The Count of Monte Cristo
And he stepped on one side to give place to a young man of refined and
dignified bearing, with large and open brow, piercing eyes, and black
moustache, whom our readers have already seen at Marseilles, under
circumstances sufficiently dramatic not to be forgotten. A rich
uniform, half French, half Oriental, set off his graceful and stalwart
figure, and his broad chest was decorated with the order of the Legion
of Honor. The young officer bowed with easy and elegant politeness.
“Monsieur,” said Albert with affectionate courtesy, “the count of
Château-Renaud knew how much pleasure this introduction would give me;
you are his friend, be ours also.”
“Well said,” interrupted Château-Renaud; “and pray that, if you should
ever be in a similar predicament, he may do as much for you as he did
for me.”
“What has he done?” asked Albert.
“Oh, nothing worth speaking of,” said Morrel; “M. de Château-Renaud
exaggerates.”
“Not worth speaking of?” cried Château-Renaud; “life is not worth
speaking of!—that is rather too philosophical, on my word, Morrel. It
is very well for you, who risk your life every day, but for me, who
only did so once——”
“We gather from all this, baron, that Captain Morrel saved your life.”
“Exactly so.”
“On what occasion?” asked Beauchamp.
“Beauchamp, my good fellow, you know I am starving,” said Debray: “do
not set him off on some long story.”
“Well, I do not prevent your sitting down to table,” replied Beauchamp,
“Château-Renaud can tell us while we eat our breakfast.”
“Gentlemen,” said Morcerf, “it is only a quarter past ten, and I expect
someone else.”
“Ah, true, a diplomatist!” observed Debray.
“Diplomat or not, I don’t know; I only know that he charged himself on
my account with a mission, which he terminated so entirely to my
satisfaction, that had I been king, I should have instantly created him
knight of all my orders, even had I been able to offer him the Golden
Fleece and the Garter.”
“Well, since we are not to sit down to table,” said Debray, “take a
glass of sherry, and tell us all about it.”
“You all know that I had the fancy of going to Africa.”
“It is a road your ancestors have traced for you,” said Albert
gallantly.
“Yes? but I doubt that your object was like theirs—to rescue the Holy
Sepulchre.”
“You are quite right, Beauchamp,” observed the young aristocrat. “It
was only to fight as an amateur. I cannot bear duelling ever since two
seconds, whom I had chosen to arrange an affair, forced me to break the
arm of one of my best friends, one whom you all know—poor Franz
d’Épinay.”
“Ah, true,” said Debray, “you did fight some time ago; about what?”
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“The devil take me, if I remember,” returned Château-Renaud. “But I
recollect perfectly one thing, that, being unwilling to let such
talents as mine sleep, I wished to try upon the Arabs the new pistols
that had been given to me. In consequence I embarked for Oran, and went
from thence to Constantine, where I arrived just in time to witness the
raising of the siege. I retreated with the rest, for eight-and-forty
hours. I endured the rain during the day, and the cold during the night
tolerably well, but the third morning my horse died of cold. Poor
brute—accustomed to be covered up and to have a stove in the stable,
the Arabian finds himself unable to bear ten degrees of cold in
Arabia.”
“That’s why you want to purchase my English horse,” said Debray, “you
think he will bear the cold better.”
“You are mistaken, for I have made a vow never to return to Africa.”
“You were very much frightened, then?” asked Beauchamp.
“Well, yes, and I had good reason to be so,” replied Château-Renaud. “I
was retreating on foot, for my horse was dead. Six Arabs came up, full
gallop, to cut off my head. I shot two with my double-barrelled gun,
and two more with my pistols, but I was then disarmed, and two were
still left; one seized me by the hair (that is why I now wear it so
short, for no one knows what may happen), the other swung a yataghan,
and I already felt the cold steel on my neck, when this gentleman whom
you see here charged them, shot the one who held me by the hair, and
cleft the skull of the other with his sabre. He had assigned himself
the task of saving a man’s life that day; chance caused that man to be
myself. When I am rich I will order a statue of Chance from Klagmann or
Marochetti.”
“Yes,” said Morrel, smiling, “it was the 5th of September, the
anniversary of the day on which my father was miraculously preserved;
therefore, as far as it lies in my power, I endeavor to celebrate it by
some——”
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“Heroic action,” interrupted Château-Renaud. “I was chosen. But that is
not all—after rescuing me from the sword, he rescued me from the cold,
not by sharing his cloak with me, like St. Martin, but by giving me the
whole; then from hunger by sharing with me—guess what?”
“A Strasbourg pie?” asked Beauchamp.
“No, his horse; of which we each of us ate a slice with a hearty
appetite. It was very hard.”
“The horse?” said Morcerf, laughing.
“No, the sacrifice,” returned Château-Renaud; “ask Debray if he would
sacrifice his English steed for a stranger?”
“Not for a stranger,” said Debray, “but for a friend I might, perhaps.”
