The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (79 page)

‘Ah, Monsieur has a noble heart,’ he said. ‘So much the better!’

This sort of exclamation, which responded to the count’s own thoughts rather than to what Albert had just said, surprised everyone, most of all Morrel, who looked at Monte Cristo with astonishment. But at the same time the tone was so soft and – for want of a better word – so soothing that, strange though the exclamation was, it would be impossible to be annoyed by it.

‘Why should he doubt it?’ Beauchamp asked Château-Renaud.

‘In truth,’ said the latter, who, being accustomed to society and with the sharpness of his aristocratic eye, had seen everything that it was possible to see in Monte Cristo, ‘in truth, Albert did not deceive us: this count is an unusual person. What do you think, Morrel?’

‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘he has an honest eye and a pleasing voice, so I like him, despite the odd reflection he has just made regarding me.’

‘Gentlemen,’ said Albert, ‘Germain tells me that you are served. My dear Count, allow me to show you the way.’

They walked silently through into the dining-room, where each took his place.

‘Gentlemen,’ the count said as he sat down, ‘allow me to confess something that will serve as my excuse for any impropriety on my part: I am a foreigner, and so much one that this is the first time I have been in Paris. Consequently, I know absolutely nothing of French manners, having virtually up to now practised only an Oriental style of life, which is the one most opposed to the fine traditions of Paris. I beg you therefore to excuse me if you find anything in my behaviour which is too Turkish, too Neapolitan or too Arabian. Having said that, gentlemen, let us dine.’

‘How well he says all that!’ Beauchamp muttered. ‘He is undoubtedly some noble lord.’

‘A noble lord,’ Debray repeated.

‘A noble lord of all countries, Monsieur Debray,’ said Château-Renaud.

It will be remembered that the count was an abstemious guest. Albert made the observation, while expressing a fear that, from the start, Parisian life might not displease the traveller with respect to its least spiritual yet, at the same time, most necessary side.

‘My dear Count,’ he said, ‘you see me prey to an anxiety, which is that the cuisine of the Rue du Helder may not please you as much as that of the Piazza di Spagna. I should have enquired about your taste and had some dishes prepared to suit your fancies.’

‘If you knew me better, Monsieur,’ the count replied with a smile, ‘you would not concern yourself with an attention which is almost humiliating for a traveller who has lived in turn with
macaroni
in Naples,
polenta
in Milan,
olla podrida
in Valencia,
pilaff
in Constantinople, curry in India and birds’ nests in China. There is no such thing as a cuisine for a cosmopolitan like myself. I eat everything, everywhere, but little. And today, when you reproach me with my abstinence, I am in fact indulging my appetite, for I have not eaten since yesterday morning.’

‘What! Not since yesterday morning,’ the guests exclaimed. ‘You have not eaten for twenty-four hours?’

‘No,’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘I was obliged to make a detour and ask for some information near Naples. This delayed me slightly and I did not want to stop.’

‘Did you not eat in your carriage?’ asked Morcerf.

‘No, I slept, as I am accustomed to do when I am bored but do not have the strength to amuse myself, or when I am hungry without having the desire to eat.’

‘Can you control sleep then, Monsieur?’ asked Morrel.

‘More or less.’

‘Do you have a recipe for that?’

‘An infallible one.’

‘It would be invaluable to us Africans, who do not always have anything to eat and seldom have anything to drink,’ said Morrel.

‘Yes,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Unfortunately my preparation, while excellent for a man like myself who leads a quite exceptional life, would be very dangerous if given to an army, which would not wake up when it was needed.’

‘Can we know the recipe?’ asked Debray.

‘Indeed, yes,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘There’s no secret. It is a mixture of excellent opium which I brought myself from Canton so that I could be certain it was pure, and the best hashish harvested in the East, namely that which comes from between the Tigris and the Euphrates. These two ingredients are mixed in equal proportions and shaped into pills which can be taken when needed. The result follows within ten minutes. Ask Baron Franz d’Epinay; I think he tried it once.’

