The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (12 page)

‘Well done, Danglars, well done. You’re a good fellow. I had already thought about you, in the event of poor Dantès becoming captain of the
Pharaon
.’

‘How so, Monsieur?’

‘Well, you see, I did ask Dantès what he thought of you and if he would have any objection to my leaving you in your post; I don’t know why, but I thought I had noticed some coldness between you.’

‘And what was his reply?’

‘He told me that he did indeed feel that he had some grievance against you, though in circumstances that he would not explain; but that anyone who enjoyed the shipowner’s confidence also had his own.’

‘Hypocrite!’ muttered Danglars.

‘Poor Dantès,’ said Caderousse. ‘He was an excellent fellow, and that’s a fact.’

‘Yes, but meanwhile,’ M. Morrel said, ‘the
Pharaon
has no captain.’

‘Oh, we must hope,’ said Danglars, ‘that, since we cannot sail again for three months, Dantès will be freed before then.’

‘Of course, but in the meanwhile?’

‘Well, Monsieur Morrel, in the meantime, I am here. As you know, I can manage a ship as well as the first ocean-going captain who may come along. It may even benefit you to use me, because when Edmond comes out of prison you will not have to dismiss anybody: he will quite simply resume his post and I mine.’

‘Thank you, Danglars,’ said the shipowner. ‘That arranges everything. I therefore authorize you to take command and supervise the unloading: whatever disaster may befall an individual, business must not suffer.’

‘Have no fear, Monsieur. But can we at least go and visit him? Poor Edmond!’

‘I’ll let you know as soon as I can, Danglars. I shall try to speak to Monsieur de Villefort and intercede with him on the prisoner’s behalf. I know that he is a rabid Royalist; but, dammit, though he’s a Royalist and the crown prosecutor, he is also a man and not, I believe, a wicked one.’

‘No,’ said Danglars. ‘Though I have heard it said that he is ambitious, which is much the same.’

‘Well, we shall find out,’ M. Morrel said, with a sigh. ‘Go on board and I’ll join you there.’

He left the two friends, to make his way towards the law courts.

‘You see how things are turning out?’ Danglars said to Caderousse. ‘Do you still want to go and speak for Dantès?’

‘No, indeed not. But it is dreadful that a trick should have such dire consequences.’

‘Pah! Who played the trick? Not you or I. You know very well that I threw the paper into a corner. I even thought I had torn it up.’

‘No, no,’ Caderousse insisted. ‘As far as that goes, I am certain. I can see it in the corner of the arbour, screwed up in a ball – and I wish it were still in the place where I saw it.’

‘What do you expect? Fernand must have picked it up, copied it or had it copied; perhaps he did not even take that trouble; which means… Good Lord! Suppose he sent my own letter! Luckily I disguised my handwriting.’

‘But did you know that Dantès was a conspirator?’

‘Did I know? I knew nothing at all. As I told you, I was making a joke, that’s all. It seems that, like Harlequin, I spoke a true word in jest.’

‘No matter,’ said Caderousse. ‘I’d give a great deal for this not to have happened, or at least not to be involved in it. You wait and see, Danglars! It will bring us misfortune!’

‘If it brings misfortune, it will be to the guilty party, and the real responsibility lies with Fernand, not with us. What ill do you suppose could befall us? All we have to do is to keep quiet and not breathe a word of this, and the storm will blow over without striking us.’

‘Amen!’ Caderousse said, waving goodbye to Danglars and making his way towards the Allées de Meilhan, shaking his head and muttering to himself, as people are inclined to do when they have a good deal on their minds.

‘Good!’ Danglars exclaimed. ‘Everything is working out as I expected. I am now captain
pro tem
and, if only that idiot Caderousse can keep his mouth shut, captain for good. So, the only other eventuality is that the Law may release Dantès? Ah, well,’ he added, with a smile, ‘the Law is the Law, and I am happy to put myself in her hands.’

Upon which, he leapt into a boat and gave the boatman the order to row him out to the
Pharaon
where the shipowner, as you will recall, had arranged to meet him.

