The Count of Monte Cristo
consumed with heat, rolling on the stone floor of my prison. Mercédès,
I must revenge myself, for I suffered fourteen years,—fourteen years I
wept, I cursed; now I tell you, Mercédès, I must revenge myself.”
The count, fearing to yield to the entreaties of her he had so ardently
loved, called his sufferings to the assistance of his hatred.
“Revenge yourself, then, Edmond,” cried the poor mother; “but let your
vengeance fall on the culprits,—on him, on me, but not on my son!”
“It is written in the good book,” said Monte Cristo, “that the sins of
the fathers shall fall upon their children to the third and fourth
generation. Since God himself dictated those words to his prophet, why
should I seek to make myself better than God?”
“Edmond,” continued Mercédès, with her arms extended towards the count,
“since I first knew you, I have adored your name, have respected your
memory. Edmond, my friend, do not compel me to tarnish that noble and
pure image reflected incessantly on the mirror of my heart. Edmond, if
you knew all the prayers I have addressed to God for you while I
thought you were living and since I have thought you must be dead! Yes,
dead, alas! I imagined your dead body buried at the foot of some gloomy
tower, or cast to the bottom of a pit by hateful jailers, and I wept!
What could I do for you, Edmond, besides pray and weep? Listen; for ten
years I dreamed each night the same dream. I had been told that you had
endeavored to escape; that you had taken the place of another prisoner;
that you had slipped into the winding sheet of a dead body; that you
had been thrown alive from the top of the Château d’If, and that the
cry you uttered as you dashed upon the rocks first revealed to your
jailers that they were your murderers. Well, Edmond, I swear to you, by
the head of that son for whom I entreat your pity,—Edmond, for ten
years I saw every night every detail of that frightful tragedy, and for
ten years I heard every night the cry which awoke me, shuddering and
cold. And I, too, Edmond—oh! believe me—guilty as I was—oh, yes, I,
too, have suffered much!”
“Have you known what it is to have your father starve to death in your
absence?” cried Monte Cristo, thrusting his hands into his hair; “have
you seen the woman you loved giving her hand to your rival, while you
were perishing at the bottom of a dungeon?”
“No,” interrupted Mercédès, “but I have seen him whom I loved on the
point of murdering my son.”
Mercédès uttered these words with such deep anguish, with an accent of
such intense despair, that Monte Cristo could not restrain a sob. The
lion was daunted; the avenger was conquered.
“What do you ask of me?” said he,—“your son’s life? Well, he shall
live!”
Mercédès uttered a cry which made the tears start from Monte Cristo’s
eyes; but these tears disappeared almost instantaneously, for,
doubtless, God had sent some angel to collect them—far more precious
were they in his eyes than the richest pearls of Guzerat and Ophir.
“Oh,” said she, seizing the count’s hand and raising it to her lips;
“oh, thank you, thank you, Edmond! Now you are exactly what I dreamt
you were,—the man I always loved. Oh, now I may say so!”
“So much the better,” replied Monte Cristo; “as that poor Edmond will
not have long to be loved by you. Death is about to return to the tomb,
the phantom to retire in darkness.”
“What do you say, Edmond?”
“I say, since you command me, Mercédès, I must die.”
“Die? and why so? Who talks of dying? Whence have you these ideas of
death?”
“You do not suppose that, publicly outraged in the face of a whole
theatre, in the presence of your friends and those of your
son—challenged by a boy who will glory in my forgiveness as if it were
a victory—you do not suppose that I can for one moment wish to live.
What I most loved after you, Mercédès, was myself, my dignity, and that
strength which rendered me superior to other men; that strength was my
life. With one word you have crushed it, and I die.”
“But the duel will not take place, Edmond, since you forgive?”
“It will take place,” said Monte Cristo, in a most solemn tone; “but
instead of your son’s blood to stain the ground, mine will flow.”
Mercédès shrieked, and sprang towards Monte Cristo, but, suddenly
stopping, “Edmond,” said she, “there is a God above us, since you live
and since I have seen you again; I trust to him from my heart. While
waiting his assistance I trust to your word; you have said that my son
should live, have you not?”
“Yes, madame, he shall live,” said Monte Cristo, surprised that without
more emotion Mercédès had accepted the heroic sacrifice he made for
her. Mercédès extended her hand to the count.
“Edmond,” said she, and her eyes were wet with tears while looking at
him to whom she spoke, “how noble it is of you, how great the action
you have just performed, how sublime to have taken pity on a poor woman
who appealed to you with every chance against her, Alas, I am grown old
with grief more than with years, and cannot now remind my Edmond by a
smile, or by a look, of that Mercédès whom he once spent so many hours
in contemplating. Ah, believe me, Edmond, as I told you, I too have
suffered much; I repeat, it is melancholy to pass one’s life without
having one joy to recall, without preserving a single hope; but that
proves that all is not yet over. No, it is not finished; I feel it by
what remains in my heart. Oh, I repeat it, Edmond; what you have just
done is beautiful—it is grand; it is sublime.”
