The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 114. Peppino / Chapter 117. The Fifth of October

Baron Danglars, still marked by the fresh ribbon of his Legion of Honor, raced post from Florence to Rome in the days after the steamer vanished behind Cape Morgiou, shouting only Italian musical terms—Allegro! for uphill stretches, Moderato! for descents—at his postilions, a habit that amused his drivers all along the hilly road. He checked into the Hôtel d’Espagne, where the ever-obliging Signor Pastrini pointed him toward the famed Thomson & French bank on the Via dei Banchi, and Danglars hurried there to withdraw five million francs, his face bright with triumph at clawing back his fortune after his public ruin. Unseen by the baron, Peppino, a sharp-eyed Roman bandit, had already tailed him from the street, even confirming the exact sum with the bank clerk before slipping back into the crowd of idlers outside. That night, Danglars tucked his pocketbook full of funds under his pillow, then set out for Venice the next afternoon, delayed only by slow police formalities and a lazy posting-master that kept him from leaving Rome until three. As his comfortable English calash rolled down the Ancona road, he dozed off, only to jolt awake when the carriage stopped in a desolate, unpopulated stretch of countryside, no town in sight. The postilion refused to answer his questions, cloaked men on horseback flanked the carriage, and when the vehicle turned sharply, Danglars realized they were looping back toward Rome, not heading to Venice. He spotted the broken aqueducts of the Appian Way, then the ruins of Caracalla’s circus, and the truth struck him: he had fallen into the hands of Roman bandits. Peppino led him through a narrow rock fissure into a catacomb hideout carved from ancient sepulchres, where bandit captain Luigi Vampa sat reading Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. Vampa ordered his men to show Danglars to a bed, and when the banker found a real cell furnished with dried grass and goat skins, a bolted door sealing him inside, he remembered Albert de Morcerf had been held in this very cell for a 4,000 crown ransom. Danglars quickly calculated his own ransom would be set at 8,000 crowns, leaving him with nearly five million francs, and fell asleep with the same calm as the ancient conqueror Vampa was reading about. Weeks later, on the fifth of October, the grief-stricken Maximilian Morrel arrived by yacht at dusk on the island of Monte Cristo, exactly on the date he had named for a painless death the Count had promised him. The Count greeted him on the shore, then led him into his lavish underground grotto, where they spoke at length of grief, mortality, and the Count’s offer of his entire hundred-million fortune to keep Morrel alive. Morrel refused firmly, saying he had come to die, and swallowed the mysterious greenish substance the Count offered. As the drug took hold, he drifted toward unconsciousness, and saw a vision of Valentine appear in the doorway—she was alive, the Count had saved her from a poisoning plot too. The Count told Valentine he would be departing, and asked her to care for Haydée; when he informed Haydée she was free to leave and reclaim her father’s name and fortune, she broke down and confessed she loved him. The Count realized he loved her too, accepting her devotion as a sign of divine pardon for his years of obsessive vengeance. Morrel revived, and Jacopo arrived with the Count’s farewell letter, bequeathing all his properties to the young couple and entrusting them with the simple, enduring maxim that would guide the rest of their lives: “Wait and hope.” That evening, the Count and Haydée sailed away across the Mediterranean, while Morrel and Valentine watched from the shore, ready to build their shared future.