The Count of Monte Cristo

The Return of Edmond Dantès

Crushed, Fernand asks what she would do if Edmond were dead. She answers that she would die too. Before he can press further, a joyous voice calls, “Mercédès!” from outside, and the young girl, blushing with delight, leaps up crying that Edmond has not forgotten her and rushes to the door, throwing it open to welcome him. Fernand, pale and trembling, recoils as if confronted by a serpent and drops into a chair. Edmond and Mercédès fall into each other’s arms in a flood of Marseilles sunlight, so absorbed in one another that at first they seem unaware of anything else. At length Edmond perceives Fernand’s gloomy, threatening face in the shadow and instinctively puts his hand on his knife.

Fernand’s Humiliation

Edmond, frowning, apologizes for not seeing that there were three of them and asks Mercédès who the stranger is. Mercédès answers that he is Fernand, her cousin, her brother, the man who, after Edmond, she loves best in the world, and that he will be Edmond’s best friend. Edmond extends his hand cordially, but Fernand does not respond. Reading the situation in a single glance at Mercédès and at Fernand, Edmond’s anger rises, and he declares that he did not know he would meet an enemy in the house. Mercédès, furious, warns that if she believed that she would take his arm and leave for Marseilles never to return. Turning to Fernand, she fixes him with an imperious look and tells him that if any misfortune befell Edmond, she would cast herself from the Cape de Morgiou, forcing Fernand to confront the depth of her resolve. Fernand goes deadly pale, but under Mercédès’s ascendancy he slowly steps forward and offers Edmond his hand; the moment he touches it he knows he has given all he can, and he rushes from the house. Outside, tearing his hair, he cries out for anyone to deliver him from this man, calling himself wretched. A voice calls after the fleeing Fernand.