the prison, and rubbed his polished boots with the corner of a handkerchief which was embroidered with initials under a heraldic crown.
Some detainees in the Lions’ Pit showed a marked interest in the prisoner’s attention to his dress.
‘Look there: the prince is smartening himself up,’ one of the thieves said.
‘He is naturally very smart-looking,’ another said. ‘If only he had a comb and some pomade, he would outshine all those gentlemen in white gloves.’
‘His coat must have been brand new and his boots have a lovely polish on them. It’s an honour for us to have such respectable colleagues; and the gendarmes are a real bunch of hooligans. What envy! To destroy a set of clothes like that!’
‘They do say he’s a celebrity,’ another added. ‘He’s done the lot, and in style. And he’s come in so young. Oh, it’s marvellous!’
The object of this frightful admiration seemed to be savouring the praise — or the whiff of praise, because he could not hear the words.
His toilet complete, he went over to the window of the canteen against which a warder was leaning. ‘Come, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Lend me twenty francs. I’ll return them very soon: you need not worry about me. Just think: some of my relatives have more millions than you have farthings. So, a matter of twenty francs, if you please, so that I can get a pistol and buy a dressing-gown. I can’t bear always being in a coat and boots. And what a coat! Monsieur! For Prince Cavalcanti!’
The warder turned his back on him and shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t even laugh at these words, which would have brought a smile to anyone’s lips, because he had heard many variations on the theme; or, rather, the same thing over and over.
‘Very well,’ Andrea said. ‘You are a man without feeling and I shall get you sacked.’
The last remark made the warder turn around, and this time he did respond, with a huge burst of laughter. At that, the other prisoners gathered around.
‘I am telling you,’ Andrea said, ‘that with this paltry sum I could buy myself a coat and dressing-gown, so that I shall be able to receive the illustrious visitor I am expecting, any day now, in an appropriate manner.’
‘He’s right! He’s right!’ the prisoners cried. ‘Damnation! You can see he’s a proper gentleman.’
‘Well, then, you lend him the twenty francs,’ said the warder, shifting his weight to his other, enormous shoulder. ‘Don’t you owe that to a comrade?’
‘I am not the comrade of these people,’ the young man said proudly. ‘Don’t insult me. You have no right to do that.’
The thieves looked at one another, muttering under their breath; and a storm, raised by the warder’s provocation even more than by Andrea’s words, began to rumble around the aristocratic prisoner.
The warder, sure of doing a quos ego[3] when the waves began to rise too high, let the storm brew a little to play a trick on the man who had been importuning him and to give himself a little light relief in a tedious day’s work.
The thieves had already come close to Andrea, and some were shouting: ‘The slipper! The slipper!’
This is a cruel game which consists in attacking a colleague who has fallen foul of these gentlemen, not with a slipper, but with a hobnailed boot.
Others suggested the eel: this is a different type of entertainment, consisting in filling a twisted handkerchief with sand, pebbles or coins (when they have any), and beating the victim around the head and shoulders with it.
‘Let’s whip the fine fellow,’ some said. ‘The real gent!’
But Andrea, turning around towards them, winked, put his tongue in his cheek and gave a clicking of the lips that meant a host of things to these bandits, who fell silent. These were masonic signs that Caderousse had shown him, and the hooligans recognized one of their own.
The handkerchiefs dropped at once and the hobnailed slipper went back on the head executioner’s foot. Some voices muttered that the gentleman was right, that he could be honest in his own way and that the prisoners ought to set an example of freedom of thought.
The riot receded. The warder was so amazed that he immediately took Andrea’s hands and began to search him, attributing this sudden change in the inhabitants of the Lions’ Pit to something other than mere hypnotism. Andrea let him, but not without protest.
Suddenly there was a shout from the gates. ‘Benedetto!’ an inspector called. The warder gave up his prey.
‘Someone wants me?’ said Andrea.
‘In the visitors’ room,’ said the voice.
‘You see, someone to visit me. Oh, my dear friend, you'll soon see if a Cavalcanti is to be treated like an ordinary man!’
Hurrying across the courtyard like a black shadow, Andrea swept through the half-open door, leaving his fellow-prisoners and even the warder looking after him admiringly.
He had indeed been called in to the visitors’ room, and one should not be any less surprised at this than Andrea himself, because the clever young man, since he had first been put in La Force, instead of following the custom of ordinary prisoners and taking advantage of the opportunity to write to have visitors come and see him, had kept the most stoical silence.
‘Obviously,’ he thought, ‘I have some powerful protector. Everything goes to prove it: my sudden fortune, the ease with which I overcame every obstacle, a ready-made family, an illustrious name which was mine to use, the gold showered upon me, the splendid matches offered to satisfy my ambition. My good luck unfortunately failed me and my protector was away, so I was lost, but not entirely, not for ever! The hand was withdrawn for a moment, but it must now reach out to me again and catch me just as I feel myself about to fall into the abyss.
‘Why should I risk doing something unwise? Perhaps I would alienate my protector. There are two ways to get out of this spot: a mysterious escape, expensively paid for, or pressure on the judges to dismiss the case. Let’s wait before speaking or acting, until it is proved that I have been utterly abandoned, then…’
Andrea had worked out a plan which some might consider clever; the rascal was bold in attack and tough in defence. He had put up with the wretchedness of prison and every form of deprivation. But, little by little, nature (or, rather, habit) regained the upper hand. He was suffering from being naked, dirty and hungry, and time was hanging heavy on his hands. It was when he had reached this point of boredom that the inspector called him to the visitors’ room.
Andrea felt his heart leap with joy. It was too early for a visit from the investigating magistrate and too late for a call from the prison director or the doctor. It must therefore be the visit he was expecting.
He was introduced into the visiting-room. There, behind the grille, his eyes wide with hungry curiosity, he saw the dark and intelligent face of M. Bertuccio, who was also looking, though with painful astonishment, at the iron bars, the bolted doors and the shadow moving behind the iron lattice.
‘Ah!’ Andrea exclaimed, deeply touched.
‘Good day, Benedetto,’ Bertuccio said, in his resounding, hollow voice.
‘You!’ the young man exclaimed, looking around in terror. ‘You!’
‘You don’t recognize me,’ said Bertuccio. ‘Wretched child!’
‘Be quiet!’ said Andrea, knowing that these walls had very sharp ears. ‘Do be quiet! My God, don’t talk so loudly!’
‘You would like to speak to me, wouldn’t you?’ said Bertuccio. ‘A téte-a-téte?’
‘Yes, certainly,’ said Andrea.
‘Very well.’ After feeling around in his pocket, Bertuccio motioned to a warder who could be seen in his box behind a glass screen. ‘Read this,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Andrea asked.
‘An order to take you into a room, to leave you there, and to let me converse with you.’
‘Oh!’ Andrea said, leaping for joy. And immediately, in his inner thoughts, he told himself: ‘Once more, my unknown protector! I have not been forgotten! He is trying to keep it quiet because we are to talk alone in a room. I’ve got them! Bertuccio has been sent by my protector.’
The warder briefly consulted his superior, then opened the two barred doors and led Andrea, beside himself with joy, to a room on the first floor with a view over the courtyard.
The room was whitewashed, as prison rooms usually are. It had a pleasant appearance, which seemed delightful to the prisoner: a stove, a bed, a chair and a table made up its luxurious furnishings.
Bertuccio sat down on the chair; Andrea threw himself on the bed. The warder left the room.
‘Now, then,’ said the steward. ‘What have you to say to me?’
‘And you?’
‘You speak first…’
‘Oh, no. You have a lot to tell me, since you came to find me.’
‘Very well. You have continued to pursue your criminal career: you have stolen, you have committed murder…’
‘Pooh! If it was to tell me that that you had me brought to a private room, you might have saved yourself some time. I know all those things; but there are others that I do not know. Let’s start with those, if you don’t mind. Who sent you?’
‘Oh! You’re going very fast, Monsieur Benedetto.’
‘I am, and straight to the point. Let’s not waste words. Who sent you?’
‘No one.’
‘How did you know that I was in prison?’
‘I recognized you a long time ago in the insolent dandy who was so elegantly driving his horse down the Champs-Elysées.’
‘The Champs-Elysées! Ah, we’re getting warm, as they say in hunt the slipper. The Champs-Elysées… So, let’s talk about my father, shall we?’
‘Who am I, then?’
‘You, my good sir, are my adoptive father. But I don’t suppose it was you who put at my disposal some hundred thousand francs, which I spent in four or five months. I don’t suppose it was you who forged an Italian father for me — and a nobleman. I don’t suppose you were the one who introduced me to society and invited me to a certain dinner, which I can still taste, in Auteuil, with the best company in Paris, including a certain crown prosecutor whose acquaintance I was mistaken not to cultivate; he could be useful to me at this moment. In short, you are not the one who stood guarantor for me for two million when I suffered the fatal accident of the revelation of the truth. Come, my fine Corsican, say something…’
‘What can I say?’
‘I'll help you. You were talking about the Champs-Elysées just now, my dear adoptive father.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, in the Champs-Elysées lives a rich, a very rich man.’
‘You committed burglary and murder at his house?’
‘I do believe I did.’
‘The Count of Monte Cristo?’
‘You were the one who mentioned him, as Monsieur Racine says.[4] Well, should I throw myself into his arms, press him to my heart and cry: “Father, father!!” as Monsieur Pixérécourt does?’
‘Don’t joke,’ Bertuccio answered. ‘Such a name should not be spoken here in the tone in which you dare to speak it.’
‘Huh!’ said Andrea, a little stunned by the gravity of Bertuccio’s demeanour. ‘Why not?’
‘Because the man who bears that name is too favoured by heaven to be the father of a wretch like yourself.’
‘Fine words!’
‘With fine consequences, if you are not careful.’
‘Threats! I’m not afraid of them… I'll say…’
‘Do you imagine you are dealing with pygmies like yourself?’ Bertuccio said, so calmly and with such a confident look that Andrea was shaken to the core. ‘Do you imagine you are dealing with one of your ordinary convicts or your weak- minded society gulls? Benedetto, you are in dreadful hands. These hands are ready to open for you: take advantage of it. But don’t play with the lightning that they may put down for a moment but will pick up again if you try to hamper their freedom of movement.’
‘My father! I want to know who my father is,’ Andrea said obstinately. ‘I'll die in the attempt if I must, but I will find out. What does a scandal mean to me? Good, reputation, “publicity”, as Beauchamp the journalist says. But the rest of you, who belong to society, always have something to lose by scandal, for all your millions and your coats of arms… So, who is my father?’
‘I have come to tell you.’
‘Ah!’ Benedetto cried, his eyes shining.
At that moment the door opened and the keeper said to Bertuccio: ‘Excuse me, Monsieur, but the investigating magistrate is waiting for the prisoner.’
‘That’s the end of the enquiry into my case,’ Andrea told the good steward. ‘Damn him for disturbing us.’
‘I'Il come back tomorrow,’ said Bertuccio.
‘Very well,’ Andrea replied. ‘Gentlemen of the watch, I am all yours. Oh, my good sir, please leave the guard ten écus or so, for them to give me what I need in here.’
‘It will be done,’ Bertuccio replied.
Andrea offered his hand. Bertuccio kept his in his pocket and merely jingled a few coins with it.
‘That’s what I meant,’ Andrea said, forcing a smile, but in fact quite overwhelmed by Bertuccio’s calm manner.
‘Could I have been wrong?’ he wondered, getting into the oblong vehicle with its barred windows, which is called the Black Maria. ‘We’ll see! So, until tomorrow,’ he added, turning to Bertuccio.
‘Until tomorrow!’ said the steward.
_________
NOTES
1. La Force: The building, originally a thirteenth-century royal mansion, became a prison in 1782, housed political prisoners during the Revolution and was demolished in 1850.
2. Barrière Saint-Jacques: After 1832, the place where executions were carried out.
3. quos ego: ‘You, whom I...’ the start of Neptune’s reprimand to the disobedient winds in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book II, 1. 135.
4. as Monsieur Racine says: In his play Phédre, Act I, Scene 3.
The first floor in the house on the Rue Saint-Germain-des-Prés[1] which Albert de Morcerf had chosen for his mother and himself consisted of a little, self-contained apartment which was rented to a very mysterious character.
Not even the concierge had seen the man’s face, either when he was coming in or going out. In winter he buried his chin in one of those red scarves that high-class coachmen wear while they are waiting for their masters to leave the theatre; in summer he was always blowing his nose just at the moment when he might have been seen going in front of the lodge. It must be said that, contrary to all usual practice, this inhabitant was not being spied on by anyone and that the rumour going around that his alias disguised a most eminent personage — and one who could pull lots of strings — had led people to respect the mystery of his comings and goings.
His visits were usually at fixed times, though sometimes delayed or brought forward: but almost always, winter and summer, he took possession of the apartment at four o’clock, but never stayed the night there.
At half-past three, in winter, the fire was discreetly lit by the servant who had charge of the little apartment; and at half- past three, in summer, the same girl would bring up ices.
At four o’clock, as we have said, the mysterious character would arrive.
Twenty minutes later, a carriage would stop in front of the house. A woman in black or dark blue, always wrapped in a huge veil, would get out, drift like a shadow in front of the concierge’s lodge and go up the stairs, though no one ever heard a single board creak under her light footsteps. Nor had anyone ever asked her where she was going.
Her face, like the stranger’s, was thus entirely unknown to the two door-keepers, model concierges and perhaps the only ones in the vast brotherhood of the capital’s watchdogs who would have been capable of such discretion.
Needless to say, she went up only as far as the first floor. She scratched in a special way on the door, which opened then closed tightly, and that’s all.
To leave the building, the same procedure was followed. The woman would go out first, always veiled, and get back into her carriage, which vanished sometimes down one end of the street, sometimes the other. Then, twenty minutes later, the stranger would go out in his turn, buried in his scarf or hidden behind his handkerchief, and he too would disappear.
