The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (87 page)

‘For the past month, the wicked child, who could not think what to do with himself, had longed for a monkey. No doubt this unfortunate whim was inspired in him by a travelling showman who had passed through Rogliano with several of these animals, whose antics had delighted the boy.

‘ “There are no monkeys to be found in these woods,” I said, “especially not chained ones. Tell me truly how you came by it.”

‘Benedetto persisted in his lie, supporting it with details that said more for his imagination than for his love of the truth. I became annoyed, and he started to laugh; I threatened him and he stepped back. “You can’t hit me,” he said. “You have no right: you are not my father.”

‘We had no idea who had revealed the secret to him, despite our efforts to conceal it. However it may be, this reply, which was entirely characteristic of the child, filled me with something close to fear, and my raised hand fell without touching the guilty boy. He had triumphed and the victory made him so bold that, from then on, Assunta, whose love for him seemed to increase in proportion to his unworthiness, spent all her money on whims that she was unable to combat and follies that she did not have the strength to prevent. When I was in Rogliano, then the situation was still more or less bearable. But as soon as I left, Benedetto became master of the house and everything went wrong. When he had barely reached the age of eleven, all his friends were young men of eighteen or twenty, the worst young hooligans of Bastia and Corte; and already, because of some tricks (which deserved a worse name), the law had warned us about him.

‘I was terrified. Any further unfavourable report might have serious consequences: I had shortly to go away from Corsica on an important expedition. I thought carefully and, hoping to ward off disaster, I decided to take Benedetto with me. I hoped that the rough and active life of a smuggler, and the harsh discipline on board ship, would rescue a character on the point of being corrupted, provided it had not already gone too far. So I took Benedetto aside and suggested that he accompany me, dressing the proposal up with every sort of promise that might attract a twelve-year-old boy.

‘He let me continue right to the end and, when I had finished, burst out laughing. “Are you mad, uncle?” he said (that was his name for me when he was in a good mood). “Am I to exchange the life I lead for yours: my idleness for the awful toil that you have imposed on yourself! To be cold by night, hot by day and constantly in hiding – or, if you show yourself, to be shot at; and all to earn a little money! I have all the money that I want! Ma Assunta gives me some whenever I ask for it. So you can easily see that I’d be a fool to accept your proposal.”

‘I was dumbstruck at this shameless argument. Benedetto went
back to play with his friends and I could see him, from a distance, pointing me out to them as an idiot.’

‘What a delightful child!’ Monte Cristo muttered.

‘Oh, if he had been mine,’ Bertuccio replied, ‘if he had been my own son, or at least my nephew, I should soon have brought him back to the straight and narrow, because a clean conscience gives a man strength. But the idea that I would beat a child whose father I had killed made it impossible for me to punish him. I gave good advice to my sister, who always took the miserable child’s side whenever we talked about him and, since she confessed to me that she had several times lost quite large sums of money, I showed her a place where she could hide our little fortune. For my part, I had made up my mind what to do. Benedetto knew very well how to read, write and do sums, because when he happened to want to work he could learn in one day what took another child a week. As I said, my mind was made up. I would sign him on as secretary on some ocean-going ship and, without giving him any advance warning, have him picked up one fine morning and carried on board. In this way, if I recommended him to the captain, he would be entirely responsible for his own future. Having taken this decision, I set off for France.

‘On this occasion all our business was to take place in the Gulf of Lyon. Smuggling was becoming more and more difficult, because it was now 1829, peace had been entirely restored and consequently the coastguard was operating more regularly and more efficiently than ever. Moreover its vigilance was temporarily intensified by the fair at Beaucaire, which had just opened.