‘Yes,’ Morcerf replied. ‘He mentioned it to me and has a very pleasant memory of the occasion.’

‘And do you always carry this drug with you?’ asked Beauchamp who, as a journalist, was very incredulous.

‘Always,’ said Monte Cristo.

‘Would it be indiscreet to ask you to show us these precious pills?’ Beauchamp continued, hoping to catch the stranger out.

‘Not at all, Monsieur,’ said the count; and he took out of his pocket a wonderful pillbox formed out of a single emerald and closed by a gold screw which, when it was loosened, allowed to emerge a small, greenish ball, about the size of a pea. The ball had a pervasive, acrid smell. There were four or five others like it inside
the emerald, which might have been able to contain a dozen of them.

This pillbox was passed around the table, but this was much more so that the splendid emerald itself could be examined than to see or sniff the pills that the guests passed from one to another.

‘Is it your cook who prepares this delicacy?’ asked Beauchamp.

‘No, Monsieur. I do not entrust my real pleasures to unworthy hands. I am a good enough chemist to prepare the pills myself.’

‘This is a splendid emerald and the largest I have ever seen, even though my mother has some quite remarkable family jewels,’ said Château-Renaud.

‘I had three like that,’ Monte Cristo went on. ‘I gave one to the sultan, who had it mounted on his sword. I gave the second to our Holy Father the Pope, who had it encrusted into his tiara opposite an emerald that was more or less similar, though not so beautiful, which had been given to his predecessor, Pius VII, by the Emperor Napoleon. I kept the third for myself and had it hollowed out, thus diminishing its value by half, but fitting it better for the use I wished to make of it.’

Everyone looked at Monte Cristo with astonishment. He spoke so unaffectedly that it was clear either that he was speaking the truth or that he was mad; but the emerald which had remained in his hands naturally inclined one to the first supposition.

‘And what did those two sovereigns give you in exchange for this marvellous present?’ asked Debray.

‘The sultan gave me a woman’s freedom,’ the count replied. ‘His Holiness, the life of a man. In this way, once in my existence, I was as powerful as if God had allowed me to be born on the steps of a throne.’

‘It was Peppino that you freed, wasn’t it?’ Morcerf cried. ‘He was the one who benefited from your pardon?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Monte Cristo, smiling.

‘Monsieur le Comte, you have no idea how much pleasure I feel in hearing you say that!’ said Morcerf. ‘I had already let my friends know in advance that you were a fabulous being, like an enchanter from the
Thousand and One Nights
, or a sorcerer of the Middle Ages; but Parisians are people whose wits are so used to paradoxes that they mistake the most undeniable truths for mere figments of the imagination if these truths do not conform in every respect to the conditions of their daily lives. For example, Debray here reads
and Beauchamp prints day by day that a late-returning member of the Jockey Club has been stopped and robbed on the boulevards; that four people have been murdered in the Rue Saint-Denis or the Faubourg Saint-Germain; and that ten, fifteen or twenty thieves have been arrested in a café on the Boulevard du Temple, or in the Thermes de Julien; yet they still deny the existence of bandits in the Maremma, the Roman Campagna or the Pontine marshes. So tell them yourself, I beg you, Monsieur le Comte, how I was captured by those bandits and that, in all probability, without your generous intervention I should today be awaiting my eternal resurrection in the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian, instead of giving them dinner in my unworthy little house in the Rue du Helder.’

‘Puh!’ said Monte Cristo. ‘You promised me never to speak of that trifle.’

‘Not I, Monsieur le Comte!’ cried Morcerf. ‘That was someone else to whom you must have rendered the same service and whom you are confusing with me. Let us, on the contrary, speak of it, I beg you; for if you decide to talk about the circumstances of this affair, perhaps you will not only tell me again a little of what I know, but also a good deal that I do not.’

The count smiled. ‘It seems to me that you played a large enough part in the business to know as well as I do what happened.’