The day after the one on which Monte Cristo had paid his visit to Danglars, the day of Valentine’s funeral, the mysterious occupier came in at around ten o’clock in the morning, instead of his usual time of four in the afternoon. Almost at once, without leaving the usual space of time, a hired cab arrived and the veiled lady quickly went up the stairs. The door opened and closed. But, even before the door had closed, the lady exclaimed: ‘Oh, Lucien! Oh, my friend!’ — with the result that, for the first time, the concierge who had overheard the exclamation was made involuntarily aware that his tenant was called Lucien; but, being a model doorkeeper, he resolved not to mention it, even to his wife.
‘What is it, my dearest?’ asked the man whose name the veiled lady had revealed, in her anxiety or her haste. ‘Tell me.’
‘My dear, can I count on you?’
‘Of course, as you very well know. What is wrong? Your note this morning was quite bewildering: the haste and disorder in your handwriting… Come, reassure me or terrify me entirely!’
‘Lucien, something of great importance!’ she replied, scrutinizing him closely. ‘Monsieur Danglars left last night!’
‘Left! Monsieur Danglars! Where has he gone?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? Has he gone for good?’
‘Certainly. At ten in the evening, his horses took him to the barrier at Charenton. There, he found a coach ready harnessed. He got in with his valet and told his coachman he was going to Fontainebleau.’
‘So, what did you mean… ?’
‘One moment, dear. He left me a letter.’
‘A letter?’
‘Yes. Read it.’ And she reached in her pocket for an unsealed letter which she gave Debray.
Before reading it, he hesitated, as if seeking to guess what it contained; or, rather, as if, whatever it contained, he had decided to make up his mind in advance. After a few moments, his decision had no doubt been reached, because he began to read.
The following were the contents of the letter that had so disturbed Mme Danglars:
Madame, My Most Faithful Wife…
Unconsciously, Debray stopped and looked at the baroness, who blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘Read it,’ she said. Debray went on:
When you receive this letter you will no longer have a husband! Oh, don’t be too alarmed: you will not have a husband in the sense that you no longer have a daughter, by which I mean that I shall be on one of the thirty or forty roads leading out of France.
I owe you an explanation and, since you are a woman who will understand it perfectly, I shall give it to you. Here it is:
This morning I received a demand for payment of five million, and I honoured it. Another for the same amount followed almost immediately. I adjourned it until tomorrow, and I am leaving today to avoid that tomorrow which would be too unpleasant for me to bear.
You do understand, do you not, Madame and most precious wife? If I say ‘you do understand’, it is because you know my affairs as well as I do myself. You may even know them better than I do, since I should be unable to say, if anyone were to ask me, where at least half of my fortune has vanished, though it was once quite considerable; while I am certain that you, on the contrary, would be entirely capable of doing so.
Women have infallible instincts and can explain even miracles by an algebra of their own devising. I know only my figures, and I knew nothing from the day when my figures began to deceive me.
Have you ever admired the rapidity of my fall, Madame? Have you been slightly dazzled by the bright flame that has devoured my ingots? I must confess that I saw only fire, but let’s hope that you managed to find some gold in the ashes.
It is with that consolation that I depart, Madame, my most prudent spouse, without the slightest pricking of conscience at abandoning you. You still have your friends, the ashes I mentioned and, to complete your happiness, the freedom that I hasten to give you.
However, Madame, the moment has come to introduce a word or two on more intimate matters.
As long as I hoped you were working for the good of our family and the prosperity of our daughter, I philosophically turned a blind eye; but since you have brought our house to ruin, I do not wish to provide a foundation for another man’s wealth.
I took you rich, but with little honour.
Forgive me for speaking so frankly but, since it is probable that only we will read these words, I do not see why I should mince them.
I increased our wealth, which continued to grow for more than fifteen years, until the moment when these unknown catastrophes, which I am still unable to comprehend, arrived to seize it and cast it down - without my being to blame, I might say, for any of it.
You, Madame, have been working solely to increase your own wealth and that, I am certain in my own mind, you have managed to do. So I shall leave you as I found you, rich, but scarcely honourable.
Adieu.
From now on, I too shall start to work for my own benefit.
Accept the assurance of my gratitude for the example which you have given me, and which I shall follow.
Your most devoted husband. BARON DANGLARS
The baroness had been watching Debray during the long and painful reading of this letter and, despite his well-known self- control, she had seen the young man change colour once or twice. When he had finished, he slowly refolded the paper and resumed his pensive attitude.
‘Well?’ Mme Danglars asked, with understandable anxiety.
‘Well, Madame?’ Debray repeated mechanically.
‘What do you think of this letter?’
‘Very simple. I think Monsieur Danglars was suspicious.’
‘Of course he was; but what do you have to tell me?’
‘I don’t follow you,’ Debray said, icy cold.
‘He has left, altogether gone! Left, never to return!’
‘Oh,’ Debray said, ‘don’t think that, Baroness.’
‘I tell you, he will never come back. I know him: he is quite unshakeable in any resolution that reflects his own interests. If he had thought me of any use to him, he would have taken me. If he has left me in Paris, it is because the separation can serve his own ends: this means that he will never change his mind and that I am free for ever,’ Mme Danglars added, with the same pleading expression. But Debray, instead of answering, left her poised in the same anxious and questioning state of mind and posture.
‘What!’ she said finally. ‘Do you not even answer me, Monsieur!’
‘I have only one question to ask of you: what do you expect will become of you?’
‘I was going to ask you,’ the baroness replied, her heart pounding.
‘Oh?’ said Debray. ‘Are you asking for my advice, then?’
‘Yes, I would like your advice,’ the baroness said through dry lips.
‘Well, if you’re asking my advice,’ the young man said, ‘I would advise you to travel.’
‘Travel!’ muttered Mme Danglars.
‘Yes, indeed. As Monsieur Danglars said, you are rich and quite free. It will be absolutely necessary for you to leave Paris in any case, I should have thought, after the double scandal of Mademoiselle Eugénie’s broken engagement and Monsieur Danglars’ disappearance. All that matters is that everyone should know that you have been abandoned and should think you poor, because a bankrupt’s wife would not be forgiven her opulent style of life.
‘To achieve this, all you need do is to remain a fortnight in Paris, repeating to everyone that you have been abandoned and telling your closest friends, who will repeat it to everyone, exactly how the desertion took place. Then you must move out of your mansion, leaving behind your jewels and relinquishing your dowry, and everybody will admire your disinterestedness and sing your praises.
‘Then it will be known that you have been abandoned and people will think you are poor. Only I know your true financial situation and will be willing to account to you for it as your loyal associate.’
Pale, devastated, the baroness had listened to this speech with as much dread and despair as Debray had shown calm and indifference in delivering it. ‘Abandoned!’ she repeated. ‘Oh, yes, indeed abandoned. Yes, you are right, Monsieur: no one will doubt my abandonment.’
These were the only words that a proud woman, deeply in love, could reply.
‘But rich, very rich,’ Debray continued, opening his wallet and spreading the few papers it contained across the table.
Mme Danglars ignored him, being entirely taken up with quelling the beating of her heart and holding back the tears which she felt pricking at the corners of her eyes. Finally her sense of self-respect got the upper hand and, though she could not suppress the beating of her heart, she did at least manage to avoid shedding a tear.
‘Madame,’ Debray said, ‘we have been associated for some six months. You contributed funds to the value of one hundred thousand francs.
‘Our association dates from April this year. Our speculations began in May.
‘In that month we made four hundred and fifty thousand francs. In June, profits amounted to nine hundred thousand. In July, we added a further one million seven hundred thousand francs: that, as you know, was the month of the Spanish bonds.
‘In August, at the start of the month, we lost three hundred thousand, but by the fifteenth we had recovered our losses and by the end of the month we had our revenge. Our accounts, brought up to date from the time when we formed our partnership to yesterday, when I closed them, give us assets amounting to two million four hundred thousand francs, that is to say, twelve hundred thousand francs each.
‘Now,’ he continued, slamming his account book shut with the steady and methodical hand of a stockbroker, ‘we find eighty thousand francs for the compound interest on that sum which has remained in my hands.’
‘But what is this interest?’ the baroness interrupted. ‘What does it mean, since you never invested the money?’
‘I beg your pardon, Madame,’ Debray said coldly. ‘I had your authority to exploit it and I took advantage of it. This means forty thousand francs in interest for your half, plus the hundred thousand francs of the original capital sum, that is to say thirteen hundred and forty thousand francs for your share.
‘Well, Madame,’ he continued, ‘I took the precaution of cashing your money in yesterday — not long ago, as you see: anyone would think I had been expecting at any moment to be asked to account to you for it. It is there, half in banknotes, half in bills, payable to the bearer.
‘I say “there”, and it’s true. As I thought my house was not sufficiently secure and a notary not discreet enough, and property speaks even louder than a notary… In short, since you do not have the right to buy or possess anything apart from the joint property of the marriage, I kept this entire sum, which is today your only fortune, in a safe at the bottom of this wardrobe and, to be even more secure, I did the carpentry myself.
‘Now,’ he went on, opening first the wardrobe, then the safe, ‘here are eight hundred notes of one thousand francs each, which, as you can see, resemble a thick, iron-bound volume. To that I have added a bond for twenty-five thousand francs and finally, to make up the sum, which amounts, I believe, to something around a hundred and ten thousand francs, here is a demand note on my banker - and since my banker is not Monsieur Danglars, the note will be honoured, I can assure you.’
Mme Danglars mechanically took the demand note, the bond and the sheaf of banknotes.
This vast fortune seemed to amount to very little, laid out in that way on a table. Mme Danglars, dry-eyed but with her breast swelling with sobs, picked it up and shut the steel- bound pouch in her case, put the bond and the demand note in her portfolio and stood, pale and silent, waiting for one kind word that might console her for being so rich. But she waited in vain.
‘Now, Madame,’ Debray said, ‘you have a splendid living, an income of something like sixty thousand livres, an enormous sum for a woman who will not be able to set up house for at least a year from now. This will allow you to indulge whatever notion may pass through your head; apart from which, if you should find your share inadequate, in consideration of the past that is now fading away from you, you may dip into mine. I am prepared to offer you — oh, as a loan, naturally! — all that I possess, that is to say, one million sixty thousand francs.’
‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ the baroness replied. ‘Thank you; but you will appreciate that what you have given me here is far more than could be required by a poor woman who does not envisage reappearing in society, at least for a long time hence.’
For a moment Debray was astonished, but he recovered and made a gesture that might most politely be interpreted as: ‘Do as you please.’
Up to then, Mme Danglars had perhaps continued to hope for something, but when she saw the casual gesture that Debray had just unconsciously made, and the sidelong glance that accompanied it, as well as the deep bow and significant silence that followed them, she raised her head, opened the door and, with no outburst of anger or nerves, but also without hesitation, she swept down the stairs, not even deigning to address a nod of farewell to the man who was allowing her to leave in this manner.
‘Pooh!’ Debray said, when she had gone. ‘Fine plans! She will stay in her house, read novels and play lansquenet, since she cannot play on the Exchange any longer.’ And he took up his notebook, carefully crossing out the amounts he had just paid.
‘I have one million sixty thousand francs left,’ he said. ‘What a pity Mademoiselle de Villefort is dead! There’s a woman who would have suited me in every respect; I should have married her.’
Phlegmatically, as usual, he waited for twenty minutes after Mme Danglars’ departure before leaving himself. During these twenty minutes, he did his accounts, with his watch on the table beside him.
Asmodée, that diabolical personage whom any adventurous imagination might have created with a greater or lesser degree of felicity, had Le Sage[2] not already established priority with his masterpiece, Asmodée, then, who lifted the roofs off houses in order to see inside, would have enjoyed a remarkable scene if, at the moment when Debray was doing his accounts, he had raised the top of the little boarding-house in the Rue Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Above the room in which Debray had just shared out two and a half million francs with Mme Danglars, there was another room, also occupied by people we know, people who played an important enough role in the events which have just been described for us to take a continuing interest in them.
In this room were Mercédès and Albert.
Mercédés had changed a great deal in the past few days. It was not that, even at the time of her greatest wealth, she had ever displayed the proud luxury that visibly marks a person out from other ranks in society and means that one can no longer recognize her when she appears in more simple attire; nor was it that she had fallen into that state of depression where one is driven to wear an outward appearance of misery. No, Mercédés had changed because her eyes no longer shone, her mouth no longer smiled and a perpetual sense of constraint froze on her lips the quick retort formerly thrown up by an ever-ready wit.
It was not poverty that had withered Mercédès’ intelligence or lack of courage that made her poverty burdensome to her.
Stepping down from the sphere in which she had lived, lost in the new sphere which she had chosen for herself, Mercédés was like those people who suddenly emerge out of a splendidly illuminated salon into darkness. She seemed like a queen who had left her palace for a cottage and who, reduced to the absolute essentials, cannot recognize herself either in the earthenware dishes that she is obliged to carry to the table in her own hands, or in the straw mattress that has replaced her feather bed.
Neither the beautiful Catalan nor the noble countess had preserved her proud look or her charming smile, because when her eyes rested on what was around her the only objects they met were distressing: the room was papered in one of those grey-on-grey papers that thrifty landlords choose because they show the dirt least; there was no carpet on the floor, and the furniture attracted attention, obliging one to contemplate the poverty in affected luxury; in short, these were all things that clashed and were liable to upset eyes accustomed to harmony and elegance.
Mme de Morcerf had been living here ever since she had left the family mansion. She found the silence dizzying, like a traveller reaching the edge of a precipice. Noticing that Albert was constantly looking at her surreptitiously to judge her state of mind, she had forced herself to wear an unchanging smile on her lips which, since it was not accompanied by that gentle glow of a smile in the eyes, produced the same effect as simple luminescence, that is to say light without warmth.
Albert, for his part, was preoccupied, ill at ease, embarrassed by the remnants of a lifestyle that prevented him from belonging to his present state. He wanted to go out without gloves, and considered his hands too white. He wanted to walk everywhere and thought his boots were too well-polished.
However, these two noble and intelligent creatures, indissolubly linked by ties of maternal and filial love, could understand one another without speaking and economize on all the niceties required between friends to accept the material truth on which life depends. At last, Albert was able to say to his mother, without frightening her: ‘Mother, we have no money left.’
