The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (71 page)

The next day he saw Albert going past again and again, with a huge bouquet, no doubt acting as the bearer of a love letter. This probability became certainty when Franz saw the same bouquet – immediately identifiable by a circle of white camellias – in the hands of a delightful clown dressed in pink satin.

That evening there was not merely joy, but delirium. Albert had no doubt that the beautiful stranger would answer him by the same means. Franz anticipated his wishes by saying that he found all that noise tiring and had decided to spend the following day looking through his album and making notes.

Albert was not mistaken. The following evening he came leaping in a single bound into Franz’s room, holding a sheet of paper by one of its corners and brandishing it in the air.

‘Well, was I mistaken?’

‘Did she reply?’ Franz exclaimed.

‘Read it.’

The tone of Albert’s voice as he said this would be impossible to convey. Franz took the letter and read:

On Tuesday evening at seven o’clock get out of your carriage at the entrance to Via dei Pontefici and follow the Roman peasant woman who will take
hold of your
moccoletto
. When you reach the first step of the Church of San-Giacomo, make sure to tie a pink ribbon on the shoulder of your clown’s costume, so that you can be recognized. Between now and then you will not see me again.

Constancy and discretion.

‘Well, now,’ he asked Franz, when the latter had finished reading, ‘what do you think of that, dear friend?’

‘I think,’ said Franz, ‘that the business is taking on the character of a most agreeable adventure.’

‘I think the same, and I am very afraid that you may be going alone to the Duke of Bracciano’s ball.’

The very same morning, Franz and Albert had received invitations from the celebrated Roman banker.

‘Take care, my dear Albert,’ said Franz. ‘All of high society will be at the duke’s; and if your beautiful stranger is really an aristocrat, she will not be able to escape putting in an appearance.’

‘Whether she does or not, I shall not alter my opinion of her. Have you read the letter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you know how poorly educated the women of the
mezzo cito
are in Italy?’ This was a term designating the bourgeoisie.

‘Yes,’ Franz replied again.

‘So! Re-read the note, examine the writing, and tell me if there is a single mistake in grammar or spelling?’

The writing was certainly charming, the spelling faultless.

‘You are predestined,’ Franz said, once more returning the letter.

‘Laugh if you wish, joke as much as you like,’ Albert went on. ‘I am in love.’

‘Good Lord! You scare me!’ said Franz. ‘I can see that not only will I be going alone to the Duke of Bracciano’s ball, but I may well also find myself returning on my own to Florence.’

‘The fact is that, if my stranger is as agreeable as she is beautiful, then I do declare I shall be settling in Rome for at least six weeks. I adore the city, and in any case I have always had this marked predilection for archaeology.’

‘Decidedly. A few more meetings like this one and I feel sure that we shall see you elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.’

Albert looked as though he were about to argue seriously his
claims to the academic chair, but at that moment a servant came to tell the young friends that dinner was served. Love, for Albert, was not incompatible with a healthy appetite, so he hurried to sit down at the table beside his friend, though quite ready to resume the discussion after dinner.

After dinner, however, the Count of Monte Cristo was announced. They had not seen him for two days: business, according to Signor Pastrini, had taken him to Civita Vecchia. He had left the evening before and got back only an hour ago.

He was charming. Whether because he was watching, or because the circumstances did not strike those acrimonious chords that on other occasions had charged his utterances with bitterness, he was more or less like other men. Franz found him truly enigmatic. The count could not doubt that the young traveller had recognized him, yet not a single word had fallen from his lips since their acquaintance was renewed to suggest that they had met before. For his part, much though Franz would like to have referred to their previous interview, he was restrained by the fear of displeasing a man who had shown such consideration towards him and his friend, so he went on copying the other man’s reserve.

The count had learned that the two friends wanted a box in the Teatro Argentina and had been told that all places were reserved; so he was once more bringing them the key to his box – at least, this was the avowed purpose of his visit.

Franz and Albert objected, on the grounds that they did not want to deprive the count, but he replied that he was going to the Teatro Palli that evening, so his box at the Argentina would be wasted if they did not take advantage of it. This made up their minds.

Franz was becoming accustomed to the count’s pallor, which had struck him so forcibly on first meeting. He could not deny the beauty of the man’s stern face, of which the pale colour was either the only defect or perhaps the chief quality. Franz, a true Byronic hero, could not see, or even think of, him without imagining those sombre features on the shoulders of Manfred or under Lara’s head-dress.
⁶
He had the furrowed brow that spoke of bitter, inescapable thoughts; he had those burning eyes that penetrate to the depths of a soul; he had those haughty, contemptuous lips which give the words that issue from them a particular bent, so that they become deeply engraved in the memory of whoever hears them.

The count was no longer young: forty at least;
⁷
yet one could
easily understand that he would prevail over any young men among whom he might find himself. The truth is that he also had this in common with the fantastic heroes of the English poet: that he appeared to possess the gift of spellbinding others.

Albert was constantly remarking how lucky they had been to meet such a man. Franz was less enthusiastic, though he too was susceptible to the influence exercised by any superior being over those around him. He thought about the plan the count had mentioned once or twice of going to Paris and had no doubt that, with his unusual personality, his striking features and his huge wealth, he would make a considerable mark there. Yet he himself would prefer not to be in Paris when the count was there.

The evening passed as most evenings do at the theatre in Italy, not in listening to the singers, but in renewing acquaintances and conversation. Countess G— wanted to discuss the count, but Franz told her that he had something much more novel to tell her and, despite Albert’s exhibitions of false modesty, he described the major event that had taken up most of the two friends’ thoughts over the previous three days.

