The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (115 page)

‘Now, now, you did tell us that you have to leave us, Monsieur
le Comte,’ said Mme de Villefort. ‘And I think you were even going to tell us why, when your train of thought was interrupted.’

‘In truth, Madame,’ said Monte Cristo, ‘I am not sure that I dare tell you where I am going.’

‘Come, come! Tell us!’

‘I am an idle fellow, I confess, but I am going to visit a thing that has often made me stop and stare for hours.’

‘And what is that?’

‘A telegraph.
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There you are: I’ve said it.’

‘A telegraph!’ Mme de Villefort repeated.

‘Yes, indeed, the very thing: a telegraph. Often, at the end of a road, on a hilltop, in the sunshine, I have seen those folding black arms extended like the legs of some giant beetle, and I promise you, never have I contemplated them without emotion, thinking that those bizarre signals so accurately travelling through the air, carrying the unknown wishes of a man sitting behind one table to another man sitting at the far end of the line behind another table, three hundred leagues away, were written against the greyness of the clouds or the blue of the sky by the sole will of that all-powerful master. Then I have thought of genies, sylphs, gnomes and other occult forces, and laughed. Never did I wish to go over and examine these great insects with their white bellies and slender black legs, because I was afraid that under their stone wings I would find the human genie, cramped, pedantic, stuffed with arcane science and sorcery. Then, one fine morning, I discovered that the motor that drives every telegraph is a poor devil of a clerk who earns twelve hundred francs a year and – instead of watching the sky like an astronomer, or the water like a fisherman, or the landscape like an idler – spends the whole day staring at the insect with the white belly and black legs that corresponds to his own and is sited some four or five leagues away. At this, I became curious to study this living chrysalis from close up and to watch the dumbshow that it offers from the bottom of its shell to that other chrysalis, by pulling bits of string one after the other.’

‘So that is where you are going?’

‘It is.’

‘To which telegraph? The one belonging to the Ministry of the Interior, or the observatory?’

‘No, certainly not. There I should find people who would try to force me to understand things of which I would prefer to remain
ignorant, and insist on trying to explain a mystery that is beyond their grasp. Come! I want to keep my illusions about insects; it is enough to have lost those I had about human beings. So I shall not go either to the telegraph at the Ministry of the Interior, or to the one at the observatory. What I need is a telegraph in the open countryside, so I can see the fellow fixed in his tower and in his pure state.’

‘You are an odd sort of aristocrat,’ said Villefort.

‘What line do you advise me to examine?’

‘Whichever is busiest at the moment.’

‘Well, then! The Spanish one?’

‘Exactly. Would you like a letter from the minister asking them to explain…’

‘No, not at all,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘On the contrary, as I have just told you, I do not wish to understand any of it. As soon as I understood it, there would be no more telegraph, there would just be a signal from Monsieur Duchâtel or Monsieur de Montalivet, en route for the prefect in Bayonne and disguised in two Greek words:
.
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What I wish to preserve, in all its purity and my veneration, is the creature with the black legs and fearful words.’

‘You must go then, because it will be dark in two hours and you will see nothing.’

‘No! Now I am worried. Where is the nearest?’

‘On the Bayonne road, I think.’

‘Then let it be the Bayonne road.’

‘That would be the one at Châtillon.’

‘And after that?’

‘The one at the Tour de Montlhéry, I think.’

‘Thank you. Farewell! I shall tell you on Saturday what I think of it.’

At the door, the count met the two notaries who had just disinherited Valentine and were leaving, delighted at having completed a piece of business that was bound to do them credit.

Not the same evening, as he had said, but the following morning, the Count of Monte Cristo left Paris through the gate at Denfert, set off down the Orléans road and drove through the village of Linas without stopping at the telegraph which, at the precise moment when the count went by, was waving its long skeletal arms. Eventually he reached the tower at Montlhéry which, as everyone knows, is situated on the highest point of the plain of that name.

The count dismounted at the foot of the hill and started to climb it by a little winding path, eighteen inches across. When he reached the top, he was confronted by a hedge on which green fruit had come to replace the pink and white flowers. He soon found the gate into the little garden. It was a small wicket, turning on willow hinges and closed with a nail and a piece of string. He lost no time in discovering how it opened.

He was now in a little garden, twenty feet by twelve, enclosed on one side by the part of the hedge in which was set the ingenious mechanism we called a gate; and, on the other, by the old tower wreathed in ivy and strewn with wallflowers and stocks. Seeing it in this way, wrinkled and bedecked with flowers, like an old woman whose grandchildren have just been celebrating her birthday, it was hard to believe that it could have told many awful tales, if its walls had had a voice as well as the ears that an old proverb attributes to them.

The garden was crossed by a path of red sand, bordered with a boxwood hedge, already several years old and forming a contrast of colours that would have delighted the eye of Delacroix,
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our modern Rubens. The path turned back on itself to form a figure ‘8’, in such a way as to make a walk of sixty feet in a garden of twenty. Never had Flora, the youthful and smiling goddess honoured by Roman horticulturalists, been worshipped with such pure and meticulous devotion as she was in this little garden. Not one leaf on any of its twenty rosebushes bore a trace of greenfly and not a twig housed a little cluster of those aphids which gnaw and lay waste plants growing in damp soil. This did not mean, however, that it was dry here.
On the contrary, the earth as black as soot and the dense foliage of the trees bore witness to a natural humidity, which could always be supplemented by artificial means from a barrel full of stagnant water at one corner of the garden. Here, on the green surface, a frog and a toad had taken up residence, but always on opposite sides of the circle, with their backs turned to one another, owing no doubt to some incompatibility of temperament. There was not a blade of grass on the path and not the shoot of a weed in the flowerbeds. No modish belle would clean and polish the geraniums, cacti and rhododendrons on her china jardinière with as much care as the person, still invisible, who looked after this little patch.