Mercédès had never really known destitution. Often, in her youth, she had herself spoken of poverty, but that is not the same thing: ‘need’ and ‘necessity’ are synonyms, but there is a world of difference between them.
In the Catalan village, Mercédés had needed for many things, but she never went without certain others. As long as the nets were in good repair, they caught fish; as long as the fish were sold, they had rope to repair the nets. And then, isolated from friendship, only having a love that had nothing to do with the material details of the situation, one thought of oneself, each for oneself, only oneself.
From the little that she had, Mercédés used to make her share as generously as possible. Now she had two shares to make, and from nothing.
Winter was coming on. Mercédès, in this bare room, already cold, had no fire — though once she had had a boiler which had heated the whole house from the halls to the bedrooms; she did not even have one miserable little flower, though her rooms had once been a hothouse which cost a king’s ransom to furnish with plants. But she did have her son…
Up to then, the joy of fulfilling, perhaps over-fulfilling, their duty had kept them in a state of exultation. Such a state is close to enthusiasm and that makes one insensible to the things of this earth. But their enthusiasm had died down, and they had had gradually to return from the land of dreams to the world of reality.
When the ideal was exhausted, they had to talk of practicalities.
‘Mother,’ Albert said, just as Mme Danglars was coming down the stairs, ‘let’s just count all our wealth, if you don’t mind. I need a total on which to build my plans.’
‘Total: nothing,’ Mercédès said with a pained smile.
‘On the contrary, mother, total: three thousand francs, first of all, and then I intend with those three thousand francs to give us a truly delightful life.’
‘My child!’ Mercédès sighed.
‘Alas, my dear mother,’ the young man said, ‘I have unfortunately spent enough of your money to know its worth. You see, now, three thousand francs is a vast sum: I have built a miraculous future on it, one of everlasting security.’
‘You say that, my dear,’ the poor mother said, blushing, ‘but can we even accept these three thousand francs?’
‘I think it’s agreed we can,’ said Albert in a firm voice. ‘We accept them all the more readily since we do not have them, for as you know they are buried in the garden of the little house in the Allées de Meilhan, in Marseille. With two hundred francs,’ he continued, ‘we shall both go to Marseille.’
‘For two hundred francs!’ said Mercédés. ‘Do you really think that, Albert?’
‘Oh, I'm absolutely sure of it. I've enquired about coaches and steamships and done my sums. You hire your seats in the coach for Chalon: you see, mother, I’m treating you like a queen; that’s thirty-five francs…’
He took a pen and wrote:
Coupé ................................................................ 35
From Chalon to Lyon, steamship ………......... 6
From Lyon to Avignon, again steamship ….. 16
From Avignon to Marseille, seven francs ..... 7
Travelling expenses, 50 francs ………........... 50
Total ........................................................... 114 Frs.
‘Let’s say one hundred and twenty,’ Albert said, with a smile. ‘See how generous I am, mother?’
‘But what about you, my poor boy?’
‘Me! Don’t you see that I’ve left eighty francs for myself? A young man does not need a good deal of comfort. In any case, I know what it means to travel.’
‘With your post-chaise and your valet.’
‘However it may be, I know, mother.’
‘Very well,’ said Mercédès. ‘But the two hundred francs?’
‘Here they are, and another two hundred. I sold my watch for a hundred francs and the chain and trimmings for three hundred. Isn’t that splendid: a watch-chain worth three times as much as the watch! A matter of sheer excess again. So we are rich since, instead of the hundred and fourteen francs you needed for the journey, you now have two hundred and fifty.’
‘But do we owe something for our rent here?’
‘Thirty francs, which I can take out of my hundred and fifty. So it’s agreed. And, since I only need eighty francs myself for the journey, if it comes down to it, you can see we're in the lap of luxury. But that’s not all; what do you say to this, mother?’
And, out of a little wallet with a gold lock — the remnant of some past self-indulgence or perhaps a tender souvenir of one of those mysterious, veiled women who used to knock at the little door — Albert took a thousand-franc note.
‘What is that?’ Mercédés asked.
‘A thousand francs, mother. Oh, it’s perfectly in order.’
‘But where did it come from?’
‘Now listen to me, mother, and don’t get too excited.’ Albert stood up, went over to kiss his mother on both cheeks, then paused to look at her.
‘You have no idea, mother, how beautiful I think you are!’ he said, with profound feelings of filial love. ‘You really are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and the most noble.’
‘Dear child!’ Mercédés said, trying unsuccessfully to hold back the tears that were forming in the corners of her eyes.
‘I do think that you needed only to be unhappy for my love to change to adoration.’
‘I am not unhappy while I have my son,’ Mercédès said. ‘I never shall be, as long as I have him.’
‘Oh, yes, now,’ said Albert. ‘That’s where the trying times will begin. You know what is agreed?’
‘Have we agreed something?’ Mercédès asked.
‘Yes, it is agreed that you will live in Marseille and I shall leave for Africa. There, instead of the name I have given up, I shall make for myself the name I have adopted.’
Mercédès sighed.
‘Well, mother, yesterday I enrolled in the spahis,’ the young man said, lowering his eyes with some feeling of shame, not realizing how sublime his humiliation was. ‘Or, rather, I thought that my body was mine and that I could sell it; since yesterday I have replaced someone. I have sold myself, as they say, and…’ he added, forcing a smile, ‘dearer than I ever expected, that is to say for two thousand francs.’
‘So this thousand francs?’ Mercédès said, shuddering.
‘Half of the amount, mother; the rest in a year’s time.’
Mercédès raised her eyes heavenwards with an expression beyond the power of any artist to depict. Her inner feelings overflowed and the two tears poised on the rim of her eyelids ran silently down her cheeks. ‘The price of his blood,’ she murmured.
‘Yes, if I should be killed,’ said Morcerf, with a laugh. ‘But I assure you, dear mother, that I have every intention of defending myself savagely. I have never felt such a strong desire to live.’
‘My God, my God!’ Mercédès said.
‘Anyway, mother, why should I be killed? Was Lamoriciére killed, that second Ney from the south? Was Changarnier killed? Or Bedeau?[3] Has our friend Morrel been killed? Just think how pleased you will be when you see me come home in my uniform with the braid on it! I do assure you, I intend to look quite magnificent in it; I only chose that regiment for the sake of the uniform.’
Mercédès sighed, while attempting to smile. The saintly woman realized that it was wrong for her to let her son bear all the weight of their sacrifice.
‘So, you see, mother,’ Albert said, ‘you are already guaranteed more than four thousand francs. With that you can live for at least two years.’
‘Do you think so?’ said Mercédès.
The words had slipped out, and the pain behind them was so real that Albert could not help grasping their real meaning. He felt a lump in his throat and, taking his mother’s hand, clasped it tenderly in his and said: ‘Oh, yes, you shall live!’
‘I shall,’ Mercédès exclaimed. ‘But you will not go, will you, my son?’
‘Mother, I must,’ Albert said, firmly and calmly. ‘You love me too much to keep me beside you in fruitless idleness. In any case, I have signed my name.’
‘You must do what you will, my son. I shall do what God wills.’
‘Not what I will, mother, but what reason and necessity dictate. We are two desperate creatures, aren’t we? What is life for you now? Nothing. What is life for me? Very little indeed without you, mother, believe me. Without you, I swear, my life would have ended on the day when I first doubted my father and renounced his name. But I shall live, if you promise me that you will continue to hope. If you leave your future happiness in my care, you will double my strength. When I arrive there, I shall go and see the governor of Algeria. He is a fine man and, above all, a true soldier. I will tell him my sad story and beg him to watch me from time to time. If he does so, and sees how I manage, in six months I shall be an officer or dead. If I am an officer, mother, then your future is assured, because I shall have enough money for both of us and a new name of which we can both be proud, since it will be your true name. If I am killed… Well, if I am killed, then, mother dear, you will die, if you please, and our misfortunes will be ended by their own excess.’
‘Very well,’ said Mercédés, with her noble and eloquent look. ‘You are right, my son. Let us prove to certain people who are watching us and waiting to see what we will do to criticize us, and let us at least prove to them that we deserve their sympathy.’
‘But let’s have no funereal thoughts, mother: I swear to you that we are, or at least can be, very happy. You are a woman who is both full of wit and resigned; I have become simple in my tastes and, I hope, without passion. Once I am in the army, I shall be rich; once you are in Monsieur Dantès’ house, you will be at peace. Let’s try, mother, I beg you, let’s try.’
‘Yes, my son, you must live, you must be happy,’ Mercédés replied.
‘So, we each have our shares,’ the young man concluded, giving an appearance of being utterly at ease. ‘We can leave today. Come then, I shall reserve your place, as they say.’
‘And yours?’
‘I must stay here two or three days more. This is a first separation and we must get used to it. I need a few letters of recommendation and some information about Africa; then I shall join you in Marseille.’
‘Very well then, let’s go!’ Mercédés said, wrapping herself in the only shawl she had brought with her, which happened to be a very expensive black cashmere. ‘Let’s go!’
Albert hurriedly collected his papers, rang to pay the thirty francs he owed the owner of the boarding house, and offered his mother his arm to go down the stairs.
Someone was going down in front of them and this someone, hearing the rustling of a silk dress on the banisters, turned around.
‘Debray!’ Albert muttered.
‘You, Morcerf!’ the minister’s secretary answered, stopping on the stair where he was standing.
Curiosity overcame Debray’s wish to remain incognito; in any event, he had been recognized. There was something very intriguing about discovering the young man whose misfortune was the talk of the whole town in this obscure boarding-house.
‘Morcerf!’ Debray repeated. Then, noticing Mme de Morcerf’s still youthful figure in the half-light and her black veil, he added, smiling: ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, Albert! I shall leave you.’
Albert understood what he was thinking. ‘Mother,’ he said, turning to Mercédès, ‘this is Monsieur Debray, secretary to the Minister of the Interior, and one of my former friends.’
‘What do you mean, “former”?’ Debray spluttered.
‘I say that, Monsieur Debray,’ Albert went on, ‘because today I have no more friends and must have none. I thank you very much, Monsieur, for being so good as to recognize me.’
Debray ran up the two steps and shook Albert’s hand earnestly. ‘Believe me, my dear Albert,’ he said, with all the feeling of which he was capable, ‘I sympathized deeply in the misfortune that has befallen you and I am at your disposal for anything you should need.’
‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ Albert said, smiling. ‘But, despite our misfortunes, we have remained rich enough not to need to apply to anyone. We are leaving Paris and, after paying for our journey, we shall have five thousand francs left.’
Debray blushed. He had a million in his portfolio. However little poetry there was in that mathematical soul, he could not escape the reflection that the same house had only a short while before contained two women, one of whom, justly dishonoured, had left poverty-stricken despite the fifteen hundred thousand francs under her cloak; while the other, unjustly struck down, sublime in her misfortune, considered herself rich with a few pence. The comparison deflected his polite platitudes and the force of the example crushed every argument. He muttered a few more or less civil words and hastened to the bottom of the stairs.
That day, the clerks in the ministry who worked for him had to put up with a good deal of irritation. In the evening, however, he purchased a very fine house, situated on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, which brought in 50,000 francs a year.
The following day, at the time when Debray was signing the deeds, that is to say at about five o’clock in the evening, Mme de Morcerf tenderly embraced her son and was tenderly embraced by him, then got into the stagecoach, the door of which shut behind her.
A man was hidden in the courtyard of the Messageries Laffitte, behind one of those arched mezzanine windows above each of the offices. He saw Mercédès get into the coach and saw it drive off. He watched Albert walk away. Then he drew his hand across a brow furrowed with doubt and said: ‘Alas! How can I give those two innocent people back the happiness I have taken away from them? God will help me.’
_________
NOTES
1. Saint-Germain-des-Prés: Chapter xci puts the house in the Rue des Saint-Péres (which is in the district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés).
2. Asmodée... Le Sage: In Le Sage’s play, Le Diable boiteux (1707).
3. Lamoriciére... Changarnier... Bedeau: Christophe-Louis-Léon Juchault de Lamoriciére (1806-65), Nicholas-Anne-Théodule Changarnier (1793-1877) and Marie-Alphonse Bedeau (1804-63) were officers who distinguished themselves in the conquest of Algeria.
M. Boville had indeed crossed the route of the funeral procession leading Valentine to her final resting-place.
The weather was dark and cloudy. A wind, still warm but fatal to the yellowed leaves, was whipping them off the branches, which were gradually stripped clean, and making them flutter above the heads of the vast crowd filling the boulevards.
M. de Villefort, a pure Parisian, considered the Père-Lachaise cemetery the only one worthy of receiving the mortal remains of a Parisian family. The others appeared to him like country cemeteries, death’s lodging-houses. Only in the Pére-Lachaise could the respectable departed be accommodated at home.
There, as we have seen, he had bought a perpetual lease on the plot above which rose the monument which was being so swiftly occupied by all the members of his family. The pediment of the mausoleum bore the inscription: FAMILIES OF SAINT-MERAN AND VILLEFORT, Such having been the last wish of poor Renée, Valentine’s mother.
So it was towards the Pére-Lachaise that the magnificent cortége wended its way from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. They crossed all Paris, following the Faubourg du Temple and then the outer boulevards as far as the cemetery. More than fifty private carriages followed behind twenty funerary coaches and, behind these, more than five hundred more people were following on foot.
Almost all were young men who had been forcibly struck by Valentine’s death and who, despite the cold mists of the century and the prosaic spirit of the age, felt the elegiac poetry of this beautiful, chaste, adorable young woman, struck down in her prime.
As they were leaving Paris, they saw a speedy team of four horses drawing a coach which suddenly halted as they stiffened their hocks, which were as nervous as steel springs. It was Monte Cristo.
The count got down from his barouche and joined the crowd following the hearse on foot. Chateau-Renaud noticed him. He at once got out of his coupé and came over to his side. Beauchamp also left the hired cab in which he had been riding.
The count was searching carefully through every gap in the crowd. Obviously he was looking for someone. Eventually he could contain himself no longer. ‘Where is Morrel?’ he asked. ‘Does any one of you gentlemen know where he is?’
