The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (165 page)

‘Not crush this accursed race?’ he muttered. ‘Disobey God, who roused me up to punish it! Impossible, Madame, impossible!’

‘Edmond,’ the poor mother said, trying everything in her power. ‘My God, when I call you Edmond, why do you not call me Mercédès?’

‘Mercédès,’ Monte Cristo repeated. ‘Mercédès! Ah, yes, you are right, this name is still sweet to me when I speak it, and this is the first time for many years that it has sounded so clear as it left my lips. Oh, Mercédès, I have spoken your name with sighs of melancholy, with groans of pain and with the croak of despair. I have spoken it frozen with cold, huddled on the straw of my dungeon. I have spoken it raging with heat and rolling around on the stone floor of my prison. Mercédès, I must have my revenge, because for fourteen years I suffered, fourteen years I wept and cursed. Now, I say to you, Mercédès, I must have my revenge!’ And, fearful that he might give way to the prayers of the woman whom he had loved so much, the count summoned up his memories in the service of his hatred.

‘Take your revenge, Edmond,’ the poor woman said. ‘But take it on those who are guilty. Be avenged on him, on me, but not on my son!’

‘It is written in the Holy Book that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation,’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘Since God dictated those very words to his prophet, why should I be better than God?’ And he gave a sigh that was like a roar, and clasped his fine hair in his hands.

‘Edmond,’ Mercédès went on, holding out her hands to him. ‘As long as I have known you, I have worshipped your name and respected your memory. My friend, do not ask me to tarnish that noble and pure image which is constantly reflected in the mirror of my heart. Edmond, if you knew all the prayers that I have offered up to God on your behalf, as long as I hoped you were still living
and since I believed you were dead; yes, alas, dead! I thought that your corpse was buried beneath some dark tower or cast into one of those depths into which jailers throw the bodies of dead prisoners; and I wept! But what could I do for you, Edmond, except pray or weep? Listen to me. Every night for ten years, I had the same dream. They said that you had tried to escape, that you had taken the place of another prisoner, that you had climbed into a dead man’s shroud and that then they had flung the living corpse from the top to the bottom of the Château d’If, and that only the cry which you gave on crashing against the rocks revealed the substitution to your burial party, who had become your executioners. Well, Edmond, I swear on the head of the son on whose behalf I now beseech you, Edmond: for ten years every night I saw men throwing something shapeless and nameless from the top of a rock; and every night, for ten years, I heard a dreadful cry that woke me up, shivering and icy cold. Oh, believe me, Edmond, I too, wrongdoer though I was, I too have suffered!’

‘Did you experience your father’s death in your absence? Did you see the woman you loved hold out her hand to your rival, while you were croaking in the depths of the abyss?’ Monte Cristo plunged his hands deeper into his hair.

‘No,’ Mercédès said, interrupting him. ‘But I have seen the man I loved preparing to become the murderer of my son!’

She said these words with such overwhelming grief, in such a desperate voice, that when he heard it a sob rose in the count’s throat. The lion was tamed, the avenging angel overcome.

‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘Your son’s life? Well, then: he shall live.’

Mercédès gave a cry that brought two tears to Monte Cristo’s eyes, but these two tears disappeared almost immediately, God doubtless having sent some angel to gather them as being more precious in His eyes than the richest pearls of Gujarat or Ophir.

She clasped the count’s hand and raised it to her lips. ‘Oh, Edmond!’ she cried, ‘Thank you, thank you! You are as I have never ceased to think of you, as I have never ceased to love you. Oh, now I can say it!’

‘So much the better,’ Monte Cristo replied, ‘that poor Edmond will not have long to be loved by you. The corpse is about to return to its tomb and the ghost into the darkness.’

‘What are you saying, Edmond?’

‘I am saying that, since you command me to do so, Mercédès, I must die.’

‘Die! Whoever said such a thing? Who speaks of dying? Where do you get such ideas?’

