The Count of Monte Cristo

Villefort’s Murder and Discovery of a Live Infant

Bertuccio watched in astonishment as Villefort dug a hole and produced a two-foot-long, six-to-eight-inch-deep box from beneath his mantle. Driven by curiosity mingled with hatred, Bertuccio stayed motionless. The moment Villefort stamped the earth flat, Bertuccio rushed upon him, plunging his knife into the magistrate’s breast and crying out that he was Giovanni Bertuccio, claiming blood vengeance for his brother and the box’s contents for the widow. Villefort fell silently. Bertuccio seized the box, refilled the hole, tossed the spade over the wall, and escaped through the gate, double-locking it behind him.

Rescue and Abandonment of the Infant in Paris

Fleeing toward the river, Bertuccio pried open the box and discovered a linen-wrapped new-born infant with a purple face and violet hands—apparent signs of suffocation. Yet feeling a faint pulse, and recalling his training as a hospital assistant at Bastia, he inflated the child’s lungs until, after a quarter-hour, it cried feebly. Rejoicing that God had allowed him to save a life in exchange for the one he had taken, he sought an asylum in Paris. At the city gates he claimed to have found the child on the road; the blood-soaked linen and box supported his story. He left the child at an asylum on the Rue d’Enfer, deliberately cutting the marked linen in two so he kept one identifying half, then fled at full speed to Rogliano and his sister-in-law Assunta.

第四十四章 The Vendetta

Chapter 44, titled “The Vendetta,” continues Bertuccio’s narrative to Monte Cristo, recounting the fate of the abandoned child, his return to smuggling after his brother’s assassination, the reclamation of the child Benedetto by Assunta, Benedetto’s corrupt upbringing and rejection of smuggling life, a 1829 smuggling raid on the Rhône, and Bertuccio’s overhearing of a crucial conversation between the Caderousses and a Parisian jeweller about a diamond supposedly bequeathed by Edmond Dantès. Monte Cristo periodically interrupts to ask precise questions that guide Bertuccio’s recollections.