‘We were already wondering that at the house,’ said Chateau-Renaud. ‘No one has seen him.’
The count said nothing, but continued to search around him.
Finally they reached the cemetery.
Suddenly Monte Cristo’s sharp eyes penetrated the clumps of yews and pinetrees and soon he lost all anxiety: a shape had glided under the dark walkways and Monte Cristo had doubtless seen what he was looking for.
Everyone knows what a burial is like in this magnificent necropolis: dark groups scattered around the white walkways, the silence of sky and earth broken by the sound of some snapping branches or a hedge trampled around a tomb. Then the melancholy chanting of the priests, mingled here and there with a sob rising from beneath a cluster of flowers, behind which one can see a woman, overcome, her hands clasped…
The shadow that Monte Cristo had noticed was quickly moving through the quincunx of trees behind the tomb of Héloïse and Abélard[1] as he stood with the undertakers at the head of the horses drawing the hearse, and a moment later was at the place chosen for the sepulchre.
Each one was looking at something, but Monte Cristo looked only at the shadow which had hardly been noticed by those around it. Twice he came out of the crowd to see if the man’s hands were feeling for something hidden under his clothes.
When the cortége halted, the shadow could be recognized as Morrel, with his black coat buttoned right up to the neck, his ashen forehead, his hollow cheeks and his hat crumpled in his hands. He was standing with his back to a tree, on a mound above the mausoleum, so that he would lose none of the details of the funeral ceremony that was about to take place.
Everything went off according to custom. A few men — and, as always, the least impressive — made speeches. Some regretted this premature death, others expatiated on her father’s grief. Some had been found who were ingenious enough to have discovered that the young woman had more than once implored M. de Villefort on behalf of guilty men over whose head the sword of justice was suspended. Finally, every flowery metaphor and tortuous syntactical device was exhausted in every type of commentary on the lines written by Malherbe to du Périer.[2]
Monte Cristo heard and saw nothing; or, rather, he saw nothing except Morrel, whose calm immobility was a terrifying sight for the only person able to read what was going on in the depths of the young officer’s heart.
‘Look!’ Beauchamp suddenly said to Debray. ‘There’s Morrel! Why the devil has he planted himself over there?’ And they pointed him out to Chateau-Renaud.
‘How pale he is,’ Chateau-Renaud said with a shudder.
‘He’s cold,’ said Debray.
‘Not so,’ Chateau-Renaud said slowly. ‘I think it’s the emotion. Maximilien’s a very impressionable man.’
‘Pah!’ Debray retorted. ‘He hardly knew Mademoiselle de Villefort. You said so yourself.’
‘That’s true, but I remember that at Madame de Morcerf’s ball he did dance with her three times; you know, that ball where you made such an effect.’
‘No, I don’t know,’ Monte Cristo answered, without knowing either to whom or about what he was speaking, so much was he preoccupied with watching Morrel, whose cheeks were moving like those of someone who is gasping or holding his breath.
‘The speeches are over. Farewell, gentlemen,’ the count said brusquely. And he gave a signal for departure by vanishing, though no one knew where.
The funerary spectacle being over, the audience turned back towards Paris.
Only Chateau-Renaud for a moment looked around for Morrel; but, while his eyes were following the disappearing figure of the count, Morrel had left his place and Chateau-Renaud, after looking for him in vain, followed Debray and Beauchamp.
Monte Cristo had slipped into a thicket and, hidden behind a wide tomb, was watching Morrel’s every movement. The young man had gradually gone over towards the mausoleum, from which the onlookers and then the workmen were drifting away. He looked around him slowly and vaguely. But just as his head was turning towards the point on the horizon opposite him, Monte Cristo took advantage of this to come forward another ten yards without being seen.
Morrel was kneeling.
The count, arching his neck, his eyes staring and the pupils dilated, his knees flexed as if to jump at the merest signal, came closer and closer.
Morrel bent his forehead until it touched the stone, grasped the iron railings with both hands and murmured: ‘Oh, Valentine!’
The count’s heart was rent by the shattering effect of these two words. He took another step and said, touching Morrel on the shoulder: ‘It’s you, dear friend! I was looking for you.’
He expected some outburst, reproaches or recriminations, but he was wrong. Morrel turned around and with an appearance of calm said: ‘You see: I was praying.’
The count scrutinized the young man from head to toe and seemed more at ease after this examination. ‘Would you like me to take you back to Paris?’ he asked.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Do you need anything?’
‘Please leave me to pray.’
The count went away without any objection, but only to take up a new station from which he could see everything that Morrel did. The latter finally got up, wiped his knees where they had been whitened by the stones and set off towards Paris without looking around. He was walking slowly down the Rue de la Roquette.
The count, sending on his carriage which had been waiting at the cemetery, followed a hundred yards behind him. Maximilien crossed the canal and returned to the Rue de Meslay by the boulevards. Five minutes after the door had shut behind him, it re-opened to admit Monte Cristo.
Julie was at the entrance to the garden, where she was entirely absorbed in watching Maitre Penelon: with the utmost seriousness concerning his profession as a gardener, he was taking cuttings from some Bengal roses.
‘Ah, Monsieur le Comte de Monte Cristo!’ she exclaimed with the joy that every member of the family usually displayed when the count visited the Rue Meslay.
‘Maximilien has just come home, I believe, Madame?’ the count said.
‘I think I saw him go past, yes…’ the young woman said. ‘But, please, call Emmanuel.’
‘No, Madame, you must excuse me: I have to go up immediately to Maximilien’s,’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘I have something of the utmost importance to tell him.’
‘Then go,’ she said, following him with her delightful smile until he had vanished up the stairs.
Monte Cristo soon went up the two floors between the ground and Maximilien’s room. On the landing he stopped to listen. Not a sound could be heard. As in most old houses inhabited by a single master, the landing was closed off only by a glazed door. However, there was no key on the outside. Maximilien had shut himself inside, but it was impossible to see through the glass, because there was a red silk curtain across the door.
The count’s anxiety showed itself in a reddening of the face, a quite unusual sign of emotion in this impassive man. ‘What should I do?’ he muttered, and thought for a moment.
‘Should I ring? No, no! The sound of a bell, that is to say of a visitor, often precipitates the resolve of those in Maximilien’s situation, and then another sound follows that of the bell.’
He shuddered from head to toe; then, since he was a man whose decisions are made with the swiftness of lightning, he struck one of the panes of glass in the door with his elbow. It shattered and he lifted the curtain to see Morrel in front of his desk, a quill in his hand, having just leapt up at the sound of the breaking glass.
‘Nothing!’ the count said. ‘A thousand apologies, my dear friend. I slipped, and my elbow went through your glass door. But now, since it is broken, I shall take advantage of that to come in. Please don’t disturb yourself, I beg you.’ And, putting his hand through the broken pane, he opened the door.
Morrel got up, evidently irritated, and came across to Monte Cristo, less to greet him than to bar his way.
‘I do declare, it’s your servants’ fault,’ Monte Cristo said, rubbing his elbow. ‘The floors here shine like mirrors.’
‘Have you hurt yourself, Monsieur?’ Morrel asked coldly.
‘I don’t know. What were you doing there? Writing?’
‘What was I doing?’
‘Your fingers are all ink-stained.’
‘That’s true,’ Morrel replied. ‘I was writing. It does happen sometimes, even though I’m a soldier.’
Monte Cristo took a few steps into the apartment. Maximilien was obliged to let him pass, but he followed behind.
‘You were writing, then?’ Monte Cristo said, with a daunting stare.
‘I've already had the honour to answer yes,’ said Morrel.
The count took another look around him. ‘And your pistols are beside the writing table!’ he said, pointing to the weapons on Morrel’s desk.
‘I am leaving on a journey,’ Maximilien answered.
‘My dear fellow!’ Monte Cristo said, with infinite tenderness.
‘Monsieur!’
‘My friend, my dear Maximilien, I beg you, do nothing irrevocable.’
‘Irrevocable?’ Morrel said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘How can a voyage be irrevocable, I wonder?’
‘Maximilien,’ Monte Cristo said, ‘let’s both drop the masks we are wearing. You no more deceive me with that appearance of calm than I do you with my light-hearted concern. You realize, don’t you, that to do what I have just done, to have broken your door and violated the privacy of a friend’s room, you realize, I say, that to do such a thing, I must be harbouring some serious anxiety, or rather a dreadful certainty. Morrel, you want to kill yourself!’
‘Well, now,’ Morrel said, shaking. ‘Where did you get that idea, Monsieur le Comte?’
‘I say that you want to kill yourself,’ the count went on in the same tone of voice. ‘And here is the proof!’ Going over to the desk, he picked up the white sheet of paper that the young man had thrown over the letter he had been writing, and took the letter.
Morrel rushed forward to snatch it from his hands. However, Monte Cristo had anticipated the gesture and grasped Maximilien by the wrist, halting him like a steel chain halts an unfolding spring.
‘You see,’ said the count. ‘You do want to kill yourself: here it is in black and white!’
‘Very well,’ Morrel exclaimed, instantaneously switching from an appearance of calm to one of extreme violence. ‘Very well, suppose that is so, suppose I have decided to turn the barrel of this pistol against myself, who will stop me? Who will have the courage to stop me? Suppose I should say: all my hopes are dashed, my heart is broken, my life is extinguished, there is nothing about me except mourning and horror, the earth has turned to ashes and every human voice is tearing me apart… Suppose I should say: it is only humane to let me die because, if you do not, I shall lose my reason, I shall become mad… Tell, me, Monsieur, if I should say that, and when it is seen that it is voiced with the anguish and the tears of my heart, will anyone answer me: “You are wrong”? Will anyone prevent me from being the most unhappy of creatures? Tell me, Count, would you have the courage to do so?’
‘Yes, Morrel,’ Monte Cristo said, in a voice so calm that it contrasted strangely with the young man’s excited tones. ‘Yes, I am the one.’
‘You!’ Morrel cried, with a growing expression of anger and reproach. ‘You, who deceived me with absurd hopes; you, who restrained me, lulled me, deadened me with vain promises when, by some dramatic stroke or extreme resolve, I might have been able to save her, or at least to see her die in my arms; you, who pretend to have all the resources of intelligence and the powers of matter; you, who play — or appear to play — the role of Providence and don’t even have the power to give an antidote to a young girl who has been poisoned… ! Oh, Monsieur, I swear it, you would inspire pity in me if you did not inspire horror!’
‘Morrel…’
‘Yes, you told me to lay down the mask. Well, you may have your wish: I shall lay it down.
‘Yes, when you followed me to the cemetery, I still answered you, out of the goodness of my heart; when you came in here, I allowed you to do so… But now that you are taking advantage of my goodness, and challenging me even here in this room, to which I had retired as if to my tomb; since you are inflicting a new torment on me, when I thought I had exhausted every form of torment… Count of Monte Cristo, my supposed benefactor, Count of Monte Cristo, universal saviour, then be satisfied! You will witness the death of your friend!’ And, with a mad laugh on his lips, Morrel threw himself once more towards the pistols.
Monte Cristo, pale as a ghost but with his eyes flashing, reached out for the weapons and said to the frenzied man: ‘I repeat that you will not kill yourself!’
‘Just try to stop me!’ Morrel said, making a final grasp which, like the previous one, exhausted itself against the count’s steely arm.
‘I will prevent you!’
‘But who are you, then, after all, to dare claim this tyranny over free, intelligent creatures!’
‘Who am I?’ Monte Cristo repeated. ‘Let me tell you…’ And he continued: ‘I am the only man in the world who has the right to say to you: Morrel, I do not want your father’s son to die this day!’
Monte Cristo, majestic, transfigured, sublime, advanced with arms folded towards the trembling young man who, overcome despite himself by the near divinity of the man, shrank back a step.
‘Why do you mention my father?’ he stammered. ‘Why involve the memory of my father in what is happening to me now?’
‘Because I am the man who has already saved your father’s life, one day when he wanted to kill himself as you do today; because I am the man who sent the purse to your young sister and the Pharaon to old Morrel; because I am Edmond Dantès, who dandled you on his knees when you were a child!’
Morrel shrank back again, staggering, panting, speechless, overwhelmed. Then all his sense failed him and he fell prostrate at Monte Cristo’s feet. But then, at once, just as suddenly and completely, there was a surge of regeneration in that admirable constitution. He got up, leapt out of the room and dashed to the top of the stairs, crying at the top of his voice: ‘Julie, Julie! Emmanuel, Emmanuel!’
Monte Cristo also tried to follow, but Maximilien would have died rather than release the hinges of the door which he thrust back against the count.
At the sound of Maximilien’s cries, Julie, Emmanuel, Penelon and some servants ran up in fright. Morrel took them by the hands and, re-opening the door, gasped out in a voice stifled by sobs: ‘On your knees, on your knees! This is the benefactor, this is our father’s saviour, this is…’
He was about to say: ‘This is Edmond Dantès!’
The count stopped him by grasping his arm.
Julie seized the count’s hand, Emmanuel embraced him as he would a guardian angel and Morrel again fell to his knees, dashing his forehead against the ground.
At this, the man of bronze felt his heart swell in his breast, a devouring flame shot from his throat to his eyes, and he lowered his head and wept.
For a few moments the room was full of a chorus of tears and sublime sobs that must have seemed harmonious even to the dearest angels of the Lord!
Scarcely had Julie recovered from the deep emotion that had overwhelmed her than she rushed out of the room, went down one floor and ran into the drawing-room, with childish glee, to lift the glass dome protecting the purse given by the stranger in the Allées de Meilhan.
Meanwhile Emmanuel said to the count, in a voice choking with emotion: ‘Oh, Count, how — when you heard us so often speak of our unknown benefactor, when you saw us surround his memory with such gratitude and adoration, how could you wait until today to reveal yourself? Oh, this is cruel towards us — and, I might almost say, towards yourself.’
‘Listen, my friend,’ the count said. ‘And I can call you that because, without realizing it, you have been my friend for eleven years: the revelation of this secret has come about by a great event that you cannot know. God is my witness that I wished to conceal it for ever in my soul, but your brother Maximilien forced it out of me by violence which, I am sure, he now regrets.’
