The Count of Monte Cristo

After the visit, the count travels to his newly purchased home at 28 Rue de la Fontaine in Auteuil, accompanied by his steward Bertuccio, a Corsican who served as a soldier and smuggler before entering the count’s employ. Bertuccio is visibly distressed the entire ride, making the sign of the cross repeatedly and muttering prayers, and turns ashen when he learns the house the count has bought is in Auteuil. When they arrive at the isolated, old house, the concierge tells them it was previously owned by the Marquis de Saint-Méran, Villefort’s father-in-law, and Bertuccio nearly collapses. The count forces him to tour the property, and when they reach the garden, Bertuccio freezes at the base of a plane tree, sobbing that this is the exact spot where he committed a murder years prior. The count teases him gently at first, then threatens to fire him if he does not confess, and Bertuccio finally agrees to tell the full story of his vendetta, beginning in 1815.

Bertuccio explains that his elder brother, a Bonapartist soldier, was assassinated by royalist mobs in Nîmes after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. When Bertuccio went to the local king’s attorney, Gérard de Villefort, to demand justice, Villefort callously refused, calling his brother a Bonapartist traitor who got what he deserved, and threatened to have Bertuccio arrested. Bertuccio swore a lifelong vendetta against Villefort, and followed him when he was transferred to Versailles, then to Paris, tracking him to the Saint-Méran house in Auteuil, where he discovered Villefort was visiting a pregnant young mistress. One night, Bertuccio hid in the garden, waiting for Villefort to emerge, and watched as the prosecutor carried a small box out to bury. Bertuccio attacked him, stabbing him through the heart, and opened the box to find a newborn baby boy, suffocated but still breathing. He revived the child, left him at the Paris Foundling Asylum, keeping half of the linen swaddle marked with an H and N under a baron’s coronet as proof of his parentage. He returned to Corsica, where his sister-in-law Assunta regretted that he had not brought the child home to raise as their own.

Bertuccio returned to smuggling, his small fortune growing, until Assunta used the linen swaddle to reclaim the child from the asylum, naming him Benedetto. The boy was beautiful but cruel from infancy, stealing and lying from a young age, and when Bertuccio tried to apprentice him to the smuggling life, Benedetto mocked the offer and ran away to join a gang of petty criminals in Bastia. In 1829, Bertuccio was part of a smuggling run on the Rhône, near Beaucaire, when customs officers raided their vessel; he escaped by diving into the river, and hid in the shed of an inn run by Gaspard Caderousse and his wife La Carconte, a couple Bertuccio had known in Nîmes. Through a hole in the partition, he overheard Caderousse and a Parisian jeweller named Joannes negotiating to sell a large diamond that Caderousse claimed had been left to him by Edmond Dantès, via the Abbé Busoni. They haggled the price down to 45,000 francs, and the jeweller left as a thunderstorm rolled in, but Caderousse and La Carconte whispered of robbing and killing him on the road. Minutes later, the jeweller returned, saying he had forgotten his cane, and La Carconte double-locked the door behind him, leaving the couple and their hidden treasure alone with the man they planned to murder, as the storm raged outside.

