The Count of Monte Cristo

In the small hours of the morning, Villefort stumbled home through a Paris that seemed to fold around him like a trap. He remembered his confrontation with his wife that very day—how he had demanded the location of her poison, had threatened her with the scaffold, had driven her to the very act he now rushed home to prevent. He burst into her room to find her dead on the floor, a crystal bottle still clutched in her hand, and his son Edward cold on the sofa beside her, a folded paper on his breast. The note read: “A good mother cannot depart without her son.”

Screaming, Villefort stumbled to his father’s room and found the Abbé Busoni waiting. But the priest threw off his disguise, and Villefort recognized Edmond Dantès—the man he had condemned to a living death, the man whose father he had driven to starvation. Monte Cristo, his face pale with horror at the sight that exceeded his vengeance, took the dead child in his arms and tried to revive him. Finding that even his arts were useless, he laid the boy beside his mother and rushed down into the garden, where he found Villefort digging frantically in the earth, mad, utterly mad, calling for a son who would never answer. “It is not here!” he cried, and began again. Monte Cristo drew back in horror, his triumph curdling to ashes, and fled into the street, for the first time doubting whether he had the right to do what he had done.

The Count returned to his house, where Morrel wandered like a ghost awaiting a sign. “Prepare yourself, Maximilian,” he said. “We leave Paris tomorrow.”

Their journey south unfolded with the Count’s customary speed—post-chaise to Châlons, steamer down the Rhône, the white towers of Marseilles rising at last against the autumn sky. On the Canebière, they paused. There, on the quay where the Pharaon had once entered port, Morrel relived the moment his father had thrown himself into his arms. A vessel was setting sail for Algiers, and Morrel pointed out a young lieutenant waving his hat—Albert de Morcerf, departing for Africa. Beside him, a veiled woman was waving farewell.

That woman was Mercédès. The Count dismissed Morrel to weep at his father’s grave and walked alone to the Allées de Meilhan, to the small house with the worn stone steps and the great blackened vine. He found her in the garden beneath the Virginia jessamine, weeping with her face hidden in her hands. She had come to bid her son farewell, and now she was alone.

Their meeting was a long, aching dialogue between two souls shaped by the same catastrophe. She would not reproach him. “I neither reproach you nor hate you, my friend,” she said. “It is myself that I blame, myself that I hate.” She had been a coward, she confessed; she had let Morcerf perish rather than speak the truth that might have saved him. She refused his offers of money—her son would not permit it. Her only request was that Albert be happy. The Count promised.

At last Mercédès withdrew up the stairs of the little house, and the Count was left alone beneath the climbing vine. He walked slowly toward the quay, his heart heavy with the weight of what he had wrought. At the top of the hill of Villejuif, he paused to look back upon Paris, that great modern Babylon where he had arrived less than six months before. He had not sought personal gain or useless vengeance; he had been, he believed, the instrument of an offended God. But the sight of Valentine’s corpse, the sight of Edward’s little body in Mercédès’ arms, had given him pause. Had he gone too far? He did not know. He only knew that his work was done, his mission ended, and that the great city could now afford him neither pain nor pleasure. He murmured a prayer, entered his carriage, and was gone.

In the little house by the Allées de Meilhan, Mercédès sat at the window of the room where old Dantès had once lived, straining her eyes to see the ship that carried her son across the sea. Her lips moved soundlessly, murmuring a single name over and over, the name of the man she had loved in another lifetime, the name of the man who had just left her forever: “Edmond, Edmond, Edmond.”