The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (180 page)

Preoccupied though she was by what had brought her here, the reception she had been given by all these underlings seemed to her so undeserved that Mme Danglars started to complain. But Villefort raised a head so bowed down with sorrow and looked at her with such a sad smile that the complaint died on her lips.

‘Please excuse my servants for a regime of terror for which I cannot blame them. Suspect themselves, they have become suspicious.’

Mme Danglars had often heard people speak of this regime of terror which the judge mentioned, but if she had not seen it with her own eyes she could never have believed that it could have been taken to this point.

‘So you too are unhappy?’ she said.

‘Yes, Madame,’ the judge replied.

‘Then you must feel for me?’

‘I do, Madame, sincerely.’

‘And you understand why I’m here?’

‘You want to talk to me about what is happening to you, I suppose?’

‘Yes, Monsieur. A terrible disaster.’

‘You mean, a mishap.’

‘A mishap!’ the baroness cried.

‘Alas, Madame,’ the crown prosecutor replied imperturbably, ‘I have reached the point where I only describe what is irreparable as a disaster.’

‘Ah, Monsieur! Do you think people will forget… ?’

‘People forget everything, Madame,’ said Villefort. ‘Your daughter’s marriage will take place tomorrow, if not today; or in a week, if not tomorrow. And as for regretting Mademoiselle Eugénie’s intended spouse, I can’t imagine you would do that.’

Mme Danglars stared at Villefort, amazed by this almost mocking imperturbability. ‘Am I in the presence of a friend?’ she asked in a voice full of pained dignity.

‘You know you are,’ Villefort replied, blushing as he gave this assurance. In fact it alluded to events other than the ones that were on his mind and that of the baroness at that moment.

‘Well then, my dear Villefort,’ the baroness said, ‘be more affectionate. Speak to me as a friend and not as a judge; and when I am deeply unhappy, don’t tell me I should be joyful.’

Villefort bowed. ‘When I hear tell of misfortunes, Madame,’ he said, ‘I have, in the past three months, acquired the unfortunate habit of thinking about my own; this selfish comparison takes place in my mind in spite of myself. This is why, beside my misfortunes, yours seemed to me a mishap; this is why, beside my dreadful situation, yours seemed to me something to envy; but it upsets you, so let’s forget it. You were saying, Madame?’

‘I have come to ask you, my friend,’ the baroness resumed, ‘how the affair of this impostor stands at present.’

‘Impostor!’ Villefort repeated. ‘Assuredly, Madame, you are determined to extenuate certain things and exaggerate others. Monsieur Andrea Cavalcanti – or, rather, Monsieur Benedetto – an impostor! You are mistaken, Madame: Monsieur Benedetto is nothing more or less than a murderer.’

‘Monsieur, I don’t deny that you are right to correct me; but the more harshly you arm yourself against this unfortunate, the harder you will strike our family. Come, forget him for the moment. Instead of pursuing him, let him escape.’

‘You have come too late, Madame. The orders have been given.’

‘Well, if he is arrested… Do you think they will arrest him?’

‘I hope so.’

‘If he is arrested… listen, I hear that the prisons are overflowing – well, leave him in prison.’

The crown prosecutor shook his head.

‘At least until my daughter is married,’ the baroness added.

‘Impossible, Madame. The law has its procedures.’

‘Even for me?’ the baroness asked, half joking, half serious.

‘For everyone,’ Villefort replied. ‘And for me as for everyone else.’

‘Ah!’ the baroness exclaimed, without putting into words what her thoughts had revealed by this exclamation.

Villefort looked at her with the look he used to sound out a person’s thoughts. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘You are referring to those dreadful rumours that are circulating, that there is something unnatural about all those deaths which over the past three months have clothed me in mourning, and the death from which Valentine has just escaped, as if by a miracle.’

‘I was not thinking of that,’ Mme Danglars hastened to say.

