The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (33 page)

Towards evening, however, after the time of the jailer’s customary visit, when the young man did not return, Faria tried to make his way across the space between them. Edmond shuddered on hearing the old man’s painful efforts to drag himself along: his leg was immobile and he could not use one of his arms. Edmond was obliged to pull him into his cell, because he could never otherwise have managed to force himself through the narrow opening by his own efforts.

‘As you see, I am absolutely pitiless in my pursuit of you,’ he said with a radiant smile, full of benevolence. ‘You thought you could escape my lavish generosity, but you will not. So listen.’

Edmond saw that there was no backing away, and made the old man sit down on his bed, taking up a place next to him on his stool.

‘You know that I used to be the secretary, the intimate and the friend of Cardinal Spada,
¹
last prince of that name. To this worthy lord I owe all the happiness that I have tasted in this life. He was not rich, even though his family’s wealth was proverbial and I have often heard people say: “As rich as a Spada”. But, like the proverb, he lived on this reputation for opulence. His palace was paradise to me. I taught his nephews, who died, and when he was alone in the world, I repaid him for all that he had done for me during the previous ten years by my absolute dedication to fulfilling his every wish.

‘The cardinal’s house soon held no secrets for me. I had often seen Monseigneur at work consulting ancient books and eagerly hunting through the dusty old family papers. One day, when I reprimanded him for vainly losing sleep and for the exhaustion that followed his late nights, he gave me a bitter smile and opened a book on the history of the city of Rome. There, at the twentieth chapter in the life of Pope Alexander VI, I read the following lines, which I have never forgotten:

The great wars in the province of Romagna were ended. Cesare Borgia, having completed his conquests, was in need of money to purchase the whole of Italy. The Pope also needed money if he was to have done with Louis XII, king of France, who was still a threat despite his recent defeats. It was essential for him to speculate successfully and this was no longer easy in the poor, exhausted land of Italy.

His Holiness had an idea. He resolved to create two cardinals.

By choosing two of the leading men in Rome, and above all two wealthy men, the Holy Father could expect the following from his speculation: firstly, he would have at his disposal the high offices and magnificent titles that these two cardinals possessed; and, secondly, he could count on a splendid price for the sale of the two cardinals’ hats. There was also a third source of income, which will soon appear.

The Pope and Cesare Borgia first found their two future cardinals: they were Giovanni Rospigliosi, who alone had at his disposal four of the highest offices of the Holy See; and Cesare Spada, one of the richest men, from one of the most noble families in Rome. Both men realized the value of the Pope’s favour. They were ambitious. Having decided on them, Cesare soon found purchasers for their offices.

The result was that Rospigliosi and Spada paid to become cardinals and that eight other men paid to become what previously these two newly created cardinals had been. The speculators were the richer by eight hundred thousand
écus
.

The time has now come for us to consider the last part of the speculation. The Pope showered his favours on Rospigliosi and Spada and conferred the insignia of their new office on them; then, certain that, in order to meet the quite substantial debt of gratitude that was imposed on them, they must have consolidated their fortunes and liquidated them, prior to settling in Rome, the Pope and Cesare Borgia invited the two cardinals to dinner.

The Holy Father and his son argued over the matter. Cesare thought that they could employ one of those devices which he always kept at the disposal of his intimate friends, for example, the famous key with which certain people would be asked to go and open a particular wardrobe. The key happened to have a little point of iron negligently left sticking out of it by the locksmith. When anyone pressed it, in order to open the wardrobe – the lock was stiff – he would be pricked by this little pin and would die the following day. There was also the lion’s-head ring, which Cesare wore on his finger to shake certain people by the hand. The lion bit the skin of these specially favoured hands and the bite would prove fatal within twenty-four hours.

So Cesare suggested to his father, either that they should send the cardinals to open the wardrobe, or else that each of them should be given a warm handshake. But Alexander VI replied:

Let us not begrudge a dinner when our guests are to be those fine men, Cardinals Spada and Rospigliosi. Something tells me that we shall have our expenses back. In any case, Cesare, you are forgetting that indigestion strikes immediately, while a prick or a bite takes a day or two to work.

