The Count of Monte Cristo

Outside the gates, in the dark lane beyond Auteuil, a sunburnt man with a red handkerchief and wolf’s teeth accosted young Andrea Cavalcanti as he prepared to mount his tilbury. The stranger called him Benedetto, the name he had used in the gutters of Marseille, and Andrea’s face went white. It was Caderousse, the former innkeeper of the Pont du Gard, escaped from the prison at Toulon, his pockets full of gold louis that Andrea pressed into his trembling hand. One hundred fifty francs a month, agreed Andrea, just enough to keep the man in a state resembling a retired baker and far from the questions that might arise in Paris. To pass the barrier, Caderousse stripped Andrea of his hat and his groom’s greatcoat, transformed himself into the image of a servant, and rode through the checkpoint without challenge. Once inside the city, he leapt down at a courtyard and vanished, leaving the young man bareheaded in the night, lamenting that no man in this world can call himself completely happy.

The next day brought storms of a different kind. At the Place Louis XV, Debray, Château-Renaud, and Morrel parted ways, the latter two to their domestic hearths, the former to a familiar door in the Rue de la Michodière, where Madame Danglars waited with news of her own distress. The evening at Monte Cristo’s had unsettled her, and she had been unwell all night. Debray pressed her gently, but she would say only that her nerves were frayed. When Danglars unexpectedly appeared, the baron dismissed his wife’s lover with cold politeness and closed the door behind him to speak alone with Hermine.

What followed was a reckoning long delayed. Danglars laid out the books. He had lost seven hundred thousand francs on the Spanish loan, he said, and he knew whose dreams had prompted the speculation. Madame Danglars had dreamed that Don Carlos had returned to Spain, and she had whispered the dream to her lover, Debray, who had whispered it back as news, and the banker had acted upon it and been ruined. Now he wanted a quarter of his losses from her, one hundred and seventy-five thousand francs, the fourth share of seven hundred thousand which he had always paid her on his gains. He named the ministers and the secret conversations at their tables, he named Debray, and he named even Villefort, reminding her that her first husband had died of grief upon discovering her pregnant by another. The baroness sat as if turned to stone, knowing that the worst of what Danglars had half-guessed was true, and knowing that he knew.

Danglars withdrew to his study. At the appointed hour, Major Cavalcanti arrived in his stiff uniform to settle the bond of forty thousand francs upon Monte Cristo’s endorsement. The banker’s fortunes were unraveling, and he did not yet know the half of it.

At half-past twelve, Madame Danglars ordered her carriage and slipped out, not to the Bois de Boulogne or the milliner’s, but to the Passage du Pont-Neuf, where she dismissed her coach and summoned a cab. She drew a thick black veil across her face, crossed the Seine, and was admitted at once to the private office of M. de Villefort. The procureur locked the door behind her, drew the bolts, and led her trembling to a chair.

What unfolded between them was a confession of a much older and more terrible crime. The house at Auteuil, Villefort explained, had once been their meeting place, long before either had married again. Hermine had been with child, a child Villefort had believed stillborn, a child he had wrapped in cloth and buried in the garden beneath the plantain trees. That same night, a Corsican had driven a dagger into his back, and he had been carried away half-dead, his secret intact. For twenty years he had believed the child dead and buried. But Monte Cristo, in that very spot, had just spoken of digging up bones, and the bones were not there.

Villefort had gone back, he said, on the night of his return, and searched the thicket by lantern light. The chest was gone. The grave was empty. Someone had taken the child, alive or dead, and carried it away. He had traced the matter to a foundling hospital, where a woman had claimed the infant wrapped in half a napkin marked with a baron’s coronet and the letter H. The woman had vanished at Châlons. The trail had ended there.

Hermine listened in horror, grasping his hands. If the child lived, if Monte Cristo knew of it, then both of them were lost. Villefort bade her be calm. He would discover who the count was and what he wanted, even if it meant writing to the prefect of police and following the threads to Greece and back. The two parted in the cold of the morning, each carrying a weight that no human being should have been asked to bear.

That same evening, in the modest house behind Saint-Sulpice, the Abbé Busoni received a visitor sent by the prefect’s office, and at the Rue Fontaine-Saint-Georges, a second visitor called upon Lord Wilmore. Each was given a careful account of one Zaccone, son of a Maltese shipbuilder, who had served in India, discovered a silver mine in Thessaly, bought a rock to call himself a count, and come to Paris to speculate upon railways and mineral springs. The man who played Lord Wilmore removed his false hair and red whiskers when the door closed, and the features of the Count of Monte Cristo looked back at his own reflection in the glass.

The night of the Morcerf summer ball arrived in July, warm and starlit, with colored lanterns strung through the garden and supper set beneath a tent on the lawn. Albert returned from Tréport in good spirits, eager to escape his engagement to Mademoiselle Danglars, and prevailed upon the count to attend. Madame de Morcerf had asked for him by name.

In the grove of lindens, Mercédès offered Monte Cristo Muscatel grapes from the conservatory. He refused. She offered him a peach. He refused again, and the fruit fell to the ground. She spoke of the Arabian custom of bread and salt, which binds those who share it as eternal friends, and asked if they were not friends. The count answered in formal phrases, his voice as measured as a stranger’s, though his eyes betrayed a more complicated and unforgiving heart.

When Albert came with news that M. de Saint-Méran had died upon the road from Marseille, and that Valentine had been struck like by a thunderbolt, the countess made one final attempt. She joined the hands of her son and the count, and asked again if they were friends. The count bowed with perfect respect and not one degree of warmth. The evening closed in shadow.