‘Yes, Madame, you were, and it’s only fair, because you could not do otherwise than to think of it; and you were saying to yourself: you hunt out crime, so why are there crimes in your house that go unpunished?’

The baroness blushed.

‘You were thinking that, were you not, Madame?’

‘I confess, I was.’

‘Then I shall answer you.’

Villefort drew his chair up close to that of Mme Danglars and, resting both hands on his desk and adopting a more subdued tone than usual, he said: ‘There are crimes that go unpunished because the criminals are not known and one is afraid of striking an innocent head instead of a guilty one; but when these criminals are discovered –’ here Villefort reached out his hand towards a crucifix hanging opposite his desk and repeated ‘– when these criminals are discovered, by the living God, Madame, whoever they are, they shall die! Now, after the oath I have just sworn, and which I shall keep, do you dare, Madame, to ask my pardon for that wretch?’

‘Well, now, Monsieur,’ said Mme Danglars, ‘are you sure that he is as guilty as they say?’

‘Listen: here is his record. Benedetto, sentenced first of all to five years in the galleys for forgery, at the age of sixteen. As you can see, the young man showed promise. Then an escaped convict, then a murderer.’

‘And who is he, the wretch?’

‘Who knows? A tramp, a Corsican.’

‘He has not been claimed by anyone?’

‘No one. His parents are unknown.’

‘But the man who came from Lucca?’

‘Another crook, his accomplice perhaps.’

The baroness clasped her hands. ‘Villefort,’ she began, in her sweetest and most cajoling tone.

‘For God’s sake, Madame,’ the prosecutor replied, with a resolve that was somewhat unfeeling. ‘For God’s sake, never ask me to pardon a guilty man. What am I? The law. Does the law have eyes to see your sorrow? Does the law have ears to hear your soft pleadings? Does the law have a memory to make itself the conduit for your tender thoughts? No, Madame, the law orders and when it orders, it strikes.

‘You will tell me that I am a living being and not a book of laws; a man, not a rule. Look at me, Madame; look around me: have men treated me as a brother? Have they loved me? Have they considered me? Have they spared me? Has anyone ever begged pardon for Monsieur de Villefort, and has anyone ever granted a pardon to Monsieur de Villefort? No, no, no! Struck, struck and struck again!

‘You insist, woman, siren that you are, in speaking to me with that charming and expressive look that reminds me I should blush. Yes, yes, blush for what you know about, and perhaps for other things as well.

‘But in the end, since I myself failed and was found wanting – more profoundly perhaps than other men; well, since that time I have shaken out their clothes to discover a blemish, and I have always found it; I will say more: I have found it with joy, this evidence of human weakness and perversity.

‘Every man that I found guilty, every guilty man that I punished, seemed to me a living proof, a proof constantly renewed, that I was not some hideous exception! Alas, alas, alas! The whole world is wicked, Madame, so let us prove it and strike down the wicked man!’

Villefort uttered these final words with a feverish vehemence that gave them a kind of savage eloquence.

Madame Danglars decided to try one last effort. ‘But,’ she said, ‘you tell me this young man is a tramp, an orphan, abandoned by everyone?’

‘Too bad, too bad – or, rather, so much the better. Providence has ensured that no one will weep for him.’

‘But this is striking at the weak, Monsieur.’

‘A weak man who kills!’

‘His dishonour will reflect on my house.’

‘Do I not have death in mine?’

‘Ah, Monsieur,’ cried the baroness, ‘you have no pity for your fellow man. Well, I tell you now: there will be no pity for you!’

‘So be it!’ said Villefort, raising his hands in a threatening gesture towards heaven.

‘At least put back this wretch’s case, if he is arrested, until the next assizes. This will give us six months for people to forget.’

‘No, I cannot,’ said Villefort. ‘I still have five days. The charge has been made; five days is more time than I need. And, don’t you realize, Madame, that I too need to forget? Well, when I work – and I work night and day – there are moments when I no longer remember; and when I no longer remember, I am happy as the dead are happy; but that is far better than suffering…’

‘Monsieur, he has fled. Let him escape. To do nothing is the simplest kind of mercy.’