“Do you say so now, Mercédès?—then what would you say if you knew the
extent of the sacrifice I make to you? Suppose that the Supreme Being,
after having created the world and fertilized chaos, had paused in the
work to spare an angel the tears that might one day flow for mortal
sins from her immortal eyes; suppose that when everything was in
readiness and the moment had come for God to look upon his work and see
that it was good—suppose he had snuffed out the sun and tossed the
world back into eternal night—then—even then, Mercédès, you could not
imagine what I lose in sacrificing my life at this moment.”
Mercédès looked at the count in a way which expressed at the same time
her astonishment, her admiration, and her gratitude. Monte Cristo
pressed his forehead on his burning hands, as if his brain could no
longer bear alone the weight of its thoughts.
“Edmond,” said Mercédès, “I have but one word more to say to you.”
The count smiled bitterly.
“Edmond,” continued she, “you will see that if my face is pale, if my
eyes are dull, if my beauty is gone; if Mercédès, in short, no longer
resembles her former self in her features, you will see that her heart
is still the same. Adieu, then, Edmond; I have nothing more to ask of
heaven—I have seen you again, and have found you as noble and as great
as formerly you were. Adieu, Edmond, adieu, and thank you.”
But the count did not answer. Mercédès opened the door of the study and
had disappeared before he had recovered from the painful and profound
reverie into which his thwarted vengeance had plunged him.
The clock of the Invalides struck one when the carriage which conveyed
Madame de Morcerf rolled away on the pavement of the Champs-Élysées,
and made Monte Cristo raise his head.
“What a fool I was,” said he, “not to tear my heart out on the day when
I resolved to avenge myself!”
Chapter 90. The Meeting
After Mercédès had left Monte Cristo, he fell into profound gloom.
Around him and within him the flight of thought seemed to have stopped;
his energetic mind slumbered, as the body does after extreme fatigue.
“What?” said he to himself, while the lamp and the wax lights were
nearly burnt out, and the servants were waiting impatiently in the
anteroom; “what? this edifice which I have been so long preparing,
which I have reared with so much care and toil, is to be crushed by a
single touch, a word, a breath! Yes, this self, of whom I thought so
much, of whom I was so proud, who had appeared so worthless in the
dungeons of the Château d’If, and whom I had succeeded in making so
great, will be but a lump of clay tomorrow. Alas, it is not the death
of the body I regret; for is not the destruction of the vital
principle, the repose to which everything is tending, to which every
unhappy being aspires,—is not this the repose of matter after which I
so long sighed, and which I was seeking to attain by the painful
process of starvation when Faria appeared in my dungeon? What is death
for me? One step farther into rest,—two, perhaps, into silence. No, it
is not existence, then, that I regret, but the ruin of projects so
slowly carried out, so laboriously framed. Providence is now opposed to
them, when I most thought it would be propitious. It is not God’s will
that they should be accomplished. This burden, almost as heavy as a
world, which I had raised, and I had thought to bear to the end, was
too great for my strength, and I was compelled to lay it down in the
middle of my career. Oh, shall I then, again become a fatalist, whom
fourteen years of despair and ten of hope had rendered a believer in
Providence?
“And all this—all this, because my heart, which I thought dead, was
only sleeping; because it has awakened and has begun to beat again,
because I have yielded to the pain of the emotion excited in my breast
by a woman’s voice.
“Yet,” continued the count, becoming each moment more absorbed in the
anticipation of the dreadful sacrifice for the morrow, which Mercédès
had accepted, “yet, it is impossible that so noble-minded a woman
should thus through selfishness consent to my death when I am in the
prime of life and strength; it is impossible that she can carry to such
a point maternal love, or rather delirium. There are virtues which
become crimes by exaggeration. No, she must have conceived some
pathetic scene; she will come and throw herself between us; and what
would be sublime here will there appear ridiculous.”
The blush of pride mounted to the count’s forehead as this thought
passed through his mind.
“Ridiculous?” repeated he; “and the ridicule will fall on me. I
ridiculous? No, I would rather die.”
By thus exaggerating to his own mind the anticipated ill-fortune of the
next day, to which he had condemned himself by promising Mercédès to
spare her son, the count at last exclaimed:
“Folly, folly, folly!—to carry generosity so far as to put myself up as
a mark for that young man to aim at. He will never believe that my
death was suicide; and yet it is important for the honor of my
memory,—and this surely is not vanity, but a justifiable pride,—it is
important the world should know that I have consented, by my free will,
to stop my arm, already raised to strike, and that with the arm which
has been so powerful against others I have struck myself. It must be;
it shall be.”
Seizing a pen, he drew a paper from a secret drawer in his desk, and
wrote at the bottom of the document (which was no other than his will,
made since his arrival in Paris) a sort of codicil, clearly explaining
the nature of his death.
“I do this, Oh, my God,” said he, with his eyes raised to heaven, “as
much for thy honor as for mine. I have during ten years considered
myself the agent of thy vengeance, and other wretches, like Morcerf,
Danglars, Villefort, even Morcerf himself, must not imagine that chance
has freed them from their enemy. Let them know, on the contrary, that
their punishment, which had been decreed by Providence, is only delayed
by my present determination, and although they escape it in this world,
it awaits them in another, and that they are only exchanging time for
eternity.”
While he was thus agitated by gloomy uncertainties,—wretched waking
dreams of grief,—the first rays of morning pierced his windows, and