Then, seeing that Maximilien had thrown himself sideways on to a chair while still remaining on his knees, he said softly, squeezing Emmanuel’s hand in a significant manner: ‘Take care of him.’
‘Why?’ the young man asked in astonishment.
‘I cannot tell you; but watch over him.’
Emmanuel looked around the room and saw Morrel’s pistols. His eyes settled in alarm on the weapons, which he pointed out to Monte Cristo by slowly raising his arm towards them. Monte Cristo nodded, and Emmanuel made a movement in the direction of the pistols. ‘Leave them,’ said the count.
Then, going to Morrel, he took his hand. The tumult that had briefly racked his heart had given way to a profound stupor.
Julie came back upstairs, holding the silk purse in her hands, and two shining and happy tears ran down her cheeks like two drops of morning dew.
‘Here is the relic,’ she said. ‘Do not think that it is any less dear to me since our saviour was revealed.’
‘My child,’ Monte Cristo said, blushing, ‘allow me to take back that purse. Now that you know the features of my face, I should not want to be recalled to your memory except by the affection that I beg you to give me.’
‘Oh, no!’ Julie said, pressing the purse to her heart. ‘No, I beg you, because one day you might leave us… because one day, alas, you will leave us, won’t you?’
‘You are right, Madame,’ Monte Cristo replied, smiling. ‘In a week, I shall have left this country where so many people who deserved the vengeance of heaven were living happily while my father was dying of hunger and grief.’
As he was announcing his forthcoming departure, Monte Cristo kept his eyes on Morrel and noticed that the words ‘I shall have left this country’ passed without rousing the young man from his lethargy. He realized that he must engage in a further bout against his friend’s grief and, taking the hands of Julie and Emmanuel and clasping them in his own, he told them, with the gentle authority of a father: ‘My dear friends, please leave me alone with Maximilien.’
For Julie this was an excuse to take away the precious relic which Monte Cristo had forgotten to mention again. She pulled her husband after her, saying: ‘Come, let’s leave them.’
The count remained alone with Morrel, who was as motionless as a statue.
‘Come, now,’ the count said, touching his shoulder with his fiery hand. ‘Are you once more becoming a man, Maximilien?’
‘Yes, because I am starting to suffer again.’
The count frowned, seemingly a prey to some grave dilemma.
‘Maximilien, Maximilien!’ he said. ‘The thoughts that obsess you are unworthy of a Christian.’
‘Have no fear, my friend,’ Morrel said, looking up with a smile of infinite sadness. ‘I shall no longer seek for death.’
‘So: no more weapons, no more despair?’
‘No, for I have something better than the barrel of a gun or the point of a knife to cure me of my grief.’
‘You poor, crazed man: what do you have?’
‘I have my grief itself: that will kill me.’
‘My friend,’ Monte Cristo said, in tones as melancholy as those of the man he was addressing, ‘listen to me. One day, in a moment of despair equal to your own, since it induced me to take a similar resolution, I too wanted to kill myself; and one day, your father, equally desperate, also wanted to do the same.
‘If anyone had said to your father, at the moment when he was lifting the barrel of the pistol to his head, and if anyone had said to me, at the moment when I was thrusting away from my bed the prison bread that I had not touched for three days, I say, if anyone had said to us at that climactic moment: Live! Because the day will come when you will be happy and bless life; then, wherever that voice had come from, we would have answered it with a smile of scepticism or with pained incredulity; and yet, how many times, when he embraced you, has your father not blessed life and how many times have I…’
‘Ah!’ Morrel cried, interrupting him. ‘But you only lost your freedom; my father only lost his fortune. I have lost Valentine.’
‘Look at me, Morrel,’ Monte Cristo said, with the solemnity that on certain occasions made him so great and so persuasive. ‘Look at me. I have no tears in my eyes, or fever in my veins, or dread beatings in my heart; yet I am watching you suffer, you, Maximilien, whom I love as I should my own son. Well, Maximilien, does that not tell you that grief is like life and that there is always something unknown beyond it? So, if I beg you, if I order you to live, Morrel, it is in the certainty that one day you will thank me for saving your life.’
‘My God!’ the young man exclaimed. ‘My God, what are you telling me, Count? Take care! Perhaps you have never been in love?’
‘Child!’ the count replied.
‘About love,’ Morrel said, ‘I do understand.
‘You see, I have been a soldier for as long as I have been a man. I reached the age of twenty-nine without ever being in love, because none of the feelings that I experienced up to then deserved the name of love. Then, at twenty-nine I saw Valentine. For almost two years I have loved her, for almost two years I have been able to read the virtues of womanhood, inscribed by the hand of the Lord on that heart which was as plain to me as a book.
‘Count, for me with Valentine there could be an infinite, immense, unknown happiness, a happiness too great, too complete and too divine for this world. Since this world has not given it to me, Count, that means that there is nothing for me on earth except despair and desolation.’
‘I told you to hope, Morrel,’ the count repeated.
‘Then I too shall repeat: take care,’ said Morrel, ‘because you are trying to persuade me, and if you do persuade me, you will make me lose my mind, because you will make me believe I can see Valentine again.’
The count smiled.
‘My friend, my father!’ Morrel cried, in exultation. ‘For the third time I must tell you: take care, because I am terrified at the power you have over me. Beware of the meaning of your words, because my eyes are lighting up again, my heart is being born anew. Beware, or you will make me believe in the supernatural.
‘I should obey if you were to order me to raise the stone of the sepulchre in which the daughter of Jairus[3] is entombed, I should walk on the water, like the apostle, if your hand were to signal to me to step on the waves. Take care: I should obey.’
‘Hope, my friend,’ the count repeated.
‘Oh!’ Morrel cried, crashing from the highest point of his exultation to the depths of sorrow. ‘Oh, you are toying with me: you are like one of those good mothers or, rather, like one of those selfish mothers who calm their children’s sorrows with honeyed words, because they are tired of hearing them cry.
‘No, my friend. I was wrong to tell you to beware. Fear nothing. I shall bury my grief with so much care in the depth of my heart, I shall make it so dark, so secret, that it will not even try your sympathy any more. Farewell, my friend! Adieu!’
‘On the contrary,’ the count said. ‘From this moment onwards, Maximilien, you will live near me and with me. You will not leave my side and in a week we shall have left France.’
‘Do you still tell me to hope?’
‘I do because I have the means to cure you.’
‘Count, you are making me even sadder, if that were possible. All you can see, after the blow that has struck me, is an ordinary grief, which you intend to console by ordinary means - by travel.’ And Morrel shook his head, in contemptuous disbelief.
‘What can I say?’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘I have faith in what I promise, so let me try the experiment.’
‘Count, you are prolonging my agony, nothing more.’
‘So, feeble spirit that you are,’ said the count, ‘you do not even have strength enough to allow your friend a few days for the experiment he is trying. Come, do you know what the Count of Monte Cristo can do? Do you know that he commands many powers on earth? Do you know that he has enough faith in God to obtain miracles from Him who said that if a man has faith he can move mountains? Well, wait for the miracle I am hoping for, or…’
‘Or… ? Morrel repeated.
‘Or beware, Morrel, I shall call you ungrateful.’
‘Have pity on me, Count.’
‘I do, Maximilien, so much so that if I have not cured you in a month, day for day, hour for hour — do you hear? — I shall put you myself in front of those pistols, fully loaded, and a glass of the most deadly of Italian poisons, one more certain and quicker than the one that killed Valentine; remember that!’
‘Do you promise?’
‘Yes, for I am a man and I too, as I told you, wished to die. Ever since misfortune has deserted me, I have often dreamed of the delights of eternal sleep.’
‘Oh, surely, do you promise me this, Count?’ Maximilien asked, intoxicated.
‘Not only do I promise, I swear it,’ Monte Cristo said, extending his hand.
‘In a month, on your honour, if I am not consoled, you will leave me free to take my life and, whatever I do, you will not call me ungrateful?’
‘In a month, day for day, Maximilien; in a month, to the hour. The date is sacred: I don’t know if you have realized, but today is the fifth of September. Ten years ago today, I saved your father, who wanted to die.’
Morrel grasped the count’s hands and kissed them. The count accepted the homage as if such adoration were his due.
‘In a month,’ he went on, ‘you shall have, on the table in front of which we shall both be sitting, fine weapons and an easy death. But, in exchange, do you promise me to wait until then?’
‘Oh, yes!’ cried Morrel. ‘In my turn, I swear it!’
Monte Cristo clasped the young man to his heart and held him there for a long time.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘from this day forth you will come and live with me. You will take Haydée’s rooms and my daughter will at least be replaced by my son.’
‘Haydée?’ Morrel said. ‘What has happened to her?’
‘She went away last night.’
‘To leave you?’
‘To wait for me… So be ready to join me in the Champs-Elysées, and smuggle me out of here without anyone seeing.’
Maximilien bent his head and obeyed, like a child or a disciple.
_________
NOTES
1. Héloise and Abélard: A monument to the twelfth-century lovers, made to cover their tomb after Héloise’s death in 1164, was eventually transferred to the Pére Lachaise cemetery in the early nineteenth century.
2. Malherbe... du Périer: A celebrated poem to console du Périer on the death of his daughter, by Francois de Malherbe (1555-1628).
3. the daughter of Jairus: The story of how Jesus resurrected the daughter of Jairus is told in three gospels (Matthew 19: 18-26; Mark 5: 22-43; and Luke 8: 40-56). The story of Jesus walking on the water is in Matthew, 14: 28-9.
During the night the undertakers had accomplished their dismal task and sewn the body, as it lay on the bed, in that shroud which gloomily enfolds the dead, supplying (whatever is said about the levelling effect of death) a last sign of the luxury that they enjoyed in their lifetimes.
In this case the shroud was a magnificent piece of cambric lawn that the young woman had bought a mere fortnight earlier.
During the evening, some men who had been brought in for this purpose transported Noirtier from Valentine’s room to his own and, against all expectation, the old man made no objection to being taken away from his grandchild’s body.
Abbé Busoni watched until daybreak and then went back to his house without calling anyone.
At about eight in the morning, d’Avrigny returned. He had met Villefort, who was going to see Noirtier, and accompanied him in order to discover how the old man had spent the night. They found him in the large armchair that served as his bed, enjoying a gentle sleep and almost smiling.
They both stopped on the threshold in astonishment. ‘You see,’ d’Avrigny said to Villefort, who was looking at his sleeping father. ‘See how nature is able to assuage the most awful pain. Surely, no one would have said that Monsieur Noirtier did not love his granddaughter, yet he is asleep.’
‘Yes, you are right,’ Villefort replied, in surprise. ‘He is sleeping; and that is very strange, because the slightest upset used to keep him awake for nights on end.’
‘He is exhausted by grief,’ d’Avrigny replied. And the two men returned thoughtfully to the crown prosecutor’s study.
‘Now, I didn’t sleep,’ Villefort said, showing d’Avrigny his untouched bed. ‘Grief has not exhausted me and I have not been to bed for two nights. On the other hand, look at my desk: good Lord, what I have written over those two days and nights! How I have perused that dossier, how I have annotated that indictment against the murderer Benedetto! Work, work! My passion, my joy, my fury: it is for you to exhaust all my griefs!’ And he seized d’Avrigny’s hand in a convulsive grip.
‘Do you need me?’ the doctor asked.
‘No,’ Villefort said. ‘But, I beg you, come back at eleven o’clock. It is at twelve that… oh, my poor child! The departure… My God, my poor child!’ And the crown prosecutor, a man again, raised his eyes to heaven and heaved a great sigh.
‘Will you be receiving in the drawing-room then?’
‘No, I have a cousin who has agreed to undertake that sad honour. I shall work, doctor; when I work, everything vanishes.’
And, indeed, the doctor had hardly reached the door before the crown prosecutor was once more immersed in his labours.
On the steps d’Avrigny met the relative whom Villefort had mentioned, an insignificant personage both in the family and in this story, one of those beings who are born to play a purely utilitarian role in the world.
He was punctual, dressed in black, with a crépe armband, and he had come round to his cousin’s with his face composed into a suitable expression, which he intended to keep for as long as need be and then put aside.
At eleven o’clock the funerary carriages were clattering over the paved courtyard, and the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré filled with the murmur of the crowd, equally hungry for the joys and the griefs of the rich, and hurrying to a fine funeral with the same haste as it would to a duchess’s wedding.
Little by little the drawing-room filled up with mourners. Among the first to arrive were some of our old acquaintances: Debray, Chateau-Renaud and Beauchamp; then all the luminaries of the bench, of letters and the arts, because Monsieur de Villefort, less by reason of his social standing than for his personal qualities, occupied one of the highest ranks in Parisian society.
The cousin stood at the door and showed everyone in; and it must be said that it was a great relief for the indifferent to see a neutral face who did not require the guests to produce any hypocritical expression or false tears, as a father, brother or fiancé would have done. Those who knew one another exchanged looks and gathered in groups, one of which was made up of Debray, Chateau-Renaud and Beauchamp.
‘Poor girl!’ Debray said, acknowledging this sad occasion (as, incidentally, everyone else was quite spontaneously doing). ‘Poor girl! So rich and beautiful! Would you have thought it, Chateau-Renaud, when we came here, when was it — three weeks or a month ago at the most — to sign that contract that was not signed?’
‘Heavens, no,’ said Chateau-Renaud.
‘Did you know her?’
‘I spoke to her once or twice at Madame de Morcerf’s ball. She seemed charming, if a trifle melancholic. Where is the stepmother? Do you know?’
‘She has gone to spend the day with the wife of the worthy gentleman who greeted us as we came in.’
‘And what might he be?’
‘Who?’
‘The gentleman at the door: a member of parliament?’
‘No,’ said Beauchamp. ‘I am condemned to see those honourable gentlemen daily, and I don’t know his face.’
‘Did you mention this death in your newspaper?’
‘I didn’t write the piece myself, but it was mentioned. I doubt if it will please Monsieur de Villefort. I believe the writer remarked that if four successive deaths had occurred anywhere except in the crown prosecutor’s house, the crown prosecutor would certainly have more to say about it.’