‘But I told you! It is too late! The telegraph was in operation at daybreak and by now…’

‘Monsieur,’ said the valet, coming in, ‘a dragoon has brought this dispatch from the Ministry of the Interior.’

Villefort seized the letter and hastily broke the seals. Mme Danglars shivered with terror, Villefort trembled with joy.

‘Arrested!’ he cried. ‘He has been arrested at Compiègne. It’s over!’

Mme Danglars got up, cold and pale.

‘Farewell, Monsieur,’ she said.

‘Farewell, Madame,’ the crown prosecutor replied, almost joyful, as he showed her to the door. Then, returning to his desk, he struck the letter with the back of his right hand and said: ‘There now! I had a fraud, I had three thefts, I had three cases of arson, all I lacked was a murder. And here it is: it will be a fine session.’

As the crown prosecutor had told Mme Danglars, Valentine had not yet recovered. In fact, quite exhausted, she was keeping to her bed and it was there, in her room, from Mme de Villefort, that she learned of the events which we have just described, namely the flight of Eugénie and the arrest of Andrea Cavalcanti, or rather Benedetto, as well as the charge of murder against him.

But Valentine was so weak that the story did not perhaps have as much effect on her as it would have done had she been in her normal state. There were only a few vague notions and blurred images, and even these mingled with odd ideas and fleeting spectres born of her sick mind or drifting before her eyes; and soon even they vanished so that her personal feelings could resume with all their force.

During the day Valentine was still kept close to reality by the presence of Noirtier, who had his granddaughter brought to him and stayed with her, brooding over her with paternal eyes. Then, when he came back from court, Villefort in turn spent an hour or two with his father and his child.

At six o’clock he retired to his study. At eight o’clock, Monsieur d’Avrigny would arrive, personally delivering the night-time medicine that had been prepared for the young woman. Then Noirtier was taken away, a night nurse chosen by the doctor replaced everyone and she herself retired only when, at around ten or eleven o’clock, Valentine had fallen asleep.

On her way down, this person gave the keys of Valentine’s room to Monsieur de Villefort himself, so that no one could reach the patient except through Mme de Villefort’s apartments and little Edouard’s room.

Every morning, Morrel came to Noirtier for news of Valentine; but, astonishingly enough, Morrel seemed less anxious as the days went by. Firstly, although subject to extreme nervous excitement, Valentine improved day by day – and then, had Monte Cristo not told him, when he rushed round to see him, that if Valentine was not dead in two hours she would be safe? Well, she was still alive, and four days had passed.

The nervous excitement pursued Valentine even into her sleep; or rather into the state of drowsiness that, for her, followed wakefulness. It was now that, in the silence of night and the half-dark created by the night-light burning in its alabaster stand on the mantelpiece, she would see those passing shades that haunt the rooms of the sick and which fever shakes with its quivering wings.

At such times she would imagine she saw either her stepmother, threatening her, or Morrel, opening his arms, or beings who were almost strangers in her ordinary life, like the Count of Monte Cristo. In such moments of delirium, even the furniture seemed to move and wander about the room. This would last until two or three in the morning, when a deep sleep would overtake her and last until daybreak.

It was on the evening after the morning when Valentine learned of the flight of Eugénie and Benedetto’s arrest – and when, after being confused for a moment with the sensations of her own life, these events began bit by bit to leave her thoughts – and following the successive withdrawal of Villefort, d’Avrigny and Noirtier, while eleven o’clock was striking on the clock of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule and after the night nurse had given her patient the medicine prepared by the doctor and shut the door of her room, and retired to the servants’ quarters where she was now shuddering as she listened to what the servants had to say, furnishing her memory with the dreary tales which for the past three months had passed back and forth in the antechamber of the crown prosecutor’s house – that a peculiar incident happened in that carefully closed and guarded room.