‘The start of our expedition went off without a hitch. Our boat had a concealed hold to hide our contraband; we tied up alongside a large number of other boats lining both banks of the Rhône from Beaucaire to Arles. When we arrived there, we began to unload the forbidden goods at night and had them carried into town by associates of ours, or by the innkeepers whom we used to supply. It may be that success had made us careless, or else we had been betrayed, because one evening, around five o’clock, just as we were about to sit down to a light meal, our boy ran up in a state of great excitement to tell us that he had seen a squad of revenue men approaching. What worried us was not the patrol itself – because whole companies of Customs officials would scour the banks of the Rhône, and especially at that time – but the precautions that
the boy told us they were taking not to be seen. We instantly leapt up, but it was already too late: our boat, which had clearly been the object of their investigation, was surrounded. Among the Customs men I noticed some gendarmes. Now the sight of these frightened me as much as that of any other militiamen would make me bold, so I went down into the hold and, slipping out through one of the hatches, I let myself slide into the river, then swam underwater, holding my breath for long periods, and escaped detection until I reached a small ditch that had just been dug, joining the Rhône to the canal that runs from Beaucaire to Aigues-Mortes. Once there, I was safe, because I could go down the ditch without being seen. In this way, I reached the canal without incident. I had chosen this route of escape deliberately: I think I told Your Excellency about an innkeeper in Nîmes who had set up a little hostelry on the Beaucaire to Bellgarde road.’

‘Yes, you did,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘I remember it perfectly. If I am not mistaken, this worthy man was your associate.’

‘Yes,’ Bertuccio replied, ‘but seven or eight years before, he had relinquished his business to a tailor from Marseille who had gone bankrupt in his own trade and wished to try his luck at another. It goes without saying that the little arrangement we had with the first owner was continued with the second, so this was the man from whom I intended to ask for shelter.’

‘What was his name?’ the count asked, apparently taking a renewed interest in Bertuccio’s tale.

‘He was called Gaspard Caderousse, and he was married to a woman from the village of Carconte whom we never knew except by the name of her village; she was a poor creature, stricken with malaria and languishing. As for the man, he was a sturdy fellow of forty or forty-five; more than once he had given us proof of his presence of mind and his courage in difficult circumstances.’

‘And you were saying that all this took place in the year…’

‘1829, Monsieur le Comte.’

‘What month?’

‘In June.’

‘At the beginning or the end of the month?’

‘On the evening of the third.’

‘Ah,’ Monte Cristo said. ‘June the third, 1829. Very well, go on.’

‘So I was hoping to ask for shelter from Caderousse. Usually,
even in normal circumstances, we did not enter his house by the front door and I decided to follow our established procedure, so I climbed over the garden hedge, crawled past the stunted olive-trees and wild figs and, fearing that Caderousse had some traveller in his inn, I made my way to a kind of hutch in which I had more than once spent the night as comfortably as in the best bed. This hutch or cupboard was only separated from the main parlour on the ground floor of the inn by a wooden wall, in which holes had been drilled for us, so that we could wait there until the time was ripe for us to reveal our presence. If Caderousse was alone, I intended to announce my arrival to him, finish at this table the meal that had been interrupted by the arrival of the Customs men and take advantage of the coming storm to return to the banks of the Rhône and find out what had become of the ship and those on board. So I slipped into the hutch – and it was as well that I did so, because at that very moment Caderousse was returning home with a stranger.

‘I kept quiet and waited, not because I wanted to discover my host’s secrets, but because I had no alternative. In any case, the situation had already arisen a dozen times before.

‘The man with Caderousse was obviously not a native of the south of France: he was one of those fairground tradesmen who come to sell jewellery at the fair in Beaucaire and who, for the month that it lasts, attracting merchants and buyers from all over Europe, sometimes do a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand francs’ worth of business.

‘Caderousse hurried in, leading the way. Then, when he saw the downstairs room empty as usual and watched over only by his dog, he called his wife: “Hey, La Carconte!” he said. “The good priest didn’t deceive us. The diamond was real.”

‘There was a shout of joy and almost at once the staircase began to creak under footsteps made heavier by weakness and ill-health. “What did you say?” the woman asked, paler than death.