‘For all that,’ Chateau-Renaud said, ‘Doctor d’Avrigny is my mother’s doctor, and says he is quite distraught.’
‘Who do you keep looking for, Debray?’
‘The Count of Monte Cristo,’ the young man replied.
‘I met him on the boulevard on my way here. I think he was just leaving, going to his banker,’ Beauchamp said.
‘His banker? Isn’t that Danglars?’ Chateau-Renaud asked Debray.
‘I think so,’ the private secretary answered, with some faint signs of unease. ‘But Monte Cristo is not the only person I can’t see here. Where is Morrel?’
‘Morrel! Did he know them?’ asked Chateau-Renaud.
‘I think he had been introduced to Madame de Villefort only.’
‘No matter, he should have come,’ said Debray. ‘What will he have to talk about this evening? This burial is the main news of the day. But hush, say no more: here is the Minister of Justice and Religion. He will feel obliged to make his little speech to the mournful cousin.’ And the three young people went over to the door to hear the minister’s speech.
What Beauchamp had said was true: on his way to the funeral he had met Monte Cristo who was going to see Danglars at his home in the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin.
From his window the banker had seen the count’s carriage turning into the courtyard. He came to meet him with a sad but welcoming face.
‘Well, Count,’ he said, offering Monte Cristo his hand. ‘You have come to offer me your condolences. In truth, my family is plagued by misfortune — to the point where, when I saw you coming, I was just asking myself whether I might have harboured some uncharitable thoughts against those poor Morcerfs, to justify the proverb: Let ill befall him that wishes ill. Well, no, on my honour, I did not wish any ill on Morcerf. He may perhaps be a little proud for a man who has come up from nothing, like me, and owes everything to himself, like me; but we all have our faults. Ah, mark this, Count, men of our generation… But, forgive me, you aren’t of our generation, you’re a young man… Those of our generation are not having a good year, this year: take our puritanical crown prosecutor, take Villefort, who has just lost his daughter. Why, in sum, there is Villefort, as I said, losing all his family in mysterious circumstances; Morcerf, dishonoured and dead; myself, dishonoured by the villainy of that Benedetto, and then…’
‘Then, what?’ the count asked.
‘Alas, don’t you know?’
‘Some new misfortune?’
‘My daughter…’
‘Mademoiselle Danglars?’
‘Eugénie has left us.’
‘Good heavens, what are you saying?’
‘The truth, my dear Count. You don’t know how lucky you are, not having a wife or children!’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Oh, my God.’
‘You said that Mademoiselle Eugénie…’
‘Was unable to bear the indignity to which that wretch subjected us and asked my permission to travel.’
‘Has she left already?’
‘A few nights ago.’
‘With Madame Danglars?’
‘No, with a relative… But we are still losing her, dearest Eugénie, because, knowing her proud character, I doubt if she will ever consent to return to France.’
‘What can be done, my dear Baron?’ said Monte Cristo. ‘These are family sorrows, which would be devastating for some poor devil whose child was his whole fortune, but are bearable for a millionaire. Whatever philosophers say, a practical man will always contradict them on this: money is a great consolation; and you should be more easily consoled than anyone, if you will admit the virtues of this sovereign remedy — you, the king of finance, at the crossroads of power…’
Danglars looked sideways at the count to see if he was mocking him or speaking seriously.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The fact is that if wealth is a consolation, I should feel it, because I am rich.’
‘So rich, my dear Baron, that your fortune is like the pyramids: even if anyone should wish to demolish them, he would not dare; and if he dared, he could not.’
Danglars smiled at this confident bonhomie. ‘That reminds me,’ he said, ‘when you came in I was making out five little bills. I had already signed two of them; would you permit me to do the other three?’
‘Of course, my dear Baron, of course.’
There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the scratching of the banker’s quill, while Monte Cristo stared at the gilt mouldings on the ceiling.
‘Spanish bonds?’ Monte Cristo asked. ‘Haitian bonds, bonds from Naples?’
‘No,’ Danglars said, giving one of his self-satisfied laughs. ‘Bearer bonds, drawn on the Bank of France. Here, Count,’ he added, ‘you who are the emperor of finance as I am the king, have you seen many scraps of paper of this size, each worth a million?’
Monte Cristo took the five paper bills that Danglars proudly tendered him, as if to weigh them in his hand, and read: ‘May it please the Governor of the Bank to pay on my order, from the funds deposited by me, the sum of one million, value in account. Baron Danglars.’
‘One, two, three, four, five,’ Monte Cristo counted. ‘Five million! Damnation! There’s no stopping you, Milord Croesus!’
‘That’s how I do business,’ said Danglars.
‘Marvellous, especially since, as I have no doubt, the sum is to be paid in cash.’
‘It will be,’ said Danglars.
‘It is wonderful to have such credit. In truth, one only finds such things here in France: five scraps of paper worth five million; it has to be seen to be believed.’
‘Do you doubt it?’
‘No.’
‘You say that in a certain kind of voice… Go on, try it: drive my clerk to the bank and you will see him come out with treasury bonds for the same amount.’
‘No,’ Monte Cristo said, folding the bills. ‘No, it’s too amazing; I’ll test it for myself. My credit with you was six million. I have drawn nine hundred thousand francs, so you still owe me five million, one hundred thousand francs. I'll take your five scraps of paper, which I will accept on the sole guarantee of your signature, and give you, here, a receipt for the whole of the six million, which will settle our account. I prepared it in advance because, I have to tell you, I am in great need of money today.’ And with one hand Monte Cristo put the five bills in his pocket, while with the other he handed his receipt to the banker.
If a thunderbolt had fallen at Danglars’ feet, he could not have been stricken with such terror.
‘What!’ he stammered. ‘What! What! Count, are you taking that money? Excuse me, please, that’s money I owe to the hospice, a deposit, and I promised to pay it this morning.’
‘Oh, that’s another matter,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘I’m not particular about these five bills exactly. Pay me with some other bonds. It was out of sheer curiosity that I took these, so that I could tell everyone that, with no prior warning, without asking me to wait even for five minutes, the firm of Danglars paid me five million in cash! It would have been quite exceptional! But here are your bonds. As I say, give me some others.’
He handed the five bills to Danglars who, white as a sheet, at first put out his hand, like a vulture reaching out his claw beyond the bars of his cage to pull back the meat that someone was trying to wrench from him. Then, suddenly, he changed his mind, making a violent effort to contain his feelings.
‘In point of fact,’ he said, ‘your receipt is currency.’
‘Of course it is! If you were in Rome, the house of Thomson and French would not make any more difficulty about paying you against my receipt than you have done yourself.’
‘Forgive me, Monsieur le Comte, forgive me.’
‘So: can I keep this money?’
‘Yes,’ said Danglars, wiping away the sweat that had gathered along his hairline. ‘Keep it, keep it.’
Monte Cristo put the five notes into his pocket with that untranslatable expression on his face that says: ‘Come now, think again: there is still time if you want to change your mind!’
‘No,’ said Danglars, ‘no. Really: keep my bills. You know, there is no one so much a stickler for formality as a moneyman. I meant to give that money to the hospice and I would have thought myself a robber if I didn’t give them those very bills, as if one écu were not worth the same as any other. Forgive me.’ And he burst into a loud, nervous laugh.
‘I forgive you,’ Monte Cristo replied graciously. ‘There!’ And he put the bills into his portfolio.
‘But that leaves one hundred thousand francs,’ said Danglars.
‘Oh, a mere trifle,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘The charges must amount more or less to that amount. Keep it and we'll be quits.’
‘Count, are you serious?’ said Danglars.
‘I never joke with bankers,’ Monte Cristo said, with a gravity bordering on impertinence. He was just going towards the door when the valet announced: ‘Monsieur de Boville, receiver-general for hospices.’
‘Well, well,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘It seems I came just in time to benefit from your bills: everyone’s after them.’
Danglars went pale again and hurried to take his leave of the count.
Monte Cristo exchanged courteous greetings with Monsieur de Boville, who was standing in the waiting-room; as soon as Monte Cristo had gone, he was shown into Monsieur Danglars’ study. One might have seen the count’s grave features light up with a fleeting smile at the sight of the portfolio that the receiver-general was carrying in his hand.
At the door, he got into his carriage and asked to be driven immediately to the Bank of France.
Meanwhile, repressing his feelings, Danglars came forward to greet the receiver. It goes without saying that the smile on his lips and the courteous manner were purely for show.
‘Good morning, dear creditor,’ he said. ‘For I am prepared to wager that it is the creditor who has come to see me…’
‘Quite so, Baron,’ Monsieur de Boville said. ‘You see before you, in my person, the hospices whose widows and orphans hold out their hands in mine to ask for alms of five million francs.’
‘And they say orphans are to be pitied!’ Danglars said, carrying on the pleasantry. ‘Poor mites!’
‘So I have come in their name. Did you get my letter of yesterday’s date?’
‘I did.’
‘Here is my receipt then.’
‘My dear Monsieur de Boville,’ Danglars said, ‘perhaps your widows and orphans would be good enough to wait for twenty-four hours, since Monsieur de Monte Cristo, whom you have just seen leaving here… you did see him, I suppose?’
‘Yes, I did. What about it?’
‘Well, Monsieur de Monte Cristo was taking away the five
million!’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The count has an unlimited credit with me, a credit opened by the House of Thomson and French in Rome. He came to ask me for the sum of five million in a single payment. I gave him a draft on the bank: that is where my funds are deposited and, you understand, I am afraid it might seem rather strange to the governor if I were to draw ten million on him in one day. In two days,’ Danglars added, ‘that’s a different matter.’
‘Come, come!’ Monsieur de Boville exclaimed in tones of utter incredulity. ‘Five million to that gentleman who was just leaving and who greeted me as he went, as though I knew him?’
‘Perhaps he does know you, without you knowing him. The Count of Monte Cristo knows everybody.’
‘Five million!’
‘Here is his receipt. Be like Saint Thomas: see and touch!’
M. de Boville took the paper that Danglars gave him and read: ‘Received of Baron Danglars, the sum of five million one hundred thousand francs, to be reimbursed to him on demand by the House of Thomson and French, in Rome.’
‘Good Lord, it’s true!’ he said.
‘Do you know the firm of Thomson and French?’ Danglars asked.
‘Yes,’ said Monsieur de Boville. ‘I did once do business with them for two hundred thousand francs, but I have not heard anything of them since then.’
‘It’s one of the finest houses in Europe,’ Danglars said, lightly tossing down the receipt that he had just taken from Monsieur de Boville’s hands.
‘And so he had five million, just with you? Well I never! Is he a nabob, this Count of Monte Cristo?’
‘To be honest, I don’t know what he is. But he had three unlimited credits: one with me, one with Rothschild, and one with Laffitte; and,’ Danglars added casually, ‘as you see, he gave me precedence, leaving a hundred thousand francs for bank charges.’
M. de Boville gave every sign of extreme admiration. ‘I must go and call on him,’ he said, ‘and get some pious bequest for us.’
‘You can count on it: his donations to charity alone amount to more than twenty thousand francs a month.’
‘Splendid! And I would offer him the example of Madame de Morcerf and her son.’
‘What example?’
‘They gave all their money to almshouses.’
‘What money?’
‘Their wealth, General de Morcerf’s, the deceased.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they did not want a fortune that had been so dishonourably acquired.’
‘What will they live on?’
‘The mother is to retire to Provence and the son is going to enlist.’
‘Well, well,’ said Danglars. ‘What fine scruples!’
‘I registered the donation yesterday.’
‘How much do they have?’
‘Oh, not much: twelve or thirteen hundred thousand francs. But let’s get back to our millions.’
‘Certainly,’ Danglars said, as naturally as could be imagined. ‘So, are you in a hurry for this money?’
‘Yes, I am. The accountants check our assets tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow! Why didn’t you say so at once? But it’s ages until tomorrow. What time does the check take place?’
‘At two o'clock.’
‘Send someone round at midday,’ Danglars said with a smile. M. de Boville did not answer anything much. He nodded and shuffled his portfolio.
‘Ah, but I’ve just thought of a better idea!’ said Danglars.
‘What should I do?’
‘Monsieur de Monte Cristo’s receipt is worth money. Take it to Rothschild or Laffitte; they will take it from you immediately.’
‘Even though it’s reimbursable in Rome?’
‘Of course. It will just cost you a discount of five or six thousand francs.’
The receiver started back. ‘Oh, no! No, indeed; I'd rather wait until tomorrow. Whatever next!’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Danglars said, with supreme insolence. ‘I thought for a moment that you had a little deficit to make up.’
‘Huh!’ said the receiver.
‘Listen, this kind of thing happens and, in such cases, one must make a small sacrifice.’
‘No, thank you!’ said M. de Boville.
‘Then, until tomorrow, my dear friend?’
‘Yes, until tomorrow — without fail, I hope?’
‘Of course! You’re joking! Send someone at midday, and the bank will have it ready.’
‘I'Il come myself.’
‘Even better, since that will give me the pleasure of seeing you again.’ They shook hands.
‘By the bye,’ said M. de Boville, ‘aren’t you going to the funeral of that poor Mademoiselle de Villefort, which I passed on my way here?’
‘No,’ the baron said. ‘I am still made to feel a little ridiculous since the matter of that Benedetto, so I'm keeping my head down.’
‘Come now, you’re quite wrong. Was any of that your fault?’
‘Well, my dear friend, you know, when one has a name as spotless as mine, one is vulnerable.’
‘Believe me, everyone feels sorry for you and, most of all, for your poor daughter.’
‘Yes, poor Eugénie!’ Danglars said with a deep sigh. ‘Did you know she was taking the veil, Monsieur?’
‘No.’
‘Alas, yes, it’s only too true. The very next day after all that, she decided to set off with one of her friends, who is a nun. She’s gone to look for a convent of some very strict order in Italy or in Spain.’
‘But that’s dreadful!’ And M. de Boville bowed himself out with a flood of condolences to the father.