‘Surely you don’t imagine that, having been publicly insulted, in front of a theatre full of people, in the presence of your friends and those of your son, provoked by a child who will boast of my forgiveness as a victory… you do not imagine, I say, that I have any desire to live for a moment longer. What I have loved most after you, Mercédès, is myself, that is to say my dignity, that is to say the strength that made me superior to other men. That strength was my life. You have shattered it with a word. I die.’

‘But the duel will not take place, Edmond, since you have forgiven him.’

‘It shall take place, Madame,’ Monte Cristo said solemnly. ‘But my blood will slake the earth instead of your son’s.’

Mercédès gave a great cry and rose to her feet. Then suddenly she stopped.

‘Edmond,’ she said. ‘There is a God above us, since you are alive and I have seen you again, and I trust in Him in the very depths of my heart. In expectation of His aid, I shall rely on your word. You said that my son will live: this is true, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, he shall, Madame,’ Monte Cristo said, astonished that, without any further exclamation or other sign of surprise, Mercédès had accepted the heroic sacrifice he was making for her.

She offered him her hand. ‘Edmond,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears as she looked at the man before her, ‘how fine it is of you, how great what you have just done, how sublime to have had pity on a poor woman who put herself at your mercy, when everything seemed to be contrary to her hopes. Alas, I have been aged more by sorrow than by the years and I can no longer recall to my Edmond’s memory, even by a look or a smile, that Mercédès whom he once gazed on for so many hours on end. Believe me, Edmond, I told you that I too have suffered much. I repeat, it is dreary indeed to see one’s life pass without recalling a single joy or retaining a single hope; but this proves that all is not finished on this earth. No! All is not finished: I feel it from what still remains in my heart. Oh, Edmond, I say again: it is fine, it is great, it is sublime to forgive as you have just done!’

‘You say that, Mercédès. What would you say if you knew the
extent of the sacrifice I am making for you? Suppose that the Lord God, after creating the world, after fertilizing the void, had stopped one-third of the way through His creation to spare an angel the tears that our crimes would one day bring to His immortal eyes. Suppose that, having prepared everything, kneaded everything, seeded everything, at the moment when He was about to admire his work, God had extinguished the sun and with His foot dashed the world into eternal night, then you will have some idea… Or, rather, no… No, even then you cannot have any idea of what I am losing by losing my life at this moment.’

Mercédès looked at the count with an expression that showed her combined astonishment, admiration and gratitude.

Monte Cristo put his head into his burning hands, as if no longer able to support the weight of his thoughts.

‘Edmond,’ said Mercédès, ‘I have only one more word to say to you.’

The count gave a bitter smile.

‘Edmond,’ she went on, ‘you will see that even though my brow has paled, my eyes have lost their sparkle, my beauty is gone and, in short, Mercédès no longer looks like herself, as far as her face is concerned… you will see that her heart is still the same! Farewell, then, Edmond. I have nothing further to ask of God… I have rediscovered you as noble and as great as ever. Adieu, Edmond, thank you and farewell!’

The count did not reply.

Mercédès opened the door of the study, and had vanished before he emerged from the deep and painful reverie into which his lost vengeance had plunged him. One o’clock was striking on the clock on the Invalides when the carriage bearing away Madame de Morcerf, as it rolled across the paving-stones of the Champs-Elysées, made Monte Cristo look up. ‘Senseless!’ he said. ‘The day when I resolved to take my revenge… senseless, not to have torn out my heart!’

After the departure of Mercédès, everything in Monte Cristo’s house lapsed into darkness. Around him and within him his thoughts ceased, and his energetic mind slumbered as the body does after a supreme effort.

‘What!’ he thought, while the lamp and the candles burned sadly away and the servants waited impatiently in the antechamber. ‘What! The structure that was so long in building, which demanded so much anxious toil, has been demolished at a single blow, a single word, a breath of air! What, this “I” that I thought was something; this “I”, of which I was so proud; this “I” that I saw so small in the dungeons of the Château d’If and managed to make so great, will be, tomorrow, a speck of dust! Alas, it is not the death of the body that I mourn: is not that destruction of the vital spark the point of rest towards which everything tends, for which every unfortunate yearns, that material calm which I have so long sighed for and towards which I was proceeding by the painful road of hunger when Faria appeared in my cell? What is death? One step further into calm and two perhaps into silence. No, it is not life that I regret, but the ruin of my plans, which were so long in devising and so laborious to construct. Providence, which I thought favoured them, was apparently against them. God did not want them to come to fruition!

