The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (85 page)

‘That’s a different matter,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘But if you are thinking of lying to me, consider this: it would be better for you to say nothing at all.’

‘No, Monsieur, I swear on my immortal soul, I shall tell you everything! Even Abbé Busoni only knew part of my secret. But first, I pray you, let us come away from this place. Why, the moon is about to come out from behind that cloud – and there, standing as you are, wrapped in that cloak which hides your figure from me and looks like Monsieur de Villefort’s… !’

‘What!’ Monte Cristo exclaimed. ‘Is it Monsieur de Villefort… ?’

‘Does Your Excellency know him?’

‘The former royal prosecutor in Nîmes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who married the daughter of the Marquis de Saint-Méran?’

‘Yes.’

‘And whose reputation at the Bar was that of the most honest, the strictest and the most inflexible judge?’

‘Well, Monsieur!’ Bertuccio cried. ‘That man, with his unblemished reputation…’

‘Yes?’

‘He is a villain!’

‘Pah!’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Impossible.’

‘Yet it is true.’

‘Really?’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Do you have proof of this?’

‘I did have it.’

‘And you have lost it, you oaf?’

‘Yes; but if we look carefully, we can find it.’

‘Can we indeed?’ said the count. ‘Well then, tell me about it, Monsieur Bertuccio, because I am starting to become seriously interested in what you say.’ And the count, humming a little tune from
Lucia
, went and sat on a bench, while Bertuccio followed, collecting his memories and his thoughts. He remained standing in front of the count.

‘Where would Monsieur le Comte like me to begin?’ Bertuccio asked.

‘Wherever you wish,’ Monte Cristo replied, ‘because I know nothing.’

‘But I thought that Abbé Busoni had told Your Excellency…’

‘Yes, a few facts, perhaps, but that was seven or eight years ago and I have forgotten.’

‘So, not wishing to bore Your Excellency, I can safely…’

‘Come on, Monsieur Bertuccio, come: you will be my evening newspaper.’

‘It all goes back to 1815.’

‘Ah!’ Monte Cristo exclaimed. ‘A long time ago, 1815!’

‘Indeed, Monsieur. However, the smallest detail has remained in my memory as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I had a brother,
an elder brother, who served the emperor. He had risen to the rank of lieutenant in a regiment entirely composed of Corsicans. My brother was my only friend; we had been left orphans when I was five and he was eighteen, and he brought me up as though I were his son. In 1814, under the Bourbons, he got married. Then the emperor came back from Elba, my brother immediately returned to the army and, after sustaining a slight wound at Waterloo, he retreated with the army beyond the Loire.’

‘You are telling me the whole history of the Hundred Days,
¹
Monsieur Bertuccio,’ the count said. ‘It’s all over and done with, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Excellency, pray forgive me, but these preliminary details are essential. You promised to be patient.’

‘Very well. I did agree.’

‘One day we received a letter. I have to tell you that we lived in the little village of Rogliano, at the far end of Cap Corse. The letter was from my brother and informed us that the army had been disbanded and he was returning home, via Châteauroux, Clermont-Ferrand, Le Puy and Nîmes. If I had any money, he begged me to leave it for him in Nîmes, with an innkeeper who was an acquaintance of ours and with whom I had had some dealings…’

‘By way of contraband…’

‘For heaven’s sake, Monsieur le Comte, one must live.’

‘Undoubtedly. Carry on.’

‘As I told you, Excellency, I loved my brother dearly, so I decided not to send him the money but to take it myself. I had a thousand francs, so I left five hundred for Assunta – that is, my sister-in-law – and, with the other five hundred, I set off for Nîmes. It was easy. I had a boat and a cargo to pick up on the way, so everything favoured my design. But once I had taken on the cargo, the wind changed and we had to wait for four or five days before we could pass the mouth of the Rhône. Finally, we succeeded in entering the river, and sailed up as far as Arles. I left the boat between Bellegarde and Beaucaire, and set off on the road for Nîmes.’

‘We shall get there eventually, I suppose?’

‘Yes, sir. Forgive me, but as Your Excellency will appreciate, I am only telling him what is absolutely essential. This was the moment when the celebrated massacres took place in the south. There were two or three brigands called Trestaillon, Truphemy and Graffan who went around cutting the throats of anyone suspected
of Bonapartism. Monsieur le Comte has doubtless heard about these killings?’

‘Vaguely. I was a long way from France at the time. Go on.’

‘When you entered Nîmes, you literally walked in blood; there were bodies lying everywhere. The murderers were organized in gangs to kill, loot and burn.

‘When I saw the carnage, I was filled with fear, not for myself: being a simple Corsican fisherman, I had little to fear. On the contrary, that was a fine time for us smugglers; but I was concerned for my brother, a soldier of the empire, returning from the Army of the Loire with his uniform and his epaulettes. He had every reason to feel afraid.

‘I hastened to the inn. My foreboding was correct: my brother had arrived in Nîmes the day before and, at the very door of the man from whom he had come to beg hospitality, he had been murdered.

‘I made every effort to identify his assassins, but they inspired such fear that no one dared tell me their names. Then I remembered French justice, which I had heard so much about and which was reputed to fear nothing, so I went to the king’s prosecutor.’

‘Whose name was Villefort?’ Monte Cristo asked casually.

‘Yes, Excellency. He came from Marseille, where he had been a deputy prosecutor and was promoted as a reward for his dedication. It was said that he had been among the first to warn the government of Napoleon’s landing on his return from Elba.’

‘So you went to see him,’ said Monte Cristo.

‘ “Monsieur,” I told him, “my brother was murdered yesterday in the streets of Nîmes, I don’t know by whom, but it is your responsibility to find out. You administer a law that should avenge those it has been unable to protect.”

‘ “Who was your brother?” the prosecutor asked me.

