The Count of Monte Cristo

The 1815 Nîmes Bonapartist Massacres

Upon entering Nîmes, Bertuccio waded through blood amid the notorious massacres carried out by the royalist brigands Trestaillon, Truphemy, and Graffan, who slaughtered suspected Bonapartists. While Bertuccio himself—a simple Corsican fisherman—had nothing to fear and even found the chaos favorable for smuggling, he was terrified for his uniformed brother. Arriving at the inn, he learned that his brother had been murdered the previous evening at the very door where he sought shelter, and no one dared name the killers.

Bertuccio’s Failed Appeal to Magistrate Villefort

Desperate for justice, Bertuccio sought out the king’s attorney, identifying him as Villefort—a royalist from Marseilles who had reportedly been among the first to warn the government of Napoleon’s escape from Elba. Bertuccio formally demanded an investigation into his brother’s assassination and appealed for a small pension for his widowed sister-in-law. Villefort callously refused, dismissing the killing as either a duel among unruly soldiers or a natural act of political reprisal, and had Bertuccio ejected.

Villefort’s Refusal and Bertuccio’s Vendetta Oath

Bertuccio leaned close to the stone-faced magistrate and whispered a Corsican oath of vendetta: “I will kill you.” He declared that Villefort’s “last hour” would come at their next meeting, then walked out before Villefort could react. The shaken magistrate immediately sought protection, refused to go out unattended, and eventually secured a transfer to Versailles. Bertuccio, however, refused to be deterred by distance, keeping within half a day of Villefort’s carriage on foot, though constrained by the need to provide for his sister-in-law and avoid capture.

Bertuccio Follows Villefort to Auteuil

After three months of surveillance at Versailles, Bertuccio discovered that Villefort was making secret nocturnal visits to Auteuil. He traced the magistrate to the very house where they now sit—Villefort’s father-in-law’s property, belonging to M. de Saint-Méran of Marseilles. Villefort would leave his carriage at a nearby inn and slip in through a small garden gate. Bertuccio relocated to Auteuil to lie in wait, and he learned the property was reportedly rented to a mysterious young woman known only as “the Baroness.”

Discovery of Villefort’s Secret Garden Visits

One evening, peering over the wall, Bertuccio saw a young, fair, eighteen- or nineteen-year-old woman in a loose muslin dress, visibly pregnant, walking alone in the garden. Shortly after, Villefort entered through the little door, the lovers embraced, and they retired into the house together. Bertuccio concluded that Villefort would have to cross the garden alone on his way out—a vulnerability he could exploit.

Witnessing Villefort Bury a Mysterious Box

Three days later, after observing a servant gallop to Versailles and return covered in dust, Bertuccio watched Villefort re-enter the garden on foot, muffled in a mantle. Springing over the wall with a sharpened knife, Bertuccio hid in a thicket near the path Villefort would have to take. On a windy late-September night, with moonlight barely piercing the dark shrubberies, he waited through imagined groans. At midnight a faint light appeared, Villefort emerged carrying a spade, and paused near Bertuccio’s hiding place.

Villefort’s Murder and Discovery of a Live Infant

Bertuccio watched in astonishment as Villefort dug a hole and produced a two-foot-long, six-to-eight-inch-deep box from beneath his mantle. Driven by curiosity mingled with hatred, Bertuccio stayed motionless. The moment Villefort stamped the earth flat, Bertuccio rushed upon him, plunging his knife into the magistrate’s breast and crying out that he was Giovanni Bertuccio, claiming blood vengeance for his brother and the box’s contents for the widow. Villefort fell silently. Bertuccio seized the box, refilled the hole, tossed the spade over the wall, and escaped through the gate, double-locking it behind him.

Rescue and Abandonment of the Infant in Paris

Fleeing toward the river, Bertuccio pried open the box and discovered a linen-wrapped new-born infant with a purple face and violet hands—apparent signs of suffocation. Yet feeling a faint pulse, and recalling his training as a hospital assistant at Bastia, he inflated the child’s lungs until, after a quarter-hour, it cried feebly. Rejoicing that God had allowed him to save a life in exchange for the one he had taken, he sought an asylum in Paris. At the city gates he claimed to have found the child on the road; the blood-soaked linen and box supported his story. He left the child at an asylum on the Rue d’Enfer, deliberately cutting the marked linen in two so he kept one identifying half, then fled at full speed to Rogliano and his sister-in-law Assunta.