‘This burden which I took on, almost as heavy as a world, and which I thought I could carry to the end, was measured according to my desire and not my strength. I shall have to put it down when my task is barely half completed. Ah, I shall have to become a fatalist, after fourteen years of despair and ten years of hope had made me a believer in Providence!

‘And all this, good Lord, because my heart, which I thought was dead, was only numbed; because it awoke, it beat; because I gave way to the pain of that beating which had been aroused in my breast by the voice of a woman!

‘And yet,’ the count went on, lapsing more and more into anticipation of the dreadful future that Mercédès had made him accept, ‘and yet it is impossible that that woman, with such a noble heart,
could for purely selfish reasons have agreed to let me be killed, when I am so full of life and strength! It is not possible that she should take her maternal love or, rather, her maternal delirium, that far! Some virtues, when taken to the extreme, become crimes. No, she will have imagined some touching scene in which she will come and throw herself between our swords, and what was sublime here will become ridiculous in the field.’ And a blush of pride rose to his cheeks.

‘Ridiculous!’ he repeated. ‘And the ridicule will rebound on me! I, ridiculous! Never! I would rather die!’ And by exaggerating in advance the worst possible outcome on the morrow, which he had called down on himself by promising Mercédès to let her son live, the count eventually told himself: ‘Folly, folly, folly! To place oneself as a sitting target in front of that young man’s pistol! He will never believe that my death is suicide, and yet it is important for the honour of my memory… This is not vanity, is it, God? Rightful pride, nothing more… It is important for the honour of my memory that the world knows that I myself agreed, of my own will, by my own free choice, to stay my arm when it was raised to strike; and that I struck myself down with that hand so powerfully protected against others. I shall do it. I must.’ And, grasping a pen, he took a sheet of paper from the secret drawer in his bureau and, at the bottom of this sheet, which was the will that he had drawn up on arriving in Paris, added a sort of codicil that would make his death clear to the least perceptive reader.

‘I am doing this, God, as much for your honour as for mine,’ he said, raising his eyes to heaven. ‘For the past ten years, I have considered myself as the emissary of your vengeance, God; and, apart from this Morcerf, there are other wretches – Danglars, Villefort – who must not imagine that chance has rid them of their enemy; and nor should Morcerf himself. On the contrary, let them know that Providence, which had already pronounced sentence on them, has been revised by the sole power of my will, that the punishment that awaited them in this world, now awaits them in the next, and that they have merely exchanged time for eternity.’

While he was hovering amid these uncertainties, the nightmare of a man kept awake by pain, daylight began to whiten the window-panes and shed its light on the pale-blue paper under his hands, on which he had just written this supreme justification of Providence. It was five o’clock.

Suddenly, a faint sound reached his ears. Monte Cristo thought he had heard something like a muffled sigh. He turned around, looked about him and saw no one; but the noise was repeated so clearly that doubt became certainty.

He got up and quietly opened the drawing-room door. On a chair, her arms hanging over the sides and her beautiful pale head leaning back, he saw Haydée, who had placed herself in front of the door so that he could not leave without seeing her – but sleep, which is so potent to subdue youth, had surprised her after the exhaustion of the previous day. Even the sound of the door opening could not rouse her from her sleep.

Monte Cristo turned on her a look full of tenderness and regret. ‘She remembered that she had a son,’ he said, ‘but I forgot I had a daughter!’ Then, sadly shaking his head: ‘Poor Haydée! She wanted to see me and talk to me; she must have feared or guessed something. Oh, I cannot go without saying farewell to her. I cannot die without entrusting her to someone.’