‘ “A lieutenant in the Corsican battalion.”

‘ “So he was a soldier in the usurper’s army, was he?”

‘ “He was a soldier in the French army.”

‘ “Very well,” he replied. “He lived by the sword and he died by the sword.”

‘ “You are wrong, Monsieur. He lived by the sword, but he died by the dagger.”

‘ “And what do you expect me to do about it?” the magistrate asked.

‘ “I have told you: I want his revenge.”

‘ “On whom?”

‘ “On his murderers.”

‘ “How do I know who they are?”

‘ “Have them found.”

‘ “For what purpose? Your brother must have fallen out with someone and got into a fight. All those old soldiers are inclined to intemperance: it worked well enough for them in the days of the empire, but that kind of thing is not appropriate now. Our southerners don’t like soldiers and they don’t like unruly behaviour.”

‘ “Monsieur,” I said, “I am not asking this for myself. If it were just up to me, I should weep or I should take my revenge, nothing more. But my poor brother had a wife. If anything were to happen to me, the poor woman would die of starvation, because it was only my brother’s work that kept her. Let her have a small government pension.”

‘ “There are disasters in every revolution,” Monsieur de Villefort replied. “Your brother was a victim of this one. It’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t mean that the government owes your family anything. If we were to try all the cases of reprisals that the supporters of the usurper carried out on those of the king when they were in power, then it could well be that your brother would be condemned to death. What happened was entirely natural, it’s the law of retaliation.”

‘ “What, Monsieur!” I exclaimed. “I cannot believe that you, a magistrate, are saying this!”

‘ “On my word, all these Corsicans are mad!” Monsieur de Villefort replied. “And they still think that their fellow-countryman is emperor. You have missed the boat, my dear fellow. You should have come to me about this two months ago. Now is too late, so be off with you. If you don’t leave, I’ll have you thrown out.”

‘I looked at him for a moment to see if there was anything to be gained by begging him further. The man was like granite. I went over to him, and said under my breath: “Well, then, since you know Corsicans, you must know that they keep their word. Because you are a Royalist, you think that it was a good thing to kill my brother, a Bonapartist. Well, I too am a Bonapartist, and let me tell you something: I shall kill you. From this moment on, I declare a vendetta against you, so look after and protect yourself as best you
may, because the next time we are face to face, your last hour will have come.” And, with that, before he could recover from his surprise, I opened the door and fled.’

‘Well, I’ll be darned!’ said Monte Cristo. ‘You, Monsieur Bertuccio, with that honest face of yours! You, do something like that! And to the crown prosecutor, what’s more! Shame on you! I hope he at least understood the meaning of the word “vendetta”?’

‘He understood it well enough to avoid going out alone from that time onwards, and to hole up in his house, while getting his people to look everywhere for me. Luckily I was too well hidden for them to find me. So then he took fright. He was afraid to stay any longer in Nîmes and asked to be moved. Since he was a person with influence, he was appointed to Versailles. However, as you know, no distance is too great for a Corsican when he has sworn revenge on his enemy, and his carriage, swift as it was, could never keep more than half a day’s journey ahead of me, even though I was following on foot.

‘The main thing was not to kill him; I had a hundred opportunities to do that: I had to kill him without being identified and, above all, without being caught. From then on I was no longer my own man: I had to protect and support my sister-in-law. I stalked Monsieur de Villefort for three months, and for three months he did not take a step, go for a walk or take a stroll without my watching where he went. Finally I discovered that he was paying mysterious visits to Auteuil. I followed him and saw him enter the house where we are now; but instead of going in like everyone else through the main door on the street, he arrived, either on horseback or by carriage, left his horse or his carriage at the inn and entered the house by the little door that you see there.’

Monte Cristo nodded to show that, despite the darkness, he could indeed see the entrance towards which Bertuccio was pointing.

‘I had nothing further to do in Versailles, so I settled in Auteuil and made enquiries. If I was to take him, this was clearly the place to set my trap.

‘As the concierge told Your Excellency, the house belonged to Villefort’s father-in-law, Monsieur de Saint-Méran. He resided in Marseille, so this property was of no use to him. It was said, moreover, that he had just let it to a young widow known only as “the baroness”.

‘One evening, looking over the wall, I did indeed see a beautiful
young woman walking alone in this garden, which was overlooked by no window in any other house. She kept looking towards the little door and I understood that she was waiting for Monsieur de Villefort. When she was close enough for me to make out her features, despite the darkness, I saw a lovely young woman of eighteen or nineteen, tall and fair-haired. As she was dressed in a simple gown, with no belt around her waist, I could see that she was with child, and even quite far advanced in her pregnancy.

‘A few moments later the little door opened and a man came in. The young woman ran to him as fast as she could. They threw themselves into each other’s arms, kissed tenderly and both turned to look at the house.

‘The man was Monsieur de Villefort. I guessed that, when he came out, especially if he came out at night, he would probably walk the whole length of the garden alone.’

‘Since then,’ asked the count, ‘have you learned the name of the woman?’

‘No, Excellency,’ Bertuccio replied. ‘As you will discover, I did not have time to find out.’

‘Carry on.’

‘That evening,’ Bertuccio resumed, ‘I might perhaps have been able to kill the crown prosecutor, but I still did not know every nook and cranny in the garden. I was afraid that if I did not kill him stone dead, and if someone ran up in answer to his cries, I might not be able to escape. I put the deed off until the next meeting and, so that no detail would escape me, took a little room overlooking the street that ran beside the wall of the garden.

‘Three days later, at around seven o’clock in the evening, I saw a servant riding out of the house and galloping along the pathway leading to the Sèvres road. I assumed he was going to Versailles, and correctly so. Three hours later, the man returned, covered in dust. His message had been delivered.