‘Will you promise me,’ said Morcerf, ‘that if I tell you all that I know, you will tell me, in turn, everything that I do not know?’

‘More than fair,’ Monte Cristo replied.

‘Well, then, even at the expense of my vanity,’ Morcerf proceeded, ‘for three days I thought myself to be the object of the coquetry of a masked lady whom I took for some descendant of Tullia or Poppaea, when in fact I was purely and simply the victim of the provocative manoeuvres of a
contadina
– and note that I say
contadina
, to avoid calling her a peasant. All that I do know is that, naïve as I was – still more naïve than the person I just mentioned – I mistook for this same peasant girl a young bandit of fifteen or sixteen, beardless, narrow waisted, who at the very moment when I wanted to take the liberty of planting a kiss on his chaste shoulder put a pistol to my throat and, with the help of seven or eight of his companions, led me, or dragged me, into the depths of the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian, where I met a very cultured chief bandit who, dammit, was reading Caesar’s
Commentaries
, but deigned to interrupt his reading to tell me that if, on the following
morning at six o’clock, I had not put four thousand
écus
into his coffers, then on the same day at a quarter past six I should quite simply have ceased to exist. There is a letter to prove it, in the possession of Franz, signed by me with a postscript by Luigi Vampa. If you doubt my word, I can write to Franz, who will verify the signatures. That is all I know. Now, what I do not know is how you, Monsieur le Comte, managed to inspire so much respect in these Roman bandits who respect so little else. I must admit to you that Franz and I were totally overcome with admiration.’

‘Nothing could be simpler, Monsieur,’ the count replied. ‘I had known the celebrated Vampa for more than ten years. One day, when he was quite young and still a shepherd, I gave him some gold coin or other because he had shown me the way and, so that he would not be indebted to me, he gave me in return a dagger which he had carved and which you must have seen in my collection of weapons. Later, either because he had forgotten this small exchange of presents between us or because he did not recognize me, he tried to arrest me, but I turned the tables on him and captured him myself with a dozen of his men. I might have delivered him to the justice of Rome, which is swift and would have been even more expeditious in his case, but I did not. Instead I let him and his followers go.’

‘On condition that they sinned no more,’ said the journalist, laughing. ‘I am pleased to see that they scrupulously kept their word.’

‘No, Monsieur,’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘On the simple condition that they would always respect me and mine. Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbour, I never try to protect society which does not protect me – indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm – and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbour are in my debt.’

‘At last!’ Château-Renaud exclaimed. ‘Here is the first brave man whom I have heard frankly and unashamedly preaching egoism. This is excellent! Bravo, Monsieur le Comte!’

‘At least it is honest,’ said Morrel. ‘But I am sure that Monsieur le Comte does not regret once at least having acted contrary to the principles that he has just described to us in such a positive manner.’

‘How did I act contrary to those principles, Monsieur?’ asked Monte Cristo, who had been unable to prevent himself looking from time to time at Maximilien so attentively that the bold young man had already had to lower his eyes before the clear and penetrating gaze of the count.

‘It seems to me,’ said Morrel, ‘that by delivering Monsieur de Morcerf, who is unknown to you, you served both your neighbour and society.’

‘… of which he is the finest ornament,’ Beauchamp said gravely, emptying a glass of champagne in a single gulp.

‘Monsieur le Comte!’ Morcerf exclaimed. ‘Here you are, caught in a logical argument – you, possessor of one of the most rigidly logical minds I have ever encountered; and you will see what is about to be clearly demonstrated to you, namely that, far from being an egoist, you are on the contrary a philanthropist. Oh, Count! You call yourself an Oriental, a Levantine, a Malay, an Indian, a Chinese, a Savage; you use Monte Cristo as your family name and Sinbad the Sailor as your Christian name; and yet, look what happens on the very day you set foot in Paris: instinctively you possess the finest and the worst quality of us eccentric Parisians, which is to lay claim to the vices that you do not have and to hide the virtues that you do!’