The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (130 page)

‘Oh, Madame,’ said a very gallant old general who had sung
Partons pour la Syrie
⁵
in 1809, ‘we will not go into the garden alone.’

‘Very well,’ said Mercédès. ‘I shall set you an example.’ And she turned towards Monte Cristo. ‘Monsieur le Comte, please do me the honour of giving me your arm.’

The count seemed almost to stagger on hearing these simple words, then he looked at Mercédès for a moment. The moment lasted as long as a flash of lightning, but to the countess it seemed to last a century, so much intensity of thought did Monte Cristo put into this single glance.

He offered the countess his arm and she leant on it; or, rather, she allowed her little hand to brush against it; and the two of them went down one of the staircases outside the french windows, bordered with rhododendron and camellias. By the other staircase, with noisy cries of delight, some twenty guests hurried along behind them into the garden.

Mme de Morcerf directed her companion under the arbour of linden-trees that led towards a greenhouse. ‘It was too hot in the drawing-room, wasn’t it, Count?’ she said.

‘Yes, Madame. It was an excellent idea of yours to open the doors and the shutters.’

As he said these words, the count noticed that Mercédès’ hand was trembling. ‘But perhaps you are cold, with that light dress and no other protection around your neck except a chiffon scarf?’ he said.

‘Do you know where I am taking you?’ the countess asked, not answering Monte Cristo’s question.

‘No, Madame,’ he replied, ‘but, as you see, I am offering no resistance.’

‘To the greenhouse down there, at the end of this path.’

The count looked at her questioningly, but she carried on without a word, so he too said nothing.

They arrived at the building, hung with splendid fruit which matured at the beginning of July in this temperature, designed to replace that of the sun which is so unreliable in our climate. The countess let go of Monte Cristo’s arm and went to pluck a bunch of grapes from a vine.

‘Here, Count,’ she said, with such a sad smile that it did not disguise the tears at the corners of her eyes, ‘take it. Our French grapes are not, I know, comparable to those you have in Sicily or Cyprus, but I know you will excuse our pale northern sun.’

The count bowed and took a pace backwards.

‘Are you refusing me?’ said Mercédès, her voice quivering.

‘Madame,’ Monte Cristo replied, ‘I beg you most humbly to forgive me, but I never eat muscat grapes.’

Mercédès let the bunch fall with a sigh. A magnificent peach was hanging from a nearby shrub, espaliered and warmed, like the vine, by the artificial heat of the greenhouse. Mercédès went over to the luscious fruit and picked it.

‘Then take this peach,’ she said.

But the count made the same gesture of refusal.

‘Again!’ she said, with such a pained note in her voice that one could feel it covered a sob. ‘Truly, I am unfortunate.’

There was a long silence. The peach, like the bunch of grapes, had fallen on the sand.

‘Monsieur le Comte,’ Mercédès said finally, looking imploringly at Monte Cristo, ‘there is a touching Arab custom that promises eternal friendship between those who have shared bread and salt under the same roof.’

‘I know it, Madame,’ the count replied. ‘But we are in France and not in Arabia; and in France there is no more eternal friendship than there is sharing of bread and salt.’

‘But we are friends, are we not?’ she said, breathing rapidly and looking directly into Monte Cristo’s eyes, while clasping his arm with both hands.

The blood rushed to the count’s heart and he became as white as death; then it rose from his heart to his throat and spread across his cheeks. For a few moments his eyes would not focus, like those of a man dazzled by a bright light. ‘Of course we are friends, Madame,’ he replied. ‘Why should we not be?’

His tone was so far from the one that Mme de Morcerf desired that she turned away with a sigh that was almost a groan. ‘Thank you,’ she said, then started to walk on. In this way they went round the whole garden without saying a word.

‘Monsieur,’ the countess suddenly resumed, after they had walked for ten minutes in silence, ‘is it true that you have seen so much, travelled so far, suffered so deeply?’

‘Yes, Madame, I have suffered a great deal,’ he said.

‘But are you happy now?’

‘Yes, of course,’ the count replied. ‘No one hears me complain.’

‘And does your present happiness calm your soul?’

‘My present happiness equals my past misery,’ said the count.

‘Have you ever married?’

‘Married?’ Monte Cristo replied, shuddering. ‘Who told you that?’

‘No one, but several times you have been seen at the opera with a beautiful young woman.’

‘She is a slave whom I bought in Constantinople, Madame, the daughter of a prince whom I took for my own, not having anyone else to cherish.’

‘So you live alone?’

‘I do.’

‘You have no sister… son… father?’

‘No one.’

‘How can you live like that, with nothing attaching you to life?’

‘It is not my fault, Madame. In Malta I loved a girl and was going to marry her, when the war came and swept me away from her like a whirlwind. I thought that she loved me enough to wait for me, even to remain faithful to my tomb. When I came back, she was married. This is the story of every man who is aged over twenty. Perhaps my heart was weaker than that of others and I suffered more than they would in my place, that’s all.’

The countess stopped for a moment, as if needing to recover her breath. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and that love has remained in your heart. One is only really in love once… Did you ever see her again?’

‘Never.’

‘Never?’

‘I did not go back to the country where she lived.’

‘To Malta?’

‘Yes, to Malta.’

‘So she is in Malta, then?’

‘I think so.’

‘And have you forgiven her what she made you suffer?’

‘Her I have forgiven, yes.’

‘But only her. You still hate those who separated you?’

The countess stood in front of Monte Cristo, still holding part of the bunch of grapes in her hand. ‘Take it,’ she said.

‘I never eat muscat grapes, Madame,’ the count replied, as if the matter had never been discussed between them before.

‘You are quite inflexible,’ she muttered. But Monte Cristo remained as impassive as though the reproach had not been addressed to him.

