Edmond Dantès
And surely never was the dark Duchess of Ferrara more faithfully
personated than by the present artiste. This vraisemblance, which is so
seldom witnessed in the opera, seemed to strike every eye. Her figure
was tall and majestic, and voluptuously developed. Her air and bearing
were haughty, dignified, and queen-like. Her complexion was very dark,
but perfectly clear; her forehead broad and high; her brows heavy, but
gracefully arched; her eyes large, black and flashing; her hair dark as
night, and arranged with great simplicity in glossy bands; and her mouth
large, but filled with teeth of pearl-like whiteness, contrasted by lips
of coral wet with the spray. The entire outline of her face was Roman,
and exhibited in its contour and lineaments even more than Roman
sternness and decision; and its effect was still more heightened by a
large mole at one corner of her mouth and the velvet robes in which she
was appropriately costumed.
The scene between the Duchess and the Spaniard, Gubetta, was received
with the utmost applause, and the pathos of that between the son and his
unknown mother, which succeeded, touched the audience to tears; but when
the maskers rushed in and her vizard was torn off, and her true name
proclaimed, and, amid her heart-rending wailings, the curtain fell on
the first act, the shouts were perfectly thunderous with enthusiasm. The
role of Gennaro was performed by the brother of the cantatrice, Leon
d'Armilly, a young man of twenty, of delicate and graceful figure, and
as decidedly blonde as his sister was brunette. Nature seemed to have
made a great mistake in sex when this brother and sister were fashioned.
Indeed, it seemed hardly possible that they could be brother and sister,
a remark constantly made by the audience, and the kindred announced on
the bills was generally viewed as one of those convenient relationships
often assumed on the stage, but having no more reality than those of the
dramatis personae themselves.
"A second Pasta!" cried Chateau-Renaud, entering the stalls immediately
on the descent of the curtain. "Heard you ever such a magnificent
contralto?"
"Saw you ever such a magnificent bust?" asked Beauchamp.
"Were it not for a few manifest impossibilities," thoughtfully remarked
Debray, "I should swear that this same angelic Louise d'Armilly was no
other than a certain very beautiful, very eccentric and very talented
young lady whom we all once knew as a star of Parisian fashion, and who,
the last time she was in this house, sat in the same loge where now sit
the African generals."
"Whom can you mean, Debray?" cried Beauchamp.
"A certain haughty young lady, who was to have married an Italian
Prince, but, on the night of the bridal, in the midst of the
festivities, the house being thronged with guests, and even while the
contract was receiving the signatures, the Prince was arrested as an
escaped galley-slave, and at his trial proved to be the illegitimate son
of the bride's mother and a certain high legal functionary, the
Procureur du Roi, now at Charenton, through whose burning zeal for
justice the horrible discovery transpired."
"Ha!" exclaimed Chateau-Renaud. "You cannot mean Eugenie Danglars,
daughter of the bankrupt baron, whom our unhappy friend Morcerf was once
to have wed?"
"The very same," quietly rejoined the Secretary; "but this lady cannot
be Mlle. Danglars, I say absolutely, for many sufficient reasons," he
quickly added; then, as if to turn the conversation, he hastily
remarked: "Ah! there are M. Dantes and M. Lamartine, as usual,
together."
"M. Dantes!" exclaimed the Count, in surprise, looking around.
"Impossible!"
"And yet most true," observed Beauchamp; "in the third loge from the
Minister's to the right. What a wonderful resemblance there is between
those men--the poet and the Deputy! One would suppose them brothers. The
same tall and elegant figure, the same white and capacious brow, the
same dark, blazing eye, the same raven hair, and, above all, the same
most unearthly and spiritual pallor of complexion."
"No wonder M. Dantes is pale," said the Count. "Have you not heard of
the occurrence of this evening in the Chamber? M. Dantes was in the
midst of one of his powerful harangues against the Government, when
suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped--coughed violently
several times, and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; then taking a
small vial from his vest pocket, he placed it to his lips, and
instantaneously, as if new life had entered him, proceeded more
eloquently than ever to the conclusion of his speech."
"I heard something of this," said Beauchamp.
"As he descended from the tribune his friends thronged around him,
anxious about his health. He quieted their apprehensions with his
peculiar smile of assurance, but I observed that his white handkerchief
was spotted with blood, and he almost immediately left the Chamber."
"That man will kill himself in the cause he has espoused," remarked
Debray. "See how ghastly he now looks. But so much the better for the
Ministry. He is a formidable foe. Indeed, that loge contains the two
most powerful opponents of the Government."
"And who are those men just entering the box?" asked Beauchamp.
"None other than the two rival astronomers of Europe," said Debray, "and
yet most intimate friends. The taller and elder, the one with gray hair,
a dark, sharp Bedouin countenance, and that large, wild, black eye, with
a smile of mingled sarcasm and humor ever on his thin lip, is Emanuel
Arago. The other, the short, robust man, with fair complexion, sandy
hair, bright blue eye and vivacious expression, is Le Verrier, the most
tireless star-gazer science has produced since Galileo. But hush! the
curtain is up."
"Oh! it matters not," said the Count; "only Gennaro and the Spaniard
appear in the second act, and I have neither eyes nor ears save for the
Duchess to-night. But who are those, Beauchamp?"
"Where?"
