The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 45. The Rain of Blood

As a storm raged, jeweller Joannes dined at Caderousse’s inn. Caderousse paced darkly; La Carconte was uncharacteristically attentive, a warning the traveller ignored. After the meal, Caderousse flung open the door to declare the storm over, just as a thunderclap rang out, the lamp blew out, and the household retired. Bertuccio, hiding beneath the floorboards, overheard all. A pistol shot broke the silence; he emerged to find Caderousse, pale and blood-soaked, clutching the shagreen diamond case. Caderousse wrapped the case, grabbed gold and banknotes, and fled. Upstairs, La Carconte lay shot dead on the staircase; Joannes lay on the floor above with three breast wounds and a table knife in a fourth. He opened his eyes, tried to speak, and died. Customs officers found Bertuccio drenched in La Carconte’s blood and dragged him in chains to Nîmes. His only hope was Abbé Busoni, who had stayed at the Pont du Gard inn that morning. Three months and five days later, the priest appeared, confirmed the diamond story, and took Bertuccio’s confession—including the Auteuil affair, where a Villefort infant was buried alive in a garden and later rescued. The magistrate began to doubt Bertuccio’s guilt. Caderousse was soon captured; the innkeeper confessed all, was sentenced to the galleys for life, and Bertuccio was freed. The abbé sent Bertuccio to Monte Cristo with a letter of recommendation. In the Count’s service, Bertuccio never mentioned his sister Assunta or adopted son Benedetto until the Count asked directly. Benedetto had returned to Rogliano with two accomplices, barricaded the doors, and tortured Assunta over a brazier for her money. Her clothes caught fire; she ran shrieking to the locked doors and windows, and died of her burns. Benedetto was never seen again. The Count absolved Bertuccio but reminded him his true guilt lay in failing to restore the Villefort infant to its mother, then dismissed him to wander the garden alone, murmuring over the child’s grave site. Back in Paris, Monte Cristo surveyed his Champs-Élysées residence with uncanny familiarity, ordered Ali to keep his Greek and French attendants strictly separate, and welcomed Haydée through a tapestried passage to a concealed suite. When Baron Danglars arrived, he was refused entry. The Count acquired Danglars’s horses, instructed Bertuccio to secure a seaside estate with a small harbor for his corvette, then set out for the banker’s home on the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin.

Chapter 46. Unlimited Credit

Danglars—flat forehead, projecting cheekbones, serpentine cast—surveyed Monte Cristo’s house from his carriage and was snubbed at the gate. Ali signaled the Count received no visitors; Danglars flung down his card and drove to the Chamber of Deputies muttering that the Count of Monte Cristo carried himself with the airs of a prince. From behind his blinds, the Count observed him with disgust. “What a countenance,” he murmured. He instructed Bertuccio to purchase the dappled grays Danglars had been driving, offering any price to humiliate the banker, and gave Baptistin a stern lecture on trust, demonstrating to Ali in Arabic that an unfaithful servant would be killed, not dismissed. At five o’clock, the Count descended, saw the dappled grays now harnessed to his own carriage, and drove to Danglars’s mansion. Presiding over a railway committee, Danglars boasted of an “unlimited credit” letter from Thomson & French and the strange count who claimed it. He had hoped to overwhelm his visitor with his white-and-gold drawing-room, but Monte Cristo regarded passed-off copies of Albano and Fattore with polite disdain. An exchange of titles followed: the Count conceded the baron’s many honors; goaded, Danglars conceded nothing. When Danglars questioned the “unlimited” credit, Monte Cristo drew two 500,000-franc sight-payable treasury orders from his pocket and laid them before the stammering banker, alongside letters from Arstein & Eskeles of Vienna and Baring of London proving his standing. Danglars capitulated. They agreed on six million francs as the probable first-year expenditure, half in gold, half in notes, to be delivered by ten the next morning. The Count hinted at a long-dormant family treasure whose income had doubled the capital. He was then led to meet Baroness Danglars, where Lucien Debray waited, and a connection to the Morcerfs surfaced in conversation.