Monte Cristo stopped, after closing the gate by attaching the string to the nail, and looked all about him.

‘It would seem,’ he said, ‘that the gentleman of the telegraph has at least one full-time gardener, or else is himself passionately fond of gardening.’

Suddenly he stumbled over something behind a wheelbarrow full of leaves. The thing in question stood up with an exclamation of surprise, and Monte Cristo was confronted by a man of around fifty who had been collecting strawberries and placing them on vine leaves. There were twelve leaves and almost as many strawberries. As he got up, the man had almost knocked over the fruit, the leaves and a plate.

‘Harvest time?’ the count asked with a smile.

‘Forgive me, Monsieur,’ the man replied, touching his cap. ‘I am not up there, I know, but I have only just come down.’

‘Please do not bother on my account, my friend,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Gather your strawberries while ye may, if there are still any left.’

‘Ten more,’ said the man. ‘I have eleven here and there were twenty-one in all, five more than last year. It is not surprising. The spring was warm this year, and what strawberries need, Monsieur, is heat. This is why, instead of the sixteen I had last year, I have this year, as you can see, eleven that I have already picked, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen… Oh, my goodness! I am missing two. They were still here yesterday, Monsieur, I know they were here, I counted them. It must be Mère Simon’s son who filched them from me. I saw him lurking around here this morning. Oh, the little devil! Stealing out of someone’s garden! Who knows where he will end up?’

‘I agree,’ Monte Cristo said. ‘It’s serious, but you must allow for the felon’s youth and natural appetite.’

‘Certainly, but that makes it no less irritating. However, I beg your pardon once more, Monsieur: am I perhaps keeping one of my bosses waiting like this?’ And he looked apprehensively at the count’s blue coat.

‘Have no fear, my friend,’ the count said, with that smile of his which he could make, at will, so benevolent or so fearful and which now expressed only benevolence. ‘I am not a superior who has come to inspect you, but a mere traveller, driven by curiosity, who even now is beginning to reproach himself for coming and wasting your time.’

‘Oh, my time is not very valuable,’ the man said with a melancholy smile. ‘However, it is the government’s time and I should not waste it, but I received a signal telling me I could take an hour’s rest…’ (at this, he cast a glance towards the sundial – for there was everything in the garden at the tower of Montlhéry, even a sundial) ‘… and, as you see, I still have ten minutes to go. Moreover, my strawberries were ripe and if I had left them a day longer… Now, truly, Monsieur, would you believe me if I were to say that the dormice eat them?’

‘Goodness, no, I should never have believed it,’ Monte Cristo replied gravely. ‘They are not good neighbours, dormice, for those who do not eat them, as the Romans did.’

‘Oh? Did the Romans eat them?’ the gardener asked. ‘Dormice?’

‘So Petronius tells us,’ said the count.

‘Really? They can’t taste very good, even though people say “plump as a dormouse”. And it’s not surprising that they are fat, since they sleep all day long and only wake up so that they can spend the whole night gnawing. Last year, now, I had four apricots and they took one from me. I also had a nectarine, just one, though admittedly it’s a rare fruit. Well, sir, they ate half of it, on the side nearest the wall – a superb nectarine, with an excellent flavour. I have never eaten a better.’

‘You did eat it, then?’ Monte Cristo asked.

‘The half that remained, you understand. Delicious. Those little robbers don’t choose the worst morsels, any more than MèreSimon’s son chooses the worst strawberries. Huh! But don’t worry,’ the gardener continued, ‘this is the last time it will happen, even if I have to stay awake all night guarding them when they are nearly ripe.’

Monte Cristo had seen enough. Every man has a passion gnawing away at the bottom of his heart, just as every fruit has its worm. The passion of the telegraph man was gardening. He began to break off the vine-leaves that were hiding the bunches of grapes from the sun and immediately won the gardener’s heart.

‘Did Monsieur come to look at the telegraph?’

‘Yes, provided the rules do not forbid it.’

‘Not at all,’ said the gardener. ‘There is no danger, because no one knows or can know what we are saying.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said the count. ‘I have even been told that you repeat signals that you do not understand yourselves.’

‘Indeed we do, Monsieur, and I much prefer that,’ the telegraph man said, laughing.

‘Why do you prefer it?’

‘Because in that way I have no responsibility. I am a machine and nothing more. As long as I work, no one asks anything more from me.’

‘Confound it!’ Monte Cristo thought to himself. ‘Can I have fallen by chance on one man who has no ambition? Damnation: that would be too unlucky.’

‘Monsieur,’ the gardener said, glancing at his sundial. ‘The ten minutes are almost up and I must go back to my post. Would you like to join me?’

‘You lead the way.’

They went into the tower which was divided into three floors. The ground floor was unfurnished except for some gardening tools leaning against the wall: spades, rakes, watering-cans and so on.