That same day, at the same time, in the Rue du Grand-Cours, opposite the Fontaine des Méduses, a betrothal feast was also being celebrated, in one of those old buildings in the aristocratic style of the architect Puget. However, instead of the participants in this other scene being common people, sailors and soldiers, they belonged to the cream of Marseillais society. There were former magistrates who had resigned their appointments under the usurper, veteran officers who had left our army to serve under Condé, and young men brought up by families which were still uncertain about their security, despite the four or five substitutes that had been hired for them, out of hatred for the man whom five years of exile were to make a martyr, and fifteen years of Restoration, a god.
¹

They were dining and the conversation flowed back and forth, fired by every passion – those passions of the time that were still more terrible, ardent and bitter in the South where, for five centuries, religious quarrels had seconded political ones.

The emperor, king of the island of Elba after having been ruler of part of the world, exercising sovereignty over a population of 500 or 600 souls, when he had once heard the cry ‘Long Live Napoleon!’ from 120 million subjects, in ten different languages, was treated here as a man lost for ever to France and to the throne. The magistrates picked on his political errors, the soldiers spoke of Moscow and Leipzig, the women discussed his divorce from Joséphine.
²
This Royalist gathering, rejoicing and triumphing not in the fall of the man but in the annihilation of the idea, felt as though life was beginning again and it was emerging from an unpleasant dream.

An old man, decorated with the Cross of Saint-Louis,
³
rose and invited his fellow-guests to drink the health of King Louis XVIII. He was the Marquis de Saint-Méran.

At this toast, recalling both the exile of Hartwell
⁴
and the king who had brought peace to France, there was a loud murmur. Glasses were raised in the English manner, the women unpinned their bouquets and strewed them over the tablecloth. There was something almost poetical in their fervour.

‘If they were here, they would be obliged to assent,’ said the Marquise de Saint-Méran, a dry-eyed, thin-lipped woman with a bearing that was aristocratic and still elegant, despite her fifty years. ‘If they were here, all those revolutionaries who drove us out and whom we, in turn, are leaving alone to conspire at their ease in our old châteaux, which they bought for a crust of bread during the Terror – they would be obliged to assent and acknowledge that the true dedication was on our side, since we adhered to a crumbling monarchy while they, on the contrary, hailed the rising sun and made their fortune from it, while we were losing ours. They would acknowledge that our own king was truly Louis le Bien-Aimé, the Well-Beloved, while their usurper, for his part, was never more than Napoléon le Maudit – the Accursed. Don’t you agree, de Villefort?’

‘What was that, Madame la Marquise? Excuse me, I was not following the conversation.’

‘Come, come, let these children be, Marquise,’ said the old man who had proposed the toast. ‘They are to be married and, naturally enough, have other things to discuss besides politics.’

‘I beg your pardon, mother,’ said a lovely young woman with blonde hair and eyes of velvet, bathed in limpid pools. ‘I shall give you back Monsieur de Villefort, whose attention I had claimed for a moment. Monsieur de Villefort, my mother is speaking to you.’

‘I am waiting to answer Madame’s question,’ said M. de Villefort, ‘if she will be so good as to repeat it, because I did not catch it the first time.’

‘You are forgiven, Renée,’ said the marquise, with a tender smile that it was surprising to see radiate from those dry features; but the heart of a woman is such that, however arid it may become when the winds of prejudice and the demands of etiquette have blown across it, there always remains one corner that is radiant and fertile – the one that God has dedicated to maternal love. ‘You are forgiven… Now, what I was saying, Villefort, is that the Bonapartists had neither our conviction, nor our enthusiasm, nor our dedication.’

‘Ah, Madame, but they do at least have one thing that replaces all those, which is fanaticism. Napoleon is the Mohammed of the West. For all those masses of common people – though with vast ambitions – he is not only a lawgiver and a ruler, but also a symbol: the symbol of equality.’

‘Napoleon!’ the marquise exclaimed. ‘Napoleon, a symbol of equality! And what about Monsieur de Robespierre? It seems to me that you are appropriating his place and giving it to the Corsican. One usurpation is enough, surely?’