"In the loge on the first tier, next to the Minister's and directly
opposite to that of M. Dantes?"
"Ah! two officers of the Spahis and two most exquisite women!" exclaimed
Debray. "They belong, doubtless, to the African party in the Minister's
loge. Your lorgnette, Count. What a splendid woman!"
Hardly had the Secretary raised the glass to his eyes before he dropped
it with the exclamation:
"A miracle! a miracle!"
"What?" cried both of the other young men, turning to the box at which
Debray was gazing.
"Messieurs, do you remember the fair Valentine de Villefort, whose
untimely and mysterious demise all the young people of Paris so much
bewailed, some two or three years ago, and whose lovely remains, we,
with our own eyes, saw deposited in the Saint-Meran and de Villefort
vault at Pere Lachaise, one bitter cold autumn evening, and there
listened most patiently and piously to a whole breviary of mournful
speeches, declarative of the said Valentine's most superlative
excellence?"
"Undoubtedly, we remember it well," was the reply.
"Then behold, and never dare to doubt the reappearance of the dead again
to the ocular organs of humanity."
"Valentine de Villefort!" exclaimed the Count, after a careful and
scrutinizing survey, "by all that's supernatural; and more exquisitely
lovely than ever!"
"Then it was true, after all, the strange story we heard," said
Beauchamp, "of the young lady's resurrection and marriage to Maximilian
Morrel, somewhere far away in parts unknown?"
"No doubt," replied the Count, "for, if I mistake not--and I'm sure I
don't mistake, now that I look more closely--that stalwart, splendid
fellow, with the broad forehead, black eyes and moustache, and the order
of the Legion of Honor on his breast, to set off his rich uniform of the
Spahis, and on whose arm the fair apparition is leaning, is no other
than Maximilian Morrel himself--the identical man who saved my
worthless neck from a yataghan in Algeria."
"How dark he's grown!" said Debray.
"No more so than all these African heroes--for instance, Cavaignac and
Lamoriciere."
"But what a splendid contrast there is between the young Colonel of the
Spahis and his lovely bride, if such she be! He, dark as a Corsican;
she, fair as an Englishwoman--he, upright as a poplar; she, drooping
like a willow--his hair and eyes black as midnight, while her soft,
languishing orbs are as blue as the summer sky, and her glossy ringlets
as brown as a chestnut!"
"On my word," said Beauchamp, "the Count grows poetical! Morrel had
better keep his beautiful wife out of the way! But have you discovered
who are the other couple in the box?" he added to the Secretary, who had
his lorgnette in most vigilant requisition. "Any more discoveries,
Debray?"
A sigh might have been heard as the Secretary took his glass from his
eye, and replied simply:
"Yes."
"And who now?" asked Chateau-Renaud. "There seems no end to discoveries
to-night."
"The young man who, by his decorations, seems a chef de bataillon of the
Spahis," replied Debray, "I cannot make out. But, be he whom he may, he
is effectually disguised from his most intimate friends by his luxuriant
beard and moustache. As for the lady--there is but one woman in the
world I have ever had the good fortune to behold who could be mistaken
for her."
"And that is?" said Beauchamp.
"Herself."
"And who is herself, Lucien?" asked Chateau-Renaud.
"Have you forgotten the Countess de Morcerf?"
"The Countess de Morcerf?--the wife of the general who was convicted by
the peers of felony, treason and outrage in the matter of Ali Tebelen,
Pacha of Yanina?" said Beauchamp.
"And who blew his brains out in despair?" added the Count.
"The same," said Debray. "She returned to Marseilles with her son
Albert. You remember Albert and his strange conduct in the duel with the
Count of Monte-Cristo?"
"One could hardly forget such chivalric generosity, such magnificent
magnanimity and such sublime self-control as were exhibited by the young
man on that occasion!" said Beauchamp. "It is to be hoped he was not
equally forbearing toward the Arabs in his African campaigns, although,
as his name has never been seen or heard since he entered the army, in
all probability he was."
"Well, well," cried the Secretary, impatiently, "the Countess retired to
Marseilles, and there she is said to have resided in utter seclusion, in
company only with Morrel's beautiful wife, devoting the vast wealth of
the deceased Count to philanthropic objects, having received it, as his
widow, only with the understanding it should be thus bestowed."
"But the rumor was," said Beauchamp, "and indeed I was so assured by M.
de Boville himself, Receiver-General of the Hospitals, at the time, that
the Countess gave all the Count's fortune to the hospitals, and that he
himself registered the deed of gift."
"Oh! that was only some twelve or thirteen hundred thousand francs,"
said Debray. "Three months after her settlement at Marseilles, in a
small house in the Allees de Meillan, said to be her own by maternal
inheritance, a letter came to her from Thomson and French, of Rome,
stating that there was a deposit in their house, to the credit of the
estate of the late Count, of the enormous sum of two millions of francs,
subject to her sole control and order, as the Count's only heir, in the
absence of his son."
"Two millions of francs!" cried the two young men in a breath.
"Even so, Messieurs," said Debray. "The story does sound rather
oriental; but I have reason to know that it is entirely true, for I made
diligent inquiry about it when last at Marseilles."
"And what took you to Marseilles, Lucien?" asked the Count
significantly.
"The Ministry," replied Debray, with evident confusion, coloring deeply.