The Count of Monte Cristo

第二十六章 The Pont du Gard Inn

The chapter introduces the Pont du Gard Inn, a struggling roadside tavern situated between Beaucaire and Bellegarde, identifiable by the flapping tin sign depicting the famous aqueduct. The establishment is run by Gaspard Caderousse, a weathered, sun-darkened man in his middle years, together with his sickly and perpetually complaining wife Madeleine Radelle, known by the Provençal sobriquet La Carconte, along with two meager servants. The inn has fallen on hard times ever since a new canal between Beaucaire and Aiguemortes siphoned off the post-road traffic that once brought the couple customers, leaving Caderousse to spend long, fruitless days watching the empty road from his doorstep while his wife’s bitter laments echo from her upstairs room. The quiet is broken when a priest, mounted on a Hungarian-bred horse, arrives under the fierce midday sun and inquires whether the host is indeed Gaspard Caderousse, formerly a tailor living on the fourth floor of the Allées de Meilhan. Seating himself at a table and soothing the hostile black dog Margotin, the abbé proceeds to question Caderousse about a young sailor named Edmond Dantès, whom the innkeeper enthusiastically claims as an intimate friend, his face flushing and then paling as the priest reveals that Dantès died a broken prisoner before reaching his thirtieth year. Stirred by news of Dantès’s last wishes to clear his name, and even more so by the priest’s mention of a diamond of immense value given to the doomed sailor by a wealthy English fellow-prisoner, Caderousse’s manner grows increasingly eager and unsettled, betraying the mixture of greed, guilt, and old envy that the impassive abbé observes with quiet, penetrating scrutiny.