The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 50. The Morrel Family

At No. 7 Rue Meslay, the Count found a small white-stone house with flower beds in the court and a rockwork fountain the whole quarter envied as “The Little Versailles.” Maximilian Morrel, now a young Spahis officer decorated with the Legion of Honor, superintended his horse’s grooming. He threw away his cigar and ran to the carriage. His sister Julie, now Madame Herbault, plucked dead roses in the garden, her husband never far away. Emmanuel had sold the old Morrel house for 300,000 francs exactly when he and Julie had decided to retire; a merchant arrived offering a clear 15,000-franc profit on an insurance deal and was politely directed to M. Delaunay. They lived on 25,000 francs a year, perfectly content. At the sight of a crystal-covered silk purse on black velvet, the Count pressed his hand to his heart. The purse held relics of the unknown benefactor who saved the elder Morrel from suicide: the “Sinbad the Sailor” letter and a 100,000-franc diamond. Maximilian mentioned Penelon, the old sailor turned gardener, who had seen an Englishman at Trieste and recognized him as the writer. The Count suggested it was Lord Wilmore, an eccentric who did not believe in gratitude. Julie wept at the name. Then Maximilian told how the elder Morrel, on his deathbed, had been seized with a supernatural conviction his rescuer was no foreigner but one of his own countrymen. “Maximilian,” he had said, “it was Edmond Dantès!” The Count’s paleness grew alarming; he could not speak, pressed their hands, and departed hurriedly.

Chapter 51. Pyramus and Thisbe

Behind one of the most imposing mansions on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a Louis XIII-era iron gate had fallen into disuse. Beyond it lay an abandoned kitchen garden let to market-gardeners for 500 francs a year, overgrown with lucerne. A small door in the wall opened onto a projected street never built. Chestnut trees rose above the wall near the house, and a stone bench stood in dense shade. On a warm spring evening, Valentine de Villefort—having sent her stepmother, maid, and troublesome brother Edward on errands—stood at the iron gate peering through the planks. A young man in a gray blouse and velvet cap suddenly appeared, his carefully arranged black beard ill-suited to his plebeian dress: Maximilian Morrel. He had rented the plot to be near her, holding the title of its gardener to come and go without suspicion. Valentine laughed, then wept. She confessed her miserable life: neglected by her father, persecuted by her stepmother, accompanied only by paralyzed grandfather M. Noirtier. She told of her engagement to Franz d’Épinay, arranged by her father; of her stepmother’s hatred, rooted in envy of the fortune she would inherit from M. and Madame de Saint-Méran. She reminded him her father had spoken bitterly of the Morrels as Bonapartists, “food for cannon,” while her grandfather had shown pleasure at Maximilian’s Legion of Honor decoration. The old Jacobin and young Royalist were strange bedfellows as father and son. Then a voice called from behind the trees: “Mademoiselle, madame is searching for you everywhere; there is a visitor in the drawing-room.” “Who is it?” “Some grand personage—a prince, they say—the Count of Monte Cristo.” Valentine promised to come directly. The name sent an electric shock through Maximilian. He leaned on his spade and murmured: “I would give a great deal to know how the Count of Monte Cristo is acquainted with M. de Villefort.”

Chapter 52. Toxicology

The Count had come to return the procureur’s visit. Alone with Madame de Villefort, Edward—the “naughty child” who was “really so bright”—was summoned and began pulling feathers from a splendid paroquet and feeding it live flies. The Count smiled complacently at the boy, charming the maternal heart. Valentine was sent for, entering with traces of recent tears: a tall, graceful nineteen-year-old with chestnut hair, deep blue eyes, and a swan-like air. The Count pretended to recall meeting them before, perhaps at Perugia, perhaps at the Hôtel des Postes on Corpus Christi. Madame de Villefort’s memory stirred: yes, she had conversed there with a man in a long woollen mantle, a medical man who spoke of Perugino, Raphael, aqua Tofana, and poisons. That man was the Count. “I have studied chemistry and the natural sciences somewhat deeply, but only as an amateur,” he said. Edward recited: “Mithridates, rex Ponticus, the man who took cream in his cup of poison every morning at breakfast.” The Count replied he had used such precautions himself in Naples, Palermo, and Smyrna; cold northern temperaments were easier to fortify than rich southern ones. Madame de Villefort listened, motionless, her eyes kindling with a strange fire. Suppose the poison were brucine: one milligramme the first day, two the second, and so on. At the end of a month, the drinker would be fortified; his table companion drinking from the same carafe would die. He explained that in France, a man driven by hate or cupidity, with an enemy to destroy or relation to dispose of, went straight to the grocer or druggist under a false name—easier to trace than his real one—and, on the pretext that rats kept him awake, bought five or six grammes of arsenic. A cunning man visited five or six shops, making himself only five or six times easier to track. He then administered a dose strong enough to kill a mammoth; the victim’s groans alarmed the neighborhood. Police arrived, a doctor opened the body and collected arsenic from the entrails with a spoon, and the next day a hundred newspapers reported the fact with the victim and murderer’s names. Grocers and druggists came forward to say, “It was I who sold the arsenic to the gentleman,” and would rather recognize twenty innocent men than fail to identify the guilty purchaser. The foolish criminal was arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, confronted, confounded, condemned, and executed by hemp or steel; a woman of standing was locked up for life. “This is how you Northerners understand chemistry, madame. Desrues was, I must confess, more skilful.” The Orientals, he continued, did not confine themselves, as Mithridates had, to making a cuirass of their poisons; they also made them a dagger. Science became in their hands not only a defensive but, more often, an offensive weapon. With opium, belladonna, brucea, snake-wood, and cherry-laurel, they put to sleep all who stood in their way. No Egyptian, Turkish, or Greek woman, called a “good woman” in France, did not know how, by chemistry, to stupefy a doctor, and by psychology to amaze a confessor. Madame de Villefort replied that all the world did not have the secret of the Medicis or the Borgias. “Conscience remains,” she said. He answered conscience supplied a thousand good excuses. He cited Richard III, the sons of Edward, Lady Macbeth and her son, and how maternal love was a great virtue excusing a multitude of sins. Then he told of the Abbé Adelmonte, who watered a cabbage with strychnine: the rabbit died, the hen ate it and died, the vulture ate the hen and fell into a fish pond, the pike ate the vulture, and the pike served at table killed the guest at the fifth remove. All without trace. “One drop of that elixir sufficed to recall life to a dying child,” he said, opening the phial he had used on Edward, “but three drops would have filled his lungs with blood; six would have stopped his respiration; ten would have killed him. You know, madame, how I snatched him from those phials he so imprudently touched.” Madame de Villefort declared she suffered from fainting fits and longed for such a specific. The Count offered to send her the prescription. He declined her dinner invitation, having promised to escort a Greek princess to the opera, and took his leave. “He is a very strange man,” she murmured, “and in my opinion is himself the Adelmonte he talks about.” The result had surpassed Monte Cristo’s utmost expectations. “Good,” he said as he departed; “this is fruitful soil, and I am certain the seed sown will not fall on barren ground.” He sent her the prescription the next morning as promised.