The Count of Monte Cristo
as you say; but by way of rewarding your honesty I give you another
double Napoleon, that you may drink to my health, and be able to ask
your messmates to join you.”
So extreme was the surprise of the sailor, that he was unable even to
thank Edmond, whose receding figure he continued to gaze after in
speechless astonishment. “Some nabob from India,” was his comment.
Dantès, meanwhile, went on his way. Each step he trod oppressed his
heart with fresh emotion; his first and most indelible recollections
were there; not a tree, not a street, that he passed but seemed filled
with dear and cherished memories. And thus he proceeded onwards till he
arrived at the end of the Rue de Noailles, from whence a full view of
the Allées de Meilhan was obtained. At this spot, so pregnant with fond
and filial remembrances, his heart beat almost to bursting, his knees
tottered under him, a mist floated over his sight, and had he not clung
for support to one of the trees, he would inevitably have fallen to the
ground and been crushed beneath the many vehicles continually passing
there. Recovering himself, however, he wiped the perspiration from his
brows, and stopped not again till he found himself at the door of the
house in which his father had lived.
The nasturtiums and other plants, which his father had delighted to
train before his window, had all disappeared from the upper part of the
house.
Leaning against the tree, he gazed thoughtfully for a time at the upper
stories of the shabby little house. Then he advanced to the door, and
asked whether there were any rooms to be let. Though answered in the
negative, he begged so earnestly to be permitted to visit those on the
fifth floor, that, in despite of the oft-repeated assurance of the
_concierge_ that they were occupied, Dantès succeeded in inducing the
man to go up to the tenants, and ask permission for a gentleman to be
allowed to look at them.
The tenants of the humble lodging were a young couple who had been
scarcely married a week; and seeing them, Dantès sighed heavily.
Nothing in the two small chambers forming the apartments remained as it
had been in the time of the elder Dantès; the very paper was different,
while the articles of antiquated furniture with which the rooms had
been filled in Edmond’s time had all disappeared; the four walls alone
remained as he had left them.
The bed belonging to the present occupants was placed as the former
owner of the chamber had been accustomed to have his; and, in spite of
his efforts to prevent it, the eyes of Edmond were suffused in tears as
he reflected that on that spot the old man had breathed his last,
vainly calling for his son.
The young couple gazed with astonishment at the sight of their
visitor’s emotion, and wondered to see the large tears silently chasing
each other down his otherwise stern and immovable features; but they
felt the sacredness of his grief, and kindly refrained from questioning
him as to its cause, while, with instinctive delicacy, they left him to
indulge his sorrow alone.
0317m
When he withdrew from the scene of his painful recollections, they both
accompanied him downstairs, reiterating their hope that he would come
again whenever he pleased, and assuring him that their poor dwelling
would ever be open to him.
As Edmond passed the door on the fourth floor, he paused to inquire
whether Caderousse the tailor still dwelt there; but he received for
reply, that the person in question had got into difficulties, and at
the present time kept a small inn on the route from Bellegarde to
Beaucaire.
Having obtained the address of the person to whom the house in the
Allées de Meilhan belonged, Dantès next proceeded thither, and, under
the name of Lord Wilmore (the name and title inscribed on his
passport), purchased the small dwelling for the sum of twenty-five
thousand francs, at least ten thousand more than it was worth; but had
its owner asked half a million, it would unhesitatingly have been
given.
The very same day the occupants of the apartments on the fifth floor of
the house, now become the property of Dantès, were duly informed by the
notary who had arranged the necessary transfer of deeds, etc., that the
new landlord gave them their choice of any of the rooms in the house,
without the least augmentation of rent, upon condition of their giving
instant possession of the two small chambers they at present inhabited.
This strange event aroused great wonder and curiosity in the
neighborhood of the Allées de Meilhan, and a multitude of theories were
afloat, none of which was anywhere near the truth. But what raised
public astonishment to a climax, and set all conjecture at defiance,
was the knowledge that the same stranger who had in the morning visited
the Allées de Meilhan had been seen in the evening walking in the
little village of the Catalans, and afterwards observed to enter a poor
fisherman’s hut, and to pass more than an hour in inquiring after
persons who had either been dead or gone away for more than fifteen or
sixteen years.
But on the following day the family from whom all these particulars had
been asked received a handsome present, consisting of an entirely new
fishing-boat, with two seines and a tender.
The delighted recipients of these munificent gifts would gladly have
poured out their thanks to their generous benefactor, but they had seen
him, upon quitting the hut, merely give some orders to a sailor, and
then springing lightly on horseback, leave Marseilles by the Porte
d’Aix.
Chapter 26. The Pont du Gard Inn
Such of my readers as have made a pedestrian excursion to the south of
France may perchance have noticed, about midway between the town of
Beaucaire and the village of Bellegarde,—a little nearer to the former
than to the latter,—a small roadside inn, from the front of which hung,
creaking and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with a
grotesque representation of the Pont du Gard. This modern place of
entertainment stood on the left-hand side of the post road, and backed
upon the Rhône. It also boasted of what in Languedoc is styled a
garden, consisting of a small plot of ground, on the side opposite to
the main entrance reserved for the reception of guests. A few dingy
olives and stunted fig-trees struggled hard for existence, but their
withered dusty foliage abundantly proved how unequal was the conflict.
