The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (203 page)

Danglars got down without further ado. He could still not yet speak Italian, but he was already understanding the language. More dead than alive, he looked around him. He was surrounded by four men, apart from the postilion.

‘Di quà,’
one of the four said, going down a little path that led from the Appian Way to the middle of the irregular mounds that break up the topography of the Roman campagna. Danglars followed his guide without debate, and did not need to turn around to confirm that the other three men were following him. But it seemed to him that these men were stopping like sentries at more or less equal distances.

After they had walked for some ten minutes, in which Danglars did not exchange a single word with his guide, he found himself standing between a small hillock and a tall bush. Three silent men standing around him formed a triangle, with himself at its centre. He tried to speak, but his tongue refused to obey.

‘Avanti,’
said the same sharp and commanding voice.

This time Danglars doubly understood. He understood both by word and by gesture, because the man who was walking behind him pushed him forward so roughly that he nearly collided with his guide. The guide was our friend Peppino, who advanced into the high bushes along a winding track that only the ants and the lizards could have recognized as a pathway.

Peppino stopped in front of a rock surmounted by a thick bush. This rock, half open like an eyelid, swallowed up the young man, who disappeared into it like a devil into the pit in one of our fairy tales.

The voice and gestures of the man behind Danglars ordered him to do the same. There could be no further doubt: the French bankrupt was in the hands of Roman bandits.

Danglars did as he was told like a man caught between two frightful perils, made brave by fear. Despite his stomach, which was not built for wriggling through cracks in the Roman campagna, he slipped in behind Peppino and, letting himself drop with his eyes closed, he fell on his feet. As he did so, he re-opened his eyes.

The track was wide but dark. Peppino, making no effort to conceal himself now that he was at home, struck a flame from a tinder box and lit a torch. Two other men came down behind Danglars, taking up the rear, and, pushing Danglars if he ever happened to stop, drove him down a gentle slope to the centre of a sinister-looking crossroads.

Here were white stone walls, hollowed out to make coffins, superimposed one above the other, which seemed like the deep
black eyes of a skull. A sentry was tapping the barrel of his carbine against his left hand. ‘Friend or foe?’ he asked.

‘Friend,’ said Peppino. ‘Where is the captain?’

‘There,’ the sentry said, indicating over his shoulder a sort of large room hollowed out of the rock, its light shining into the corridor through wide arched openings.

‘Good prey, Captain, good prey,’ Peppino said in Italian, seizing Danglars by the collar of his frock-coat and dragging him towards an opening like a door, through which one could gain access to the room in which the captain appeared to have made his lodging.

‘Is this the man?’ he asked, looking up from Plutarch’s
Life of Alexander
which he had been reading attentively.

‘That’s him, Captain, that’s him.’

‘Very well. Show him to me.’

On this rather impertinent order, Peppino brought his torch so sharply up to Danglars’ face that he leapt back, afraid of having his eyelashes burned. His face, pale and distraught, showed all the signs of frightful terror.

‘This man is tired,’ the captain said. ‘Let him be shown to his bed.’

‘Oh!’ Danglars murmured. ‘This bed is probably one of the coffins around the walls, and that sleep is the sleep of death that one of the daggers I can see shining in the darkness will bring me.’

Indeed, in the black depths of the vast hall, rising off their beds of dry grass or wolf’s skin, one could see the companions of the man whom Albert de Morcerf had found reading Caesar’s
Commentaries
and whom Danglars found reading
The Life of Alexander
.

The banker emitted a dull groan and followed his guide. He did not try either to pray or to cry out. He was without strength, will, power or feeling. He went because he was taken.

He tripped against a step and, realizing that there was a stairway in front of him, he bent down instinctively so as not to strike his head and found himself in a cell cut out of the sheer rock. It was clean, if bare, and dry, even though situated an immeasurable depth below the surface of the ground. A bed of dry grass, covered with goatskins, was not standing, but spread out in a corner of this cell. Seeing it, Danglars thought he saw the glowing symbol of his salvation.

‘Oh, God be praised!’ he murmured. ‘It’s a real bed!’

This was the second time in the last hour that he had called on the name of God, something that had not happened to him for ten years.

‘Ecco,’
the guide said. And, pushing Danglars into the cell, he shut the door behind him. A bolt grated and Danglars was a prisoner.

In any case, even if there had been no lock, it would have taken Saint Peter, guided by a heavenly angel, to pass through the midst of the garrison which guarded the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian, camped around its leader, in whom the reader will surely have recognized the celebrated Luigi Vampa.

Danglars had most certainly recognized the bandit, though he had not wanted to believe in the man’s existence when Morcerf had tried to introduce him in France. He had recognized not only him but also the cell in which Morcerf had been imprisoned and which, in all probability, was a lodging reserved for foreigners.

These memories which, as it happened, Danglars recalled with some joy brought back a feeling of calm. Since they had not killed him at once, the bandits did not intend to kill him at all. They had captured him in order to rob him, and since he had only a few
louis
on him, he would be ransomed.

He recalled that Morcerf had been taxed at around 4,000
écus
. As he considered himself a good deal more important than Morcerf, he mentally settled his own price at 8,000
écus
. And 8,000
écus
was equivalent to 48,000
livres
.

He would still be left with something in the region of 5,050,000 francs. With that, he could manage anywhere.

So, feeling more or less sure that he would survive the adventure, especially since there was no case in which a man had ever been held for a ransom of 5,050,000
livres
, Danglars lay down on his bed and, after turning around two or three times, fell asleep, as easy in his mind as the hero whose story Luigi Vampa was reading.

Every sleep – apart from the one that Danglars feared – ends with an awakening.