At this moment Albert ran up. ‘Oh, mother,’ he said. ‘A great disaster!’

‘What? What has happened?’ the countess asked, stiffening, as though she had been recalled to reality from a dream. ‘A disaster? Indeed, disasters must happen.’

‘Monsieur de Villefort is here.’

‘So?’

‘He has come to fetch his wife and daughter.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the Marquise de Saint-Méran has arrived in Paris, with the news that Monsieur de Saint-Méran died on leaving Marseille, at the first post. Madame de Villefort, who was very merry, did not want to understand or believe in this misfortune, but Mademoiselle Valentine guessed everything from the first words, despite her father’s attempt to disguise it from her. The blow struck her down like a bolt of lightning and she fell in a dead faint.’

‘What is Monsieur de Saint-Méran to Mademoiselle de Villefort?’ the count asked.

‘Her maternal grandfather. He was coming to Paris to speed up his granddaughter’s marriage to Franz.’

‘Really?’

‘Now Franz is delayed. Why is Monsieur de Saint-Méran not also an ancestor of Mademoiselle Danglars?’

‘Albert! Albert,’ Mme de Morcerf said, gently reprimanding him. ‘What are you saying? Oh, Monsieur le Comte, he has such a great respect for you: tell him he shouldn’t say such things.’ She took a step forward.

Monte Cristo was looking so oddly at her, with an expression that was at once so abstracted and so full of affectionate admiration, that she advanced again, took his hand and that of her son, and joined them together. ‘We are friends, are we not?’ she said.

‘Well, now, Madame,’ said the count. ‘Your friend? I should not pretend to that. But, in any case, I am your most respectful servant.’

The countess left with an inexpressible weight on her heart and had not gone more than ten yards when the count even saw her dab her eyes with a handkerchief.

‘Have you fallen out over something, my mother and you?’ Albert asked with astonishment.

‘On the contrary,’ the count replied, ‘since she has just told me in front of you that we are friends.’ And they went back to the drawing-room which Valentine had just left with M. and Mme de Villefort. It goes without saying that Morrel followed them.

A mournful scene had just taken place in M. de Villefort’s house. After the departure of the two ladies for the ball, all Mme de Villefort’s efforts having failed definitely to persuade her husband to accompany her, the crown prosecutor had shut himself up as usual in his study with a pile of dossiers which would have terrified another man but which, in normal circumstances, would hardly have been enough to satisfy his mania for work.

This time, however, the dossiers were merely a façade; Villefort was not shutting himself up to work but to reflect; and, once the door was shut and the order had been given that he should be disturbed only in an emergency, he sat down in the chair and went over in his mind everything that in the past week or so had filled his cup of bitter sorrows and dark memories to overflowing.

Then, instead of starting on the pile of dossiers in front of him, he opened a drawer in his desk, released a secret spring and took out a bundle of personal papers, precious manuscripts which he had put in order and labelled, with figures known only to him, the names of all those who had become his enemies – whether in his political career, his business dealings, his legal practice or his secret love affairs.

By this time the number was so huge that he began to tremble; and yet all these names, powerful and fearful as they were, had often brought a smile to his face, as a traveller may smile when, on reaching the summit of the mountain, he looks at the narrow peaks, impassable trails and steep precipices beneath him, up which he struggled for so long to reach his present station.

When he had gone through all the names in his memory, re-read them, studied them and commented on each list, he shook his head. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘None of those enemies would have waited and toiled patiently until now to come and crush me with this secret. Foul deeds will rise, as Hamlet
¹
says, and sometimes fly through the air like a will-o’-the-wisp, but these are flames that light us a moment to deceive. The story must have been told by the Corsican to some priest, and by him in turn to others. Monte Cristo learned it and wanted to verify it…

‘But why want to verify?’ he wondered after a moment’s reflection. ‘What interest can a dark, mysterious and inconsequential event like that have for Monsieur de Monte Cristo, Monsieur Zaccone, son of a Maltese shipowner and operator of a Thessalian silver mine, who is paying his first visit to France? Among the jumble of information I obtained from that Abbé Busoni and Lord Wilmore, the friend and the enemy, only one thing stands out clearly and plainly in my view, which is that at no time, in no event and under no circumstances can there have been the slightest contact between him and me.’

But Villefort said this without believing his own words. The worst thing, for him, was not the revelation of what he had done, because he could deny it, or even reply to the accusation. It was not the
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
²
suddenly appearing in bloody letters on the wall; what troubled him was not knowing to what body the hand that traced them belonged.

Just as he was trying to reassure himself – and, in place of the political career which he had sometimes envisaged in his ambitious imaginings, he was resigning himself to a future confined to the joys of family life, for fear of awakening this long-dormant enemy – he heard the sound of a carriage outside, then the steps of an old person on the stairs, followed by sobs and exclamations of ‘Alas!’, of the kind that servants emit when they want to make themselves interesting because of their masters’ sorrows.

He hastened to pull back the bolt on his study door and soon, unannounced, an old woman came in, a shawl on her arm and a hat in her hand. Her white hair disclosed a brow as dull as yellowed ivory and her eyes, in the corners of which age had etched deep wrinkles, had almost vanished, so swollen were they with tears.

‘Oh, Monsieur!’ she said. ‘Oh, Monsieur! What a misfortune! I too shall die of it! Oh, yes, I shall surely die!’ And, collapsing into the nearest armchair, she dissolved into tears.

The servants, standing at the door and not daring to advance into the room, turned to look at Noirtier’s old manservant who, having heard the noise from his master’s room and hurried across, was now standing behind the rest. Villefort got up and ran over to his mother-in-law – for she it was.