Chapter 45. The Rain of Blood – Chapter 52. Toxicology

The storm-lashed night at the roadside inn of Pont du Gard upended the life of the man who would one day become Bertuccio, faithful servant to the Count of Monte Cristo. Hiding in the inn’s crawlspace after a day of smuggling, he watched as Caderousse and his wife La Carconte fawned over their unexpected guest: a jeweller waiting out the violent mistral, there to appraise a stolen diamond the couple had come into. La Carconte, usually querulous, transformed into a fawning hostess, insisting the jeweller stay the night in the chamber above. When he climbed the stairs, Bertuccio drifted to sleep, only to be jolted awake by a pistol crack, a horrified cry, and the thud of a body hitting the stairs. Caderousse stumbled downstairs, paler than death, blood on his shirt, grabbed the shagreen case holding the diamond, stuffed his stolen gold and banknotes into his pockets, and fled into the dark. Bertuccio stumbled upstairs to find the jeweller murdered, three wounds in his breast, a knife buried to the hilt in a fourth gash; La Carconte lay dead on the stairs, her throat shot through. Before he could process the horror, gendarmes burst in, saw his blood-soaked clothes, and arrested him on the spot. Wrongfully accused, Bertuccio had only one plea: send for the Abbé Busoni, who had stayed at the inn that morning. Two months of despair followed, his trial looming, when Busoni appeared at the prison doors, confirmed Bertuccio’s account of the stolen diamond, and listened to his confession of the earlier Auteuil murder to prove his innocence. When Caderousse was finally caught and confessed to the jeweller’s killing, Bertuccio was freed, and Busoni gave him a letter of introduction to the Count of Monte Cristo, the master he would serve faithfully for years. It was during a quiet walk in the Count’s new Parisian garden that Bertuccio finally broke his silence on the tragedy that had haunted him since his exoneration. He had rushed back to Corsica the moment he was free, only to find his home in Rogliano in flames, his beloved sister Assunta dying of burns she’d suffered when her adopted son Benedetto and his two accomplices had tortured her over a brazier to force her to reveal hidden money. The neighbors had found her still breathing but mortally wounded, every drawer in the house forced open, the cash stolen, Benedetto gone forever. Bertuccio took the crime as divine punishment for his own sin: when he had rescued the infant son of Procureur Villefort from a live burial, he had been too cowardly to return the child to its mother, fearing he would be arrested for his part in the Auteuil affair. The Count listened, then absolved Bertuccio of the Corsican tragedy, but reminded him that abandoning the Villefort baby was his true crime. Dismissing him to wander the garden alone, the Count himself paused over the spot where the infant’s grave had been dug, murmuring that the child had never been buried there at all. That same evening, the Count surveyed his new Champs-Élysées mansion with uncanny familiarity, as if he had known every corridor and hidden nook for years. He ordered Ali, his Nubian servant, to keep his Greek and French attendants strictly separate, then welcomed Haydée, the young Greek woman who had been his companion through Italy, escorting her through a tapestried passage to a concealed suite of rooms all her own, before retiring to his own pavilion as the house fell silent. The next day, Baron Danglars—banker, Chamber of Deputies member, and self-satisfied schemer—arrived at the mansion, only to be turned away by the concierge. Infuriated by the slight, he grumbled that the Count must be a prince to demand such deference, but consoled himself with the knowledge that the Count held unlimited credit at his bank. When the Count learned Danglars owned a pair of dappled gray horses even finer than the ones he had purchased, he ordered Bertuccio to buy them at double the price, then tasked him with finding a Normandy seaside estate with a small harbor for his corvette, plus horse relays set ten leagues apart along the northern and southern roads. He then set off for Danglars’ home on the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. Their meeting was a battle of wits from the first. Danglars mocked the “unlimited” credit line from Thomson & French, questioning its validity, until the Count pulled out letters of unlimited credit from rival banking houses in Vienna, London, and Paris, reducing the banker to stunned silence. When Danglars boasted his bank could cover even a million francs, the Count scoffed, pulling out two 500,000-franc notes from his pocket, and settled on a first-year allowance of six million francs, with half a million to be delivered to his house by ten the next morning. Danglars, eager to flatter his new wealthy client, invited the Count to meet his wife, Baroness Danglars, and as they walked to her boudoir, he mentioned his wife’s close friend Lucien Debray, private secretary to the Minister of the Interior, and their connection to the Morcerf family. The baroness’s boudoir was a soft pink oasis of taste in Danglars’ gaudy gold-and-white mansion, decorated entirely by her and Debray, who the Count already knew from his meeting with Albert de Morcerf in Rome. She was eager to meet the man rumored to spend six million francs in a year, and their conversation turned to horses—until her maid burst in to tell her the dappled grays, her personal property, had vanished from the stables. Furious, she accused Danglars of selling