Cesare was won over by this argument; so that is how the two cardinals were invited to dinner.

The tables were laid in the vineyard that the Pope owned near San-Pietro-in-Vincula, at a charming residence which the cardinals knew very well by repute.

Rospigliosi, bemused by the dignity of his new office, prepared his belly and his most agreeable countenance. Spada, a cautious man who loved only his nephew, a young captain with the brightest prospects, took paper and a pen to make his will.

He then sent word to his nephew to wait for him close to the vineyard, but it appears that the servant could not find the young man.

Spada knew the significance of such invitations. From the time when Christianity, that great civilizing influence, brought enlightenment to Rome, it was no longer a matter of a centurion who would come from the tyrant and announce:
Caesar wishes you to die
. Now it was a legate
a latere
who arrived, with a smile on his lips, bringing the message from the Pope:
His Holiness wishes you to dine with him
.

Around two o’clock, Spada left for the vineyard where the Pope was expecting him. The first person who met his eyes was his own nephew, elegant and finely dressed, the object of Cesare Borgia’s affectionate attentions. Spada paled – and Cesare, casting him a glance full of irony, let him know that he had anticipated everything and that the trap had been carefully set.

They dined. Spada found the opportunity only to ask his nephew whether he had received the message. The nephew replied that he had not, and he fully appreciated the sense of the question; it was too late, for he had just drunk a glass of excellent wine set aside for him by the Pope’s vintner. At the same moment, Spada saw another bottle being brought, from which he was offered a liberal quantity. An hour later a doctor declared that both of them had been poisoned by some lethal mushrooms. Spada died at the entrance to the vineyard, while the nephew breathed his last at his own door, making a sign to his wife which she did not understand.

Cesare and the Pope at once hastened to seize hold of the inheritance, under the pretext of looking for some papers left by the dead men. But the inheritance consisted of this: a sheet of paper on which Spada had written:
I bequeath to my well-beloved nephew my coffers and my books, among them my fine breviary with the gold corners, desirous that he should keep this in memory of his affectionate uncle
.

The heirs looked everywhere, admired the breviary, seized the furniture and were astonished that Spada, that rich man, was in fact the poorest of uncles. As for treasure, they found nothing, except the treasures of knowledge contained in his library and his laboratories.

That was all. Cesare and his father hunted, ransacked and kept watch, but found nothing, or at least very little: perhaps a thousand
écus
’ worth of plate and perhaps the same amount in silver coin; but the nephew had had time to tell his wife:
Look among my uncle’s papers – there is a true will
.

They probably searched even more assiduously than did the noble heirs. All was in vain: all that remained were two palaces and a vineyard behind the Palatine Hill. At that time, landed property was of relatively little value, so the two palaces and the vineyard were left to the family, as being beneath the rapacity of the Pope and his son.

Months and years passed. Alexander VI died, poisoned by a misunderstanding which you know of; Cesare, poisoned at the same time as the Pope, escaped with a change of skin, like a snake, putting on a new covering on which the poison had left stains such as one sees on the fur of a tiger. Finally, forced to leave Rome, he died in an obscure night-time brawl which history has barely troubled to record.

After the death of the Pope and his son’s exile, most people expected the family to resume the princely style of life that it had known in the days of Cardinal Spada, but this was not the case. The Spadas continued in an ambiguous state of moderate comfort, and a lasting mystery shrouded this grim affair; the rumour was that Cesare, a more subtle politician than his father, had purloined the fortune of both cardinals from the Pope; I say both, because Cardinal Rospigliosi, who had taken no precautions, was completely dispossessed.

‘So far,’ Faria said, interrupting with a smile, ‘this does not seem to you too devoid of sense, does it?’

‘My friend,’ said Dantès, ‘on the contrary, I feel I am reading a fascinating piece of history. Please continue.’