Danglars woke up. For a Parisian who was accustomed to silk curtains, velvet hangings on the walls and the scent that rises from wood whitening in the chimney-piece or is wafted back from a ceiling lined in satin, to wake up in a chalky stone grotto must be like a dream in the worst possible taste. As he touched the goatskin curtains, Danglars must have thought he was dreaming about the Samoyeds or the Lapps. But in such circumstances it is only a second before the most intractable doubt becomes certainty.

‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘Yes, I’m in the hands of the bandits about whom Albert de Morcerf was telling us.’

His first impulse was to breathe, to make sure that he was not wounded: this was something that he had come across in
Don Quixote
, not perhaps the only book he had read, but the only one of which he could remember something.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They have not killed me or wounded me, but they may perhaps have robbed me…’

He quickly felt in his pocket. It had not been touched. The hundred
louis
that he had put aside for his journey from Rome to Venice were still in his trouser pocket, and the pocket-book with the letter of credit for five million, fifty thousand francs was still in the pocket of his frock-coat.

‘These are strange bandits,’ he thought, ‘to have left me my purse and my pocket-book. As I said yesterday when I went to bed, they will try to ransom me. Well, well! I still have my watch. Let’s see what time it is.’

Danglars’ watch, a masterpiece by Breguet which he had carefully wound up the previous day before setting out, sounded half-past five in the morning. Without it, Danglars would have had no idea of the time, since there was no daylight in his cell.

Should he ask the bandits to explain themselves? Should he wait patiently until they asked for him? The second alternative seemed the wiser, so Danglars waited.

He waited until noon.

Throughout this time a sentry had been stationed at his door. At eight in the morning, the guard was changed; and at this moment, Danglars felt a desire to find out who was guarding him.

He had noticed that rays of light – lamplight, not daylight – were managing to make their way through the ill-fitting planks of the door. He went across to one of these openings just at the moment when the bandit took a few gulps of brandy which, because of the leather bottle that contained it, exuded an odour that Danglars found quite repellent. ‘Ugh!’ he exclaimed, retreating to the far corner of the cell.

At noon the man with the brandy was replaced by another operative. Danglars was curious to see his new keeper, so he once more crept over to the gap in the boards. The new man was an athletic bandit, a Goliath with large eyes, thick lips, a broken nose and red hair which hung over his shoulders in twisted locks like vipers.

‘Oh, my God!’ Danglars said. ‘This one is more like an ogre than a human being. In any case, I am old and quite gristly: a fat white, not good to eat.’

As we may see, Danglars still had enough wits about him to joke.

At the same moment, as if to prove that he was no ogre, his guard sat down in front of the cell door, took a loaf of black bread out of his haversack, with some onions and cheese, which he forthwith began to devour.

‘Devil take me,’ Danglars said, observing the bandit’s dinner through the gaps in his door. ‘Devil take me if I can understand how anyone could eat such filth.’ He went and sat down on the goatskin, which reminded him of the smell of the first sentry’s brandy.

However, it was all very well for Danglars to think that, but the secrets of nature are beyond our understanding and it may be that the crudest of victuals can address a tangible invitation in quite eloquent terms to a hungry stomach.

Suddenly Danglars felt that at this moment his was a bottomless pit: the man seemed less ugly, the bread less black and the cheese less rancid.

Finally, those raw onions, the repulsive foodstuff of savages, began to evoke certain
sauces Robert
,
¹
certain dishes of boiled beef and onions which his cook had adapted to more refined palates
when Danglars would tell him: ‘Monsieur Deniseau, give us a spot of plain home cooking today.’

He got up and went to bang on the door. The bandit looked up. Danglars saw that he had been heard and banged louder.

‘Che cosa?’
the bandit asked.

‘I say, I say, my good fellow,’ Danglars said, tapping his fingers against the door. ‘Isn’t it about time someone thought of feeding me as well, eh?’

But either because he did not understand or because he had no orders regarding Danglars’ breakfast, the giant went back to his meal.

Danglars’ pride was wounded and, not wishing to compromise himself any further with this brute, he lay down once more on the goatskin without uttering another word.

Four hours went by. The giant was replaced by another bandit. Danglars, who was suffering dreadful stomach cramps, quietly got up, put his eye to the door and recognized the intelligent face of his guide. It was indeed Peppino who was preparing to enjoy his guard duty in as much comfort as possible, sitting down opposite the door and placing between his legs an earthenware casserole which contained some chick peas tossed in pork fat, hot and redolent. Beside these chick peas, Peppino set down another pretty little basket of Velletri grapes and a flask of Orvieto wine. Peppino was something of a gourmet.

Danglars’ mouth began to water as he watched these gastronomic preparations. ‘Ah, ha,’ he thought. ‘Let’s see if this one is any more amenable than the last.’ And he hammered gently on his door.

‘On y va,’
the bandit said. Thanks to his association with Signor Pastrini’s house, he had eventually learned even idiomatic French; so he came and opened the door.

Danglars recognized him as the man who had shouted at him in such an enraged tone: ‘Put your head in!’ However, this was no time for recriminations. On the contrary, he adopted his most pleasant manner and said, with a gracious smile: ‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur, but am I not also to be given some dinner?’

‘What!’ Peppino exclaimed. ‘Is Your Excellency hungry, by any chance?’

‘I like that “by any chance”,’ Danglars thought. ‘It is now fully twenty-four hours since I last ate anything.’ And he added aloud, shrugging his shoulders: ‘Yes, I am hungry; in fact, very hungry.’

‘So would Your Excellency like to eat?’

‘Immediately, if possible.’

‘Nothing simpler,’ said Peppino. ‘Here one can get whatever one wishes, if one pays, of course, as is customary among honest Christians.’