No sooner was he outside, however, than Danglars, with an emphatic energy that will be understood only by those who have seen a performance of Robert Macaire by Frédérick,[1] exclaimed: ‘Imbecile!’ And, slipping Monte Cristo’s receipt into a little portfolio, he added: ‘Come at midday - I'll be a long way off!’
Then he double-locked his door, emptied all the drawers of his cash desk, amassed some fifty thousand francs in banknotes, burned various papers, put others where they could clearly be seen, and began to write a letter which he eventually sealed, marking it on the outside: ‘To Madame the Baroness Danglars’.
‘This evening,’ he muttered, ‘I shall leave it myself on her dressing-table.’
Then he took a passport out of the drawer. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It is still valid for another two months.’
_________
NOTES
1. Robert Macaire... Frédérick: ‘Robert Macaire was the central character in Antier, Saint-Amant and Paulyanthe’s melodrama, L’Auberge des Adrets (1823) and its sequel Robert Macaire (1834). It was famously played by Frédérick Lemaitre (1800-76), who features in this role in Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du paradis (played by Pierre Brasseur).
Villefort got up, almost ashamed at being discovered in this extremity of grief. The awful profession he had exercised for the past twenty-five years had made him more, or less, than a man.
His eyes, after wandering for a moment, settled on Morrel.
‘Who are you, Monsieur?’ he asked. ‘Have you forgotten that one does not enter a house that is occupied by death? Begone, Monsieur! Begone!’
But Morrel remained motionless, unable to take his eyes off the frightful spectacle of the rumpled bed with the figure lying on top of it.
‘Go, do you hear!’ Villefort cried, while d’Avrigny came forward to oblige Morrel to leave.
Morrel looked in distraction at the body, the two men, the whole room… He seemed to hesitate for a moment and opened his mouth. Then, finding no word to say, despite the vast swarm of deadly thoughts swirling in his brain, he retreated, plunging his fingers through his hair, so that Villefort and d’Avrigny, momentarily distracted from the matter uppermost in their minds, looked after him with an expression that meant: ‘He is mad!’
However, in less than five minutes they heard the staircase creak beneath some considerable weight and saw Morrel who, with superhuman strength, was lifting Noirtier’s chair in his arms, bringing the old man up to the first floor of the house.
When he got to the top of the stairs, Morrel put the chair down and pushed it quickly into Valentine’s room. The whole of this operation was carried out with a strength increased ten times by the young man’s frenzied hysteria. But the most terrifying thing was Noirtier’s face as it advanced towards Valentine’s bed, pushed by Morrel: Noirtier’s face in which the intellect exerted every means within its power and the eyes concentrated all their strength to compensate for the loss of the other faculties. This pale face with its blazing look was a terrifying apparition to Villefort.
Each time that he found himself in contact with his father, something dreadful happened.
‘See what they have done!’ Morrel cried, one hand still resting on the back of the chair which he had just pushed up to the bed, and the other outstretched towards Valentine. ‘Look, father, look!’
Villefort shrank back a step and stared with amazement at this young man, who was almost unknown to him, yet who called Noirtier his father.
At that moment the old man’s whole soul seemed to rise into his eyes, which were shot with blood. Then the veins on his neck swelled and a bluish tint, like that which suffuses the skin of an epileptic, spread across his neck, his cheeks and his temples. The only thing that was missing from this internal explosion of the whole being was a cry.
But that cry seemed to emerge as it were from every pore, terrifying in its dumbness, heart-rending in its silence.
D’Avrigny rushed over to the old man and made him sniff a powerful revulsive.
‘Monsieur,’ Morrel exclaimed, grasping the paralysed man’s inert hand. ‘They ask me what I am and what right I have to be here. You know the answer. Tell them! Tell them…’ And his voice was drowned in sobs.
As for the old man, his chest heaved as he gasped for breath. One might have imagined that he was prey to the convulsions that precede the death agony. Finally, tears poured from his eyes: he was more fortunate than the young man, who could only sob without weeping. His head could not bow, so he closed his eyes.
‘Tell them,’ he said, in a strangled voice. ‘Tell them I was her fiancé. Tell them that she was my noble friend, my only love on this earth! Tell them… Tell them that this body belongs to me!’
The young man, presenting the awful spectacle of some great force breaking, fell heavily to his knees beside the bed while his fingers clasped it convulsively.
His grief was so touching that d’Avrigny turned away to hide his emotion and Villefort, asking for no further explanation, drawn by the magnetism that drives us towards those who have loved those for whom we grieve, offered the young man his hand.
But Morrel could see nothing. He had grasped Valentine’s ice-cold hand and, unable to weep, was groaning and biting the bedclothes.
For some time nothing could be heard in the room other than this conflict of sobs, oaths and prayers. Yet one noise rose above all, and that was the harsh, harrowing sound of breathing which, at each gulp of air, seemed to break one of the springs of life in Noirtier’s chest.
Finally, Villefort, the most self-possessed of all, after having as it were ceded his place for some time to Maximilien, began to speak.
‘Monsieur,’ he told Maximilien, ‘you loved Valentine, you say. You were her fiancé. I must admit I was unaware of this love and of the engagement. Yet, as her father, I forgive you for it, since I can see that your grief is great, true and real.
‘Moreover my own grief is too great to leave room in my heart for anger.
‘But, as you see, the angel for whom you longed has left this earth. She no longer needs the adoration of men — she, who, at this moment, is adoring the Lord. So say your farewells, Monsieur, to these sad remains that she has left behind among us. Once more take the hand that you were expecting to take in other circumstances and part from her for ever. Valentine no longer has need of anyone except the priest who will bless her.’
‘You are wrong, Monsieur,’ Morrel exclaimed, rising on one knee, his heart smitten by a pain sharper than any he had yet felt. ‘You are wrong. Valentine, having died as she has, needs not only a priest but an avenger. You send for the priest, Monsieur de Villefort; I shall be her avenger.’
‘What do you mean, Monsieur?’ Villefort murmured, quaking at this new product of Morrel’s delirium.
‘What I mean,’ Morrel continued, ‘is that there are two men in you, Monsieur. The father has wept enough; let the crown prosecutor resume his duties.’
Noirtier’s eyes shone, and d’Avrigny came over to them.
‘Monsieur,’ the young man went on, his eyes picking up every feeling that was expressed on the faces of those around him, ‘I know what I am saying and you all know as well as I do what I mean. Valentine was murdered!’
Villefort bent his head. D’Avrigny took another step. Noirtier moved his eyes.
‘So, Monsieur,’ Morrel continued, ‘nowadays when a creature, even one less young, even one less beautiful, even one less adorable than Valentine… such a creature does not disappear violently from the earth without someone asking for a reason. Come, Monsieur,’ Morrel added, with growing vehemence, ‘no pity — Prosecutor! I am reporting the crime to you, find the murderer!’
And his implacable eyes were fixed on Villefort, while he, for his part, looked from Noirtier to d’Avrigny and back.
‘Yes,’ went the old man.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said d’Avrigny.
‘Monsieur,’ Villefort replied, trying to struggle against these three wills and against his own feelings, ‘you are wrong. No crimes are committed in my house. Fate has struck, God is trying me, which is horrible to believe; but no one is being murdered!’
Noirtier’s eyes flashed and d’Avrigny opened his mouth to speak. But Morrel lifted his hand to order silence.
‘I tell you that people are being murdered here!’ he cried, his voice lowered without losing any of its dreadful power. ‘I tell you that this is the fourth victim struck down in four months. I tell you that four days ago someone already tried to poison Valentine and that the attempt only failed because of the precautions taken by Monsieur Noirtier…
‘I tell you that the dose was doubled, or that the type of poison was changed. And this time the attempt succeeded!
‘And, finally, I tell you that you know all this as well as I do, because this gentleman warned you, as a doctor and as a friend.’
‘Oh, you are delirious!’ Villefort cried, vainly trying to escape from the trap that he felt closing in on him.
‘I am delirious?’ Morrel cried. ‘Well, then, I appeal to Monsieur d’Avrigny himself. Ask him, Monsieur, if he still remembers the words he spoke in your garden, the garden of this very house, on the evening when Madame de Saint-Méran died and when the two of you, thinking yourselves alone, were discussing that tragic death - in which the fate you mentioned, and God, whom you unjustly accuse, could only have played one part, that is, in creating Valentine’s murderer.’
Villefort and d’Avrigny looked at one another.
‘Yes, yes, remember,’ said Morrel. ‘Those words, which you thought you entrusted to silence and solitude, reached my ears. Certainly, that very evening, seeing Monsieur de Villefort’s culpable leniency towards his own family, I should have revealed everything to the authorities. I should not then be an accomplice in your death, Valentine! My beloved Valentine! But the accomplice will become the avenger. This fourth murder is flagrant and visible to all; and, Valentine, even if your father abandons you, I swear that I shall pursue your murderer.’
This time, as though nature had finally taken pity on this strong constitution about to be crushed by its own strength, Morrel’s last words were stifled in his throat, his chest heaved with sobs, and tears, which had for so long refused to come, poured from his eyes. He could no longer support himself but fell on his knees, weeping, beside Valentine’s bed.
Now it was the turn of d’Avrigny. ‘I, too, add my voice to that of Monsieur Morrel to demand justice for this crime,’ he said emphatically. ‘My heart rebels at the idea that my cowardly indulgence encouraged the murderer.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Villefort muttered, overwhelmed.
Morrel raised his head and, looking at the old man, whose eyes were blazing with a superhuman light, he said: ‘Monsieur Noirtier has something to say.’
‘Yes,’ Noirtier went, with an expression all the more dreadful in that all the poor man’s faculties were concentrated in that look.
‘Do you know the murderer?’ Morrel asked.
‘Yes,’ Noirtier replied.
‘And you will direct us to him?’ the young man exclaimed. ‘Listen! Monsieur d’Avrigny, listen!’
Noirtier gave the unhappy Morrel a melancholy smile, one of those sweet smiles in his eyes that had so often made Valentine happy, then he concentrated his attention. Having so to speak fastened the other man’s eyes on his, he then turned them towards the door.
‘Do you wish me to go out, Monsieur?’ Morrel asked, in a pitiful tone of voice.
‘Yes,’ Noirtier said.
‘Alas, Monsieur, have pity on me!’
But the old man’s eyes remained implacably fixed on the door.
‘May I at least return?’ asked Morrel.
‘Yes.’
‘Must I go out by myself?’
‘No.’
‘Whom should I take with me? The crown prosecutor?’
‘No.’
‘The doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘You wish to remain alone with Monsieur de Villefort?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will he be able to understand you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Villefort said, almost happy now that the investigation was to take place between the two of them. ‘Have no fear, I can understand my father very well.’ But even though he said this with an expression of relief, the crown prosecutor’s teeth were chattering violently.
D’Avrigny took Morrel’s arm and led the young man into the next room. Then the house lapsed into a silence deeper than the silence of death.
Finally, after a quarter of an hour, an unsteady step could be heard and Villefort appeared on the threshold of the drawing- room in which d’Avrigny and Morrel were waiting, one absorbed in his thoughts, the other sunk in grief.
‘Come in,’ Villefort said; and he led them back to where Noirtier was sitting.
Morrel examined Villefort closely. The crown prosecutor’s face was livid. Huge patches of reddish colour had appeared on his forehead while, between his fingers, a quill was falling to pieces after being bent and twisted in a hundred different ways.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said to Morrel and d’Avrigny in a strangled voice, ‘your word of honour that this dreadful secret will remain buried among us!’
The two men started.
‘I beg you!’ said Villefort.
‘But the guilty person,’ said Morrel. ‘The murderer! The assassin!’
‘Have no fear, Monsieur, justice shall be done,’ said Villefort. ‘My father has told me the name of the guilty person; he is as thirsty as you are for revenge; yet, like me, he implores you to keep the secret — don’t you, father?’
‘Yes,’ Noirtier went, firmly.
Villefort continued: ‘He knows me, and I have given him my word. Rest assured, gentlemen. Three days: I ask you for three days, which is less than the law would demand, and in three days the revenge that I shall have exacted from the murderer of my child will make the most impassive of men shudder to the depths of his heart. Am I not right, father?’
As he spoke, he ground his teeth and shook the old man’s numbed hand.
‘Will all these promises be kept, Monsieur Noirtier?’ Morrel asked, while d’Avrigny put the same question with a look.
‘Yes,’ Noirtier answered, with a sinister joy in his eyes.
‘So, gentlemen, swear,’ Villefort said, joining d’Avrigny and Morrel’s hands. ‘Swear that you will take pity on the honour of my family and leave me to avenge it?’
D’Avrigny turned away and muttered a barely audible ‘Yes’, but Morrel tore his hand away from the judge, dashed over to the bed, pressed his lips to the icy lips of Valentine, and fled with the long-drawn-out groan of a soul plunged in despair.
We have already mentioned that all the servants had left. As a result, Monsieur de Villefort was obliged to ask d’Avrigny to take care of the proceedings, so delicate and so many, which must follow a death in one of our large towns, especially when it takes place in suspicious circumstances.
As for Noirtier, his motionless grief, his frozen despair and his noiseless tears were something terrible to behold.
Villefort returned to his study. D’Avrigny went to fetch from the town hall the doctor who fulfils the office of coroner and is quite unambiguously designated ‘doctor of the dead’.
Noirtier did not want to leave his granddaughter.
After half an hour d’Avrigny returned with his colleague. The street door had been closed and, since the concierge had left with the rest of the staff, Villefort himself came to open it. But he stopped on the landing; he no longer had the courage to go into the death chamber, so the two doctors went in alone.
Noirtier was close to the bed, as pale as the corpse, as motionless and as silent.
The coroner approached the body with the indifference of a man who spends half his life in the presence of corpses, lifted the sheet covering the young woman and partly opened her lips.
‘Don’t worry, she’s quite dead,’ said d’Avrigny. ‘Poor girl.’
‘Yes,’ the doctor replied laconically, letting the sheet fall back on to Valentine’s face. Noirtier gave a dull croak.