‘I shall do so:

‘The family grew accustomed to its obscurity. Years passed and, among the descendants of Cardinal Spada, some became soldiers, some diplomats, some men of the Church, some bankers; some became rich, others ended in poverty. I now come to the last of the family, the Count Spada whose secretary I was.

‘I had often heard him complain that his wealth was disproportionate to his rank, so I advised him to invest what little he had in annuities. He did so, and thus doubled his income.

‘The celebrated breviary had remained in the family, and it was Count Spada who owned it. It had been passed down from father to son, because the strange clause in the only will that had been found had made this a veritable relic, to be preserved in the family with superstitious veneration. It was decorated with the finest Gothic illuminations and so heavy with gold that a servant always carried it before the cardinal on solemn occasions.

‘At the sight of the papers of all sorts – titles, contracts, parchments – which were kept in the family archives, and which all came from the poisoned cardinal, I began to peruse these massive bundles, just as twenty servants, twenty stewards and twenty secretaries had done before me: despite the energy and devotion that I gave to my research, I found nothing. However, I had read – I even wrote one myself – a precise, almost a day-by-day history of the Borgias, for no other reason than to discover whether these princes had acquired any additional fortune on the death of my cardinal, Cesare Spada, and I only noted the addition to their riches of the money belonging to Cardinal Rospigliosi, his companion in misfortune.

‘In this way I was almost certain that neither the Borgias nor the family had benefited by the inheritance, but that it had remained ownerless, like those treasures in the
Arabian Nights
which sleep beneath the earth, guarded by a genie. Over and over, a thousand times, I searched, I counted, I calculated the family’s income and expenses for the past three hundred years: all to no avail; I remained in my ignorance and the Count of Spada in his poverty.

‘My master died. From his annuity he had held back his family papers, his library of five thousand volumes and his famous breviary. He bequeathed all this to me, with a thousand Roman
écus
which he had in cash, on condition that I had a Mass said for him on the anniversary of his death and that I drew up a genealogical
tree and a history of the House of Spada, all of which wishes I carried out to the letter.

‘Be patient, dear Edmond. We are near the end.

‘In 1807, a month before my arrest and a fortnight after the death of the count, on December the twenty-fifth – and you will shortly understand why the date of that memorable day has remained in my memory – I was reading these papers for the thousandth time and setting them in order: since the palace now belonged to a stranger, I was going to leave Rome and settle in Florence, taking some twelve thousand books that belonged to me, my library and my famous breviary… Worn out by study and indisposed by the rather heavy dinner that I had eaten, I let my head fall on my hands and went to sleep. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

‘I awoke as the clock was striking six.

‘I looked up. I was in utter darkness. I rang for a servant to bring me a light, but no one came, so I decided to fend for myself. In any case, this was something to which I should have to resign myself in future. In one hand I took a candle and in the other, knowing that there were no matches in their box, I looked for a piece of paper that I could light from the last embers burning in the grate. But I was afraid that, in the darkness, I would take some precious leaf of paper instead of a useless one, so I hesitated. Then I remembered that, in the famous breviary, which was sitting on the table beside me, I had seen an old piece of paper, partly yellowed with age, which appeared to serve as a bookmark and which had been handed down as such through the ages, preserved by the veneration of Cardinal Spada’s heirs. I groped around for this useless scrap, found it, folded it and thrust it into the dying fire to light it.

‘But, beneath my fingers as the fire took hold, I saw yellowing characters emerge from the white paper and appear on it, as if by magic. At this, I was seized with terror. I clasped the paper in my hands, stifled the flame and lit the candle directly from the hearth. Then, with feelings I cannot describe, I re-opened the crumpled letter and realized that there were words on it written by some mysterious, invisible ink, which became visible only on contact with heat. About one-third of the paper had been consumed by the flames. This is the paper that you read this morning. Read it again,
Dantès, and when you have done so, I shall fill in whatever is missing or unclear.’