Intrigues of this kind are not rare in Italy (at least, if travellers are to be believed), and the countess, far from expressing incredulity, congratulated Albert on the start of an adventure that promised to end in such a satisfactory manner. They parted, agreeing to meet at the Duke of Bracciano’s ball, to which all Rome had been invited.

The lady with the bouquet kept her promise to Albert: neither the next day nor the one after did she give him any sign of life.

At last Tuesday came, the last and most rowdy day of the carnival. On Tuesday the theatres are open at ten in the morning because, after eight in the evening, Lent starts. On the Tuesday, everyone who – through shortage of time, money or inclination – has not yet taken part in the festival joins the bacchanalian orgy, is carried away by the revels and contributes a share of noise and movement to the sum of movement and noise.

From two until five Franz and Albert followed the line of carriages, exchanging handfuls of confetti with those in the line opposite and with the pedestrians walking between the feet of the horses and the wheels of the carriages, without a single accident occurring, a single argument erupting or a single fight breaking out in all this appalling chaos. The Italians are supreme in this respect: a festivity
for them is a genuine festivity. The author of this story, who lived for five or six years in Italy, can never once remember having seen a celebration interrupted by any of those disturbances that inevitably accompany our own.

Albert was a huge success in his clown’s costume. On his shoulder he had a knotted pink ribbon, the ends of which fell down to his knees. To avoid any confusion between them, Franz had kept his Roman peasant’s costume.

As the day wore on, so the noise grew greater. On all those pavements, in all those carriages, at all those windows, not a single mouth remained silent, not a single arm remained still. It was a veritable human storm made up of a thunder of voices and a hail of dragées, bouquets, eggs, oranges and flowers.

At three o’clock, the sound of cannon being fired across the Piazza del Popolo and the Palazzo di Venezia, though it could only just be heard through this awful tumult, announced that the races were about to begin.

The races, like the
moccoli
, are a particular feature of the last days of carnival. At the sound of these cannon, the carriages instantly broke ranks and each headed for the side-street nearest wherever they happened to be. All these manoeuvres take place with unbelievable skill and wonderful speed, without the police bothering in the slightest to assign anyone to a post or to show anyone where he should go. Those on foot pressed themselves against the palazzi. Then a great sound of horses’ hoofs and rattling of sabres was heard.

A squadron of
carabinieri
, fifteen abreast, galloped the whole length of the Corso, clearing it in readiness for the
barberi
. When the squadron reached the Palazzo di Venezia, the sound of another roll of cannon gave the signal that the road was clear.

Almost at once, in the midst of a vast, universal, inconceivable clamour, they saw seven or eight horses go past like wraiths, driven on by the cheering of three hundred thousand voices and the metal castanets clattering on their backs. Then the cannon in the Castel Sant’Angelo fired three times: this meant that number three was the winner.

Needing no other signal but that, the carriages moved off again, cascading back towards the Corso, flowing out from every street like tributaries that had been dammed for a moment, before simultaneously pouring back into the bed of the river that they fed, and
the huge torrent resumed its course, swifter than ever, between the two granite banks.

Now, however, a new element had added still further to the noise and movement of the crowd. The sellers of
moccoli
had come on to the scene.

Moccoli
or
moccoletti
are candles of varying thickness, from an Easter candle to a taper, which excite two contradictory ambitions in the actors of the great finale of the Roman carnival: first, to keep one’s own
moccoletto
alight; second, to extinguish everyone else’s.

The same is true of the
moccoletto
as of life: mankind has so far found only one way of transmitting it, which he owes to God. But he has found a thousand ways to extinguish it – and here the Devil has surely given him some little help.

A
moccoletto
is lit by bringing it up to another source of light. But who can describe the thousand ways that have been invented to put out a
moccoletto
: great puffs of breath, monstrous bellows, superhuman fans?

Everyone hastened to buy
moccoletti
, Franz and Albert with the rest.

Night was falling fast. Already, at the cry
‘Moccoli!’
, repeated by the strident voices of a thousand manufacturers, two or three stars began to shine above the crowd. This was the signal.

In ten minutes, fifty thousand lights glittered all the way from the Palazzo di Venezia to the Piazza del Popolo, and back up from the Piazza del Popolo to the Palazzo di Venezia. It was like a vast congregation of will-o’-the-wisps, impossible to envisage if you have never seen it: imagine that all the stars in the sky were to come down and dance wildly about the earth, to the accompaniment of cries such as no human ear has ever heard elsewhere on its surface.

This is the time, above all, when class distinctions are abolished. The
facchino
takes hold of the prince, the prince of the Trasteveran, the Trasteveran of the bourgeois, each one blowing out, extinguishing and relighting. If old Aeolus
⁸
were to appear at this moment he would be proclaimed King of the Moccoli, and Aquilo the heir presumptive to the throne.

This wild, blazing dash lasted some two hours. The Corso was lit as if in broad daylight and the features of the spectators’ faces could be distinguished up to the third or fourth storey. Every five minutes Albert took out his watch. At last, it showed seven o’clock.

The two friends had reached exactly the corner of the Via dei
Pontefici. Albert leapt out of the carriage, his
moccoletto
in his hand.

Two or three masked figures tried to come up to him either to put it out or take it away, but Albert was a skilled boxer. He sent them reeling a good ten yards, one after the other, and continued running towards the Church of San Giacomo.

The steps were crowded with bystanders and masked figures struggling to take the candles from each other’s hands. Franz watched Albert as he went, and he saw him put his foot on the first step; almost at once a masked figure, wearing the familiar costume of the peasant girl with the bouquet, reached out and took his
moccoletto
, without Albert this time offering any resistance. Franz was too far away to hear what they said, but her words were doubtless reassuring, for he saw Albert and the girl walk off, arm in arm. For a time he followed them through the crowd, but he lost sight of them at the Via Macello.