Between these sickly shrubs grew a scanty supply of garlic, tomatoes,
and eschalots; while, lone and solitary, like a forgotten sentinel, a
tall pine raised its melancholy head in one of the corners of this
unattractive spot, and displayed its flexible stem and fan-shaped
summit dried and cracked by the fierce heat of the sub-tropical sun.
All these trees, great or small, were turned in the direction to which
the Mistral blows, one of the three curses of Provence, the others
being the Durance and the Parliament.
In the surrounding plain, which more resembled a dusty lake than solid
ground, were scattered a few miserable stalks of wheat, the effect, no
doubt, of a curious desire on the part of the agriculturists of the
country to see whether such a thing as the raising of grain in those
parched regions was practicable. Each stalk served as a perch for a
grasshopper, which regaled the passers-by through this Egyptian scene
with its strident, monotonous note.
For about seven or eight years the little tavern had been kept by a man
and his wife, with two servants,—a chambermaid named Trinette, and a
hostler called Pecaud. This small staff was quite equal to all the
requirements, for a canal between Beaucaire and Aiguemortes had
revolutionized transportation by substituting boats for the cart and
the stagecoach. And, as though to add to the daily misery which this
prosperous canal inflicted on the unfortunate innkeeper, whose utter
ruin it was fast accomplishing, it was situated between the Rhône from
which it had its source and the post-road it had depleted, not a
hundred steps from the inn, of which we have given a brief but faithful
description.
The innkeeper himself was a man of from forty to fifty-five years of
age, tall, strong, and bony, a perfect specimen of the natives of those
southern latitudes; he had dark, sparkling, and deep-set eyes, hooked
nose, and teeth white as those of a carnivorous animal; his hair, like
his beard, which he wore under his chin, was thick and curly, and in
spite of his age but slightly interspersed with a few silvery threads.
His naturally dark complexion had assumed a still further shade of
brown from the habit the unfortunate man had acquired of stationing
himself from morning till eve at the threshold of his door, on the
lookout for guests who seldom came, yet there he stood, day after day,
exposed to the meridional rays of a burning sun, with no other
protection for his head than a red handkerchief twisted around it,
after the manner of the Spanish muleteers. This man was our old
acquaintance, Gaspard Caderousse.
His wife, on the contrary, whose maiden name had been Madeleine
Radelle, was pale, meagre, and sickly-looking. Born in the neighborhood
of Arles, she had shared in the beauty for which its women are
proverbial; but that beauty had gradually withered beneath the
devastating influence of the slow fever so prevalent among dwellers by
the ponds of Aiguemortes and the marshes of Camargue. She remained
nearly always in her second-floor chamber, shivering in her chair, or
stretched languid and feeble on her bed, while her husband kept his
daily watch at the door—a duty he performed with so much the greater
willingness, as it saved him the necessity of listening to the endless
plaints and murmurs of his helpmate, who never saw him without breaking
out into bitter invectives against fate; to all of which her husband
would calmly return an unvarying reply, in these philosophic words:
“Hush, La Carconte. It is God’s pleasure that things should be so.”
The sobriquet of La Carconte had been bestowed on Madeleine Radelle
from the fact that she had been born in a village, so called, situated
between Salon and Lambesc; and as a custom existed among the
inhabitants of that part of France where Caderousse lived of styling
every person by some particular and distinctive appellation, her
husband had bestowed on her the name of La Carconte in place of her
sweet and euphonious name of Madeleine, which, in all probability, his
rude guttural language would not have enabled him to pronounce.
Still, let it not be supposed that amid this affected resignation to
the will of Providence, the unfortunate innkeeper did not writhe under
the double misery of seeing the hateful canal carry off his customers
and his profits, and the daily infliction of his peevish partner’s
murmurs and lamentations.
0323m
Like other dwellers in the south, he was a man of sober habits and
moderate desires, but fond of external show, vain, and addicted to
display. During the days of his prosperity, not a festivity took place
without himself and wife being among the spectators. He dressed in the
picturesque costume worn upon grand occasions by the inhabitants of the
south of France, bearing equal resemblance to the style adopted both by
the Catalans and Andalusians; while La Carconte displayed the charming
fashion prevalent among the women of Arles, a mode of attire borrowed
equally from Greece and Arabia. But, by degrees, watch-chains,
necklaces, parti-colored scarves, embroidered bodices, velvet vests,
elegantly worked stockings, striped gaiters, and silver buckles for the
shoes, all disappeared; and Gaspard Caderousse, unable to appear abroad
in his pristine splendor, had given up any further participation in the
pomps and vanities, both for himself and wife, although a bitter