‘No, Madame,’ said Villefort, ‘I leave each of them on his own pedestal: Robespierre in the Place Louis XV, on his scaffold, and Napoleon in the Place Vendôme, on his column. The difference is that equality with the first was a levelling down and with the second a raising up: one of them lowered kings to the level of the guillotine, the other lifted the people to the level of the throne – which does not mean,’ Villefort added, laughing, ‘that they were not both vile revolutionaries, or that the 9th Thermidor and the 4th April 1814
⁵
are not two fortunate dates in the history of France, and equally worthy to be celebrated by all friends of order and the monarchy. However, it does explain why, even now that he has fallen (I hope, never to rise again), Napoleon still enjoys some support. What do you expect, Marquise: even Cromwell, who was not half the man that Napoleon used to be, had his followers.’

‘Do you realize that there is a strong whiff of revolution in what you are saying, Villefort? But I forgive you: the son of a Girondin
⁶
is bound to be tarred with the same brush.’

Villefort’s face flushed a deep red.

‘It’s true, Madame, that my father was a Girondin, but he did not vote for the death of the king. He was proscribed by the same Terror by which you yourself were proscribed, and narrowly escaped laying his head on the same scaffold as that on which your father’s fell.’

‘Yes,’ the marquise replied, this bloody recollection not having produced the slightest alteration in her expression, ‘but, had they both stepped on it, it would have been as men inspired by diametrically opposed principles. The proof is that my family remained loyal to the princes in exile, while your father hastened to rally to the new regime. After Citizen Noirtier was a Girondin, Comte Noirtier became a senator.’

‘Mother, mother!’ said Renée. ‘You know we agreed that we should not mention these unfortunate matters again.’

‘Madame,’ Villefort replied, ‘I join with Mademoiselle de Saint-Méran in humbly begging you to forget the past. What is the sense in recriminations about things over which the will of God itself is powerless? God can change the future, He cannot alter even an
instant of the past. As for us, all we can do, since we are unable to repudiate it, is to draw a veil across it. Well, for my part, I have cut myself off not only from my father’s opinions but also from his name. My father was, and perhaps still is, a Bonapartist named Noirtier; I am a Royalist, and am called de Villefort. Let the last remnants of the revolutionary sap perish in the old stem and see only the young shoot, Madame, which grows away from the trunk, though it is unable – I might almost say unwilling – to break with it altogether.’

‘Bravo, Villefort,’ said the marquis. ‘Bravo! Well said! I, too, have always urged the Marquise to forget the past, but always in vain; I hope that you will be more successful.’

‘Yes, yes, that is very well,’ the marquise replied. ‘Let us forget the past; I ask nothing better. But let Villefort at least be unyielding for the future. Remember, Villefort: we have answered for you to His Majesty and, on our insistence, His Majesty was willing to forget – just as…’ (she offered him her hand) ‘… as I am, at your request. However, should any conspirator fall into your hands, remember that all eyes will be fixed upon you, the more so since it is known that you belong to a family which might perhaps have dealings with such conspirators.’

‘Alas, Madame!’ Villefort exclaimed. ‘My office and, most of all, the times in which we live, require me to be harsh. I shall be so. I have already had some political cases to deal with and, in that respect, I have shown my mettle. Unfortunately, we are not finished yet.’

‘You think so?’ asked the marquise.

‘I fear so. Napoleon is very close to France on the island of Elba, and his presence almost within sight of our coast sustains the hopes of his supporters. Marseille is full of officers on half pay who daily seek quarrels with the Royalists on some trivial pretext: this leads to duels among the upper classes and murders among the common people.’

‘Yes,’ said the Comte de Salvieux, an old friend of M. de Saint-Méran and chamberlain to the Comte d’Artois. ‘Yes, but, as you know, he is being moved away by the Holy Alliance.’

‘We heard speak of this as we were leaving Paris,’ said M. de Saint-Méran. ‘Where is he being sent?’