them for a pittance, until he admitted he’d sold them for a 16,000-franc profit to a “madman” who’d sent his steward to buy them at any cost. Just then, Debray spotted the very same horses harnessed to the Count’s carriage outside, and the Count admitted he’d paid 30,000 francs for them. He returned the horses to the baroness that very evening, adorned with large diamonds fastened to the center of each harness rosette, earning her gratitude and driving a wedge between her and her tight-fisted husband. Two days later, the Count set a trap to solidify his hold over the Danglars household. He told Ali he would send a carriage drawn by the dappled grays past their house, and ordered him to stop the horses at any cost. True to his word, a few days later a carriage drawn by the bolting grays came careening down the street, carrying a terrified Madame de Villefort and her young son Edward, who had lost consciousness from fright. Ali lassoed the front horse’s legs, letting himself be dragged a few steps before the animal fell, then seized the second horse by the nostrils until it collapsed beside its companion. The Count carried the pair inside, revived Edward with a single drop of his secret blood-colored elixir, and sent them home in his own carriage with Ali driving. The story of the adventure spread like wildfire through Parisian high society, and that night, Procureur Villefort arrived at the Count’s door in full formal dress to deliver his thanks, his rigid magistrate’s demeanor barely hiding his curiosity about the mysterious nobleman. The Count’s visit to the Villefort household a few days later was a masterclass in subtle menace and observation. He regaled Madame de Villefort with stories of Eastern poisons, Mithridates’ legendary immunity to toxin, and the work of the Sicilian Abbé Adelmonte, who had conducted chilling experiments with poisoned cabbage, rabbits, hens, and vultures to prove poison could kill without leaving any trace for human law to detect. Madame de Villefort, whose eyes sparkled with unnerving fascination as he spoke, asked about counter-poisons, and the Count offered her a vial of his own special elixir: one drop could revive a dying child, five or six would kill silently, even when added to wine without altering its taste. He declined her dinner invitation, claiming he had to escort Haydée to the opera, and sent the prescription she requested the next morning, pleased to see the “fruitful soil” of her curiosity and ambition had accepted the seed he had planted. Before his visit to the Villeforts, the Count had slipped away to visit Haydée in her hidden Oriental suite, the soft glow of rose-colored glass lighting her boudoir as she reclined on silk divans, narghile in hand. He told her she was free to leave him now that they were in Paris, to go where she pleased, wear what she wanted, but begged her to keep the secret of her birth—never speak of her father, the Greek lord he had rescued from the Turks who had killed her family. She told him she would never leave him, that he was her whole world, that she would be content to spend her days dreaming of their past in the East and waiting for his visits. He promised her he would never abandon her, that she would want for nothing, and left to visit the Morrel family, his heart light with the memory of her devotion. The Morrels’ modest home in the Rue Meslay was a haven of simple happiness. Maximilian, the young army captain, was weeding his lucern field when the Count arrived, and his sister Julie (now Madame Herbault) and brother-in-law Emmanuel greeted him warmly. The family lived comfortably on 25,000 francs a year, the result of six years of hard work after they had sold Emmanuel’s business to preserve the Morrel name, and their most prized possession was a silk purse and a 100,000-franc diamond left to them by their unknown benefactor, who had saved their father from ruin and suicide years before. Julie mentioned the benefactor had been an Englishman named Lord Wilmore who had stayed in Rome in 1829, but the Count told them Lord Wilmore had vanished into the East two years prior, and would likely never return. Julie and Maximilian were heartbroken, and when Maximilian mentioned his father had always believed the benefactor was Edmond Dantès, the Count’s face went white, and he hurried out of the house after only a few minutes, his voice thick with unspoken emotion. That evening, Valentine de Villefort slipped out of her father’s mansion to meet Maximilian in the abandoned kitchen-garden behind the house, the overgrown chestnut trees shielding them from prying eyes. Maximilian told her he had rented the lucern field bordering the garden, so he could meet her safely without being arrested as a suspicious loiterer, but Valentine was despondent: she was betrothed to Franz d’Épinay, her father was inflexible, her stepmother hated her for the large inheritance she would receive from her maternal grandparents, her grandfather Noirtier was paralyzed and unable to help her, and she had no one in the world but Maximilian to confide in. She told him about the day her father and Danglars had insulted the Bonapartist Morrel family, and how her grandfather, a former Jacobin who had helped overturn the French monarchy, had been overjoyed to hear Maximilian had been made an officer of the Legion of Honor. A servant’s voice called Valentine back to the house before they could talk further, and Maximilian was left alone, wondering what connection the Count of Monte Cristo had to the Villefort family that would let him move so freely in their circles.