‘ “I said that the diamond was real and that this gentleman, one of the leading jewellers in Paris, is prepared to give us fifty thousand francs for it. However, to ensure that the diamond is truly ours, he wants you to tell him, as I did, the miraculous way in which the diamond came into our hands. Meanwhile, Monsieur, please be seated and, as the weather is close, I shall go and find you something to refresh yourself.”

‘The jeweller looked carefully round the interior of the inn, examining the obvious poverty of this couple who were about to sell him a diamond that might have belonged to a prince.

‘ “Tell me about it, Madame,” he said, no doubt wanting to take advantage of the husband’s absence to ensure that the two accounts coincided and avoid Caderousse prompting her in any way.

‘ “Well, you wouldn’t believe it,” the woman gushed. “It was a blessing from on high, when we least expected one. To start with, I must tell you, my dear sir, that in 1814 or 1815 my husband was friendly with a sailor called Edmond Dantès. This poor lad, whom Caderousse had entirely forgotten, did not forget him and on his deathbed left him the diamond that you have just seen.”

‘ “But how did he come into possession of the diamond?” the jeweller asked. “Did he have it before going to prison?”

‘ “No, Monsieur,” the woman replied. “But it appears that while in prison he became acquainted with a very rich Englishman; and when his cellmate fell ill, Dantès took the same care of him as if he had been his brother, so the Englishman, on his release, left this diamond to poor Dantès, who was less fortunate than he was and who died in prison, bequeathing it in turn to us as he died and entrusting it to the good priest who came to give it to us this morning.”

‘ “The accounts agree,” the jeweller muttered. “And, when all’s said and done, the story may be true, however implausible it may seem. Now all that remains is to agree about the price.”

‘ “What do you mean, agree?” said Caderousse. “I thought you had accepted the price I asked.”

‘ “You mean, I offered you forty thousand francs,” said the jeweller.

‘ “Forty thousand!” exclaimed La Carconte. “We certainly can’t let it go at that price. The abbé told us it was worth fifty thousand, even without the setting.”

‘ “What was this abbé’s name?” the tireless questioner asked.

‘ “Abbé Busoni,” she replied.

‘ “A foreigner then?”

‘ “An Italian from near Mantua, I think.”

‘ “Show me the diamond,” the jeweller said. “I’d like to examine it again. One often estimates a jewel wrongly at first sight.”

‘Caderousse got a little bag of black shagreen out of his pocket, opened it and passed it to the jeweller. At the sight of the diamond,
which was as fat as a small walnut – I remember it as well as if I could still see it – La Carconte’s eyes shone with greed.’

‘And what did you think of all that, eavesdropper?’ Monte Cristo asked. ‘Did you believe the fine tale?’

‘Yes, Excellency. I did not consider Caderousse a wicked man. I felt he was incapable of committing a crime, or even pilfering.’

‘That does more honour to your heart than to your experience, Monsieur Bertuccio. Did you know the Edmond Dantès they mentioned?’

‘No, Excellency. I had never before heard his name and I have never heard it mentioned since, except once by Abbé Busoni himself when I saw him in prison in Nîmes.’

‘Very well. Continue.’

‘The jeweller took the ring from Caderousse and brought a little pair of steel pliers and a little copper balance out of his pocket. Then, removing the stone from the gold clamps that held it in the ring, he lifted the diamond from the bezel and weighed it with the utmost care in the scale.

‘ “I can go to forty-five thousand francs,” he said, “but not a
sou
more. In any case, since that was the value of the diamond, that is all the money I have brought with me.”

‘ “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Caderousse. “I’ll come back to Beaucaire with you to fetch the other five thousand francs.”

‘ “No,” the jeweller said, returning the ring and the diamond to Caderousse. “No, it’s not worth more; and I’m sorry to have offered that much, since there is a defect in the stone which I did not notice at first. However, it’s too bad. I’ve given my word. I said forty-five thousand and I won’t unsay it.”