D’Avrigny turned around: the old man’s eyes were shining. The good doctor understood that Noirtier was asking to see his child. He brought him closer to the bed and, while the coroner was dipping the fingers that had touched the dead woman’s lips into some chlorinated water, he uncovered the calm, pale face which looked like that of a sleeping angel. A tear once more appearing in Noirtier’s eye expressed his gratitude to the doctor. The ‘doctor of the dead’ wrote his report on the corner of a table in Valentine’s room and, when this last formality was completed, d’Avrigny showed him out.
Villefort heard them descend and came to the door of his study. He briefly thanked the doctor and said, turning to d’Avrigny: ‘And now, the priest?’
‘Do you have a clergyman whom you would particularly like to have pray beside Valentine?’ D’Avrigny asked.
‘No,’ Villefort said. ‘Fetch the nearest one.’
‘The nearest one,’ the doctor said, ‘is a good Italian abbé who has come to live in the house next to yours. Shall I go and see him on my way?’
‘D’Avrigny,’ Villefort said, ‘please would you go with this gentleman? Here is a key so that you can come and go as you wish. Bring back the priest and take charge of settling him in my poor child’s room.’
‘Would you like to speak to him, my friend?’
‘I want to be alone. Please forgive me. A priest must understand every kind of sorrow, including a father’s.’ And M. de Villefort, giving d’Avrigny a master key, once more took leave of the unknown doctor and returned to his study, where he began to work.
For some constitutions work is the cure for all ills.
Just as the doctors were going out into the street, they noticed a man, dressed in a soutane, standing on the threshold of the house next door. ‘There is the person I mentioned,’ the coroner told d’Avrigny. D’Avrigny went over to the priest.
‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘would you be willing to do a great service for an unfortunate father who has just lost his daughter, the crown prosecutor, Villefort?’
‘Yes, Monsieur, I know,’ the priest answered, in a pronounced Italian accent. ‘I know that death is in his house.’
‘Then I do not need to tell you what he would like you to do for him.’
‘I was going to volunteer my services, Monsieur,’ the priest said. ‘It is our mission to exceed our duties.’
‘It is a young woman.’
‘I know. I learned that from the servants whom I saw fleeing the house. I learned, too, that she was called Valentine, and I have already prayed for her.’
‘Thank you, Monsieur, thank you,’ said d’Avrigny. ‘And since you have already started to perform your holy office, please be good enough to continue. Come and sit with the dead woman, and the whole family will be grateful to you in its grief.’
‘I am going, Monsieur,’ the abbé replied. ‘And I may say that never will prayers have been more ardent than mine.’
D’Avrigny took the abbé’s hand and, without meeting Villefort, who was shut up in his study, he led him up to Valentine’s room, which the undertakers were to occupy only on the following night.
When he entered the room, Noirtier’s eyes met those of the abbé and they must doubtless have read something particular in them, because they remained fixed on the priest. D’Avrigny entrusted him not only with the dead woman but also with the living man, and the priest promised d’Avrigny that he would give his prayers to Valentine and his care to Noirtier.
He made this solemn promise and, doubtless to avoid being interrupted in his devotions and so that Noirtier would not be disturbed in his grief, as soon as M. d’Avrigny had left the room, he went to draw not only the bolts on the door through which the doctor had just left but also those on the door leading to the apartments of Mme de Villefort.
The night-light continued to burn on Valentine’s mantelpiece, exhausting the last drops of oil still floating on the water. Already the alabaster of the shade was reddening and a brighter flame flared up, crackling with those last sparks that represent, in inanimate objects, the final death throes, so often compared to those of poor human creatures. A faint, sinister light cast an opal hue over the white curtains and the sheets on the young woman’s bed. All sound from the street, for once, was hushed and the silence was dreadful.
Now it was that the door to Edouard’s room opened and a head which we have already seen appeared in the mirror opposite the door: it was Mme de Villefort, coming to see the effect of her potion.
She stopped on the threshold, listened to the crackling of the lamp, the only sound audible in this room which appeared to be unoccupied; then she went cautiously over to the bedside table to see if Valentine’s glass was empty.
It was still one-quarter full, as we said.
Mme de Villefort took it and emptied it into the fireplace, stirring the ashes to ensure that the liquid was absorbed. Then she carefully washed the glass, wiped it with her own handkerchief and put it back on the bedside table.
If anyone had been watching and able to see inside the room, they would have observed Mme de Villefort’s reluctance to look at Valentine or to go over to the bed. The gloomy light, the silence and the awful poetry of night had no doubt combined with the fearful poetry of her conscience: the poisoner was afraid to see her work.
At length she did pluck up courage, drew back the curtain, leant on the head of the bed and looked at Valentine.
The young woman was no longer breathing and her teeth, half-clenched, did not give out a single trace of that respiration which indicates life. Her pale lips had ceased to tremble; her eyes, drowning in a violet mist that seemed to have seeped beneath the skin, formed a whiter protuberance where the orb swelled beneath the lid; and her long black lashes were outlined against skin that was already as dull as wax.
Mme de Villefort looked at this face with an expression that was eloquent in its passivity. Then she grew bolder and, lifting the blanket, put her hand to the young woman’s heart.
It was silent and icy cold. All that she could feel beating was the pulse in her own fingers. She shuddered and drew back her hand.
Valentine’s arm was hanging out of the bed. This arm, from the shoulder to the elbow, appeared to have been modelled on that of one of Germain Pilon’s three Graces,[1] but the forearm was slightly deformed by a contraction of the muscles and the wrist, so pure in shape, was resting on the walnut table, slightly stiffened, with the fingers spread.
There was a bluish tinge at the base of the fingernails.
For Mme de Villefort there could be no further doubt. Everything was over: the dreadful task, the last she had to carry out, had finally been accomplished.
There was nothing further for the poisoner to do in the room. She withdrew with such care that it was evident she was afraid of the sound of her feet on the carpet; yet even as she went she still kept the curtain lifted, taking in the scene of death, which exercises an irresistible attraction when death is not decomposition but only immobility and, so long as it remains a mystery, does not yet inspire disgust.
The minutes passed. Mme de Villefort could not let go of the curtain which she was holding like a shroud above Valentine’s head. She was paying her tribute to reflection: but reflection, in the case of crime, should be remorse.
At that moment the spluttering of the night-light doubled. At the noise, Mme de Villefort shuddered and let the curtain fall. The night-light went out and the room was plunged into terrifying darkness.
The poisoner, fearful at these successive disturbances, groped her way to the door and returned to her own room with her forehead bathed in anxious sweat.
Darkness continued for a further two hours. Then, bit by bit, pallid daylight entered into the room, filtering through the slats of the blinds; and, still bit by bit, it filled out and restored colour and shape to objects and bodies.
It was at this moment that the nurse could be heard coughing on the stairway and the woman came into Valentine’s room, carrying a cup.
To a father or a lover, the first glance would have been enough: Valentine was dead. But to this hired servant, she seemed merely asleep. ‘Good,’ she said, going over to the bedside table. ‘She’s drunk part of her medicine; the glass is two-thirds empty.’ Then she went to the fireplace, relit the fire, settled into her chair and, although she had just got out of bed, took advantage of Valentine’s sleep to catch a few more minutes of slumber herself.
She was woken by the clock striking eight.
It was only now that she felt surprised at the young woman’s persistent sleep, and frightened by the arm hanging out of the bed, which was still in the same position as before. She went over to the bed and noticed the cold lips and icy breast.
She tried to put the arm next to the body, but the arm only responded with a dreadful stiffness that was unmistakable for someone accustomed to caring for the sick. She gave a horrid cry, then ran to the door, shouting: ‘Help! Help!’
‘Help? Why help?’ M. d’Avrigny’s voice replied from the foot of the stairs.
This was the time when the doctor usually arrived.
‘What? Why help?’ Villefort’s voice exclaimed as he hurried out of his study. ‘Doctor, did you hear someone shout “Help”?’
‘Yes, yes. Let’s go up,’ d’Avrigny said. ‘Quickly, to Valentine’s room!’
0But before the doctor and the father had entered, the servants (who were on the same floor, in the rooms or the corridors) had rushed into the room and, seeing Valentine pale and motionless on her bed, threw up their hands and staggered as if overcome by dizziness.
‘Call Madame de Villefort! Wake up Madame de Villefort!’ the crown prosecutor cried at the door of the room, apparently not daring to enter. But the servants, instead of replying, were watching M. d’Avrigny, who had come in, rushed over to Valentine and lifted her in his arms.
‘Now her…’ he muttered, letting her fall back on the bed. ‘Oh God, oh God, when will you tire of this?’
Villefort rushed into the room.
‘What are you saying! My God!’ he cried, raising both hands to heaven. ‘Doctor… doctor… !’
‘I am saying that Valentine is dead,’ d’Avrigny replied in a solemn voice, and one that was dreadful in its solemnity. M. de Villefort went down as though his legs had been broken under him and fell with his head on Valentine’s bed.
At the doctor’s words and the father’s cry, the servants fled in terror, muttering oaths. Down the stairs and along the corridors one could hear their running steps, followed by a commotion in the courtyard, then silence. The noise faded: from the highest to the lowest, they had deserted the accursed home.
At this moment, Mme de Villefort pushed back the door-curtain, her arm half inside her morning robe. For a moment, she remained on the threshold, looking questioningly at those around and summoning a few reluctant tears to her aid.
Suddenly she took a step, or, rather, she leapt forward, her arms extended towards the table. She had just seen d’Avrigny bending curiously over it and picking up the glass which she was sure she had emptied during the night. But the glass was one-third full, just as it had been when she emptied the contents into the fireplace.
The spectre of Valentine herself rising up before her poisoner would have produced a less startling effect on her.
It was indeed a liquid of the same colour as the one she had poured into Valentine’s glass, and which Valentine drank; it was indeed that poison which could not deceive M. d’Avrigny, which M. d’Avrigny was examining attentively. It was undoubtedly a miracle performed by God so that, despite the murderess’s precautions, a trace, a proof should remain to denounce her crime.
However, while Mme de Villefort had remained motionless like a statue of Terror and Villefort, his head buried in the sheets of the death-bed, saw nothing of what was happening around him, d’Avrigny went across to the window to make a closer ocular examination of the contents of the glass and to taste a drop on the end of his finger.
‘Ah, it’s not brucine any more,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s see what this is!’ He went over to one of the wardrobes in Valentine’s room, which had been converted into a medicine chest, and, taking a phial of nitric acid out of its little silver compartment, he poured a few drops into the opal liquid, which immediately changed into half a glass of crimson blood.
‘Ah!’ said d’Avrigny, with the horror of a judge learning the truth and, at the same time, the joy of the scientist who elucidates a problem.
For a moment Mme de Villefort staggered, her eyes at first darting fire then becoming dull. She reached unsteadily for the door-handle and went out. A moment later, there was the distant sound of a body falling to the ground. But nobody took any notice of it. The nurse was examining the chemical sample, while Villefort was still insensible. Only d’Avrigny had watched Mme de Villefort and noticed her hurried exit.
He raised the curtain in front of the door to Valentine’s room and, looking through that of Edouard, he could see into Mme de Villefort’s apartment. He saw her stretched, motionless, on the floor.
‘Go and see to Madame de Villefort,’ he said to the nurse. ‘She is unwell.’
‘But what about Mademoiselle Valentine?’ she asked.
‘Mademoiselle Valentine has no further need of help,’ d’Avrigny said. ‘Mademoiselle Valentine is dead.’
‘Dead! Dead!’ Villefort exclaimed in a paroxysm of suffering all the more acute for being quite new, unknown and unexpected in this heart of bronze.
‘Dead, you say?’ cried a third voice. ‘Who said that Valentine was dead?’
The two men turned around and, at the door, saw Morrel standing, pale, frightful, devastated with horror.
This is what had happened. Morrel had arrived, at his usual time, through the little door leading to Noirtier’s. Unusually, he found the door open and, not needing to ring, came in. In the hall, he waited for a moment, calling for a servant who would show him up to old Noirtier’s rooms. But no one replied: as we know, the servants had deserted the house.
That day, Morrel had no particular reason for anxiety. He had Monte Cristo’s promise that Valentine would live, and up to now that promise had been faithfully kept. Every evening the count had given him good news, which was confirmed the next day by Noirtier himself.
However, on this morning the silence seemed odd. He called a second, then a third time, but there was no reply, so he decided to go up.
Noirtier’s door was open, like the rest.
The first thing he saw was the old man in his armchair. His dilated pupils seemed to express an inner terror that was confirmed by the strange pallor that had spread across his face.
‘How are you, Monsieur?’ the young man said, not without some sinking in his heart.
‘Well!’ the old man replied with a wink. ‘Well!’ But the anxiety on his face seemed to increase.
‘You are worried,’ Morrel went on. ‘Do you need something? Shall I call one of your people?’
‘Yes,’ Noirtier went.
Morrel hung on the bell-pull but, even though he tugged it to breaking point, no one came. So he turned back to Noirtier. The pallor and anguish had increased on the old man’s face.
‘My God!’ said Morrel. ‘Why does no one come? Is someone sick in the house?’
Noirtier’s eyes seemed to be bulging out of their sockets.
‘But what is wrong?’ Morrel went on. ‘You are frightening me… Valentine, Valentine!’
‘Yes, yes!’ Noirtier indicated.
Maximilien opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue could not form any sound. He staggered and held on to the panelling to support himself. Then he reached out towards the door.
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ the old man continued.
Maximilien plunged down the little staircase, covering it in two leaps, while Noirtier’s eyes seemed to shout at him: ‘Faster, faster!’
It took the young man only a minute to cross through several rooms, empty like the rest of the house, and reach Valentine’s apartments. He did not need to push the door to her room, which was already wide open. The first sound that he heard was a sob. As if through a cloud, he saw a black shape kneeling and buried in a confused mass of white linen. Fear, a dreadful fear, kept him frozen at the door.
It was then that he heard a voice say: ‘Valentine is dead!’ and a second voice, like an echo, reply: ‘Dead! Dead!’
_________
NOTES
1. Germain Pilon’s three Graces: The group, The Three Graces, was commissioned from the sculptor Germain Pilon (1528-90) to support the funerary urn of King Henri II. It is now in the Louvre.