“I divined that you would become mine, count,” replied Morrel;
“besides, as I had the honor to tell you, heroism or not, sacrifice or
not, that day I owed an offering to bad fortune in recompense for the
favors good fortune had on other days granted to us.”
“The history to which M. Morrel alludes,” continued Château-Renaud, “is
an admirable one, which he will tell you some day when you are better
acquainted with him; today let us fill our stomachs, and not our
memories. What time do you breakfast, Albert?”
“At half-past ten.”
“Precisely?” asked Debray, taking out his watch.
“Oh, you will give me five minutes’ grace,” replied Morcerf, “for I
also expect a preserver.”
“Of whom?”
“Of myself,” cried Morcerf; “_parbleu!_ do you think I cannot be saved
as well as anyone else, and that there are only Arabs who cut off
heads? Our breakfast is a philanthropic one, and we shall have at
table—at least, I hope so—two benefactors of humanity.”
“What shall we do?” said Debray; “we have only one Monthyon prize.”
“Well, it will be given to someone who has done nothing to deserve it,”
said Beauchamp; “that is the way the Academy mostly escapes from the
dilemma.”
“And where does he come from?” asked Debray. “You have already answered
the question once, but so vaguely that I venture to put it a second
time.”
“Really,” said Albert, “I do not know; when I invited him three months
ago, he was then at Rome, but since that time who knows where he may
have gone?”
“And you think him capable of being exact?” demanded Debray.
“I think him capable of everything.”
“Well, with the five minutes’ grace, we have only ten left.”
“I will profit by them to tell you something about my guest.”
“I beg pardon,” interrupted Beauchamp; “are there any materials for an
article in what you are going to tell us?”
“Yes, and for a most curious one.”
“Go on, then, for I see I shall not get to the Chamber this morning,
and I must make up for it.”
“I was at Rome during the last Carnival.”
“We know that,” said Beauchamp.
“Yes, but what you do not know is that I was carried off by bandits.”
“There are no bandits,” cried Debray.
“Yes there are, and most hideous, or rather most admirable ones, for I
found them ugly enough to frighten me.”
“Come, my dear Albert,” said Debray, “confess that your cook is
behindhand, that the oysters have not arrived from Ostend or Marennes,
and that, like Madame de Maintenon, you are going to replace the dish
by a story. Say so at once; we are sufficiently well-bred to excuse
you, and to listen to your history, fabulous as it promises to be.”
“And I say to you, fabulous as it may seem, I tell it as a true one
from beginning to end. The brigands had carried me off, and conducted
me to a gloomy spot, called the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian.”
“I know it,” said Château-Renaud; “I narrowly escaped catching a fever
there.”
“And I did more than that,” replied Morcerf, “for I caught one. I was
informed that I was prisoner until I paid the sum of 4,000 Roman
crowns—about 24,000 francs. Unfortunately, I had not above 1,500. I was
at the end of my journey and of my credit. I wrote to Franz—and were he
here he would confirm every word—I wrote then to Franz that if he did
not come with the four thousand crowns before six, at ten minutes past
I should have gone to join the blessed saints and glorious martyrs in
whose company I had the honor of being; and Signor Luigi Vampa, such
was the name of the chief of these bandits, would have scrupulously
kept his word.”
“But Franz did come with the four thousand crowns,” said
Château-Renaud. “A man whose name is Franz d’Épinay or Albert de
Morcerf has not much difficulty in procuring them.”
“No, he arrived accompanied simply by the guest I am going to present
to you.”
“Ah, this gentleman is a Hercules killing Cacus, a Perseus freeing
Andromeda.”
“No, he is a man about my own size.”
“Armed to the teeth?”
“He had not even a knitting-needle.”
“But he paid your ransom?”
“He said two words to the chief and I was free.”
“And they apologized to him for having carried you off?” said
Beauchamp.
“Just so.”
“Why, he is a second Ariosto.”
“No, his name is the Count of Monte Cristo.”
“There is no Count of Monte Cristo” said Debray.
“I do not think so,” added Château-Renaud, with the air of a man who
knows the whole of the European nobility perfectly.
“Does anyone know anything of a Count of Monte Cristo?”
“He comes possibly from the Holy Land, and one of his ancestors
possessed Calvary, as the Mortemarts did the Dead Sea.”
“I think I can assist your researches,” said Maximilian. “Monte Cristo
is a little island I have often heard spoken of by the old sailors my
father employed—a grain of sand in the centre of the Mediterranean, an
atom in the infinite.”
“Precisely!” cried Albert. “Well, he of whom I speak is the lord and
master of this grain of sand, of this atom; he has purchased the title
of count somewhere in Tuscany.”
“He is rich, then?”
“I believe so.”
“But that ought to be visible.”
“That is what deceives you, Debray.”
“I do not understand you.”
“Have you read the _Arabian Nights_?”
“What a question!”
“Well, do you know if the persons you see there are rich or poor, if
their sacks of wheat are not rubies or diamonds? They seem like poor
fishermen, and suddenly they open some mysterious cavern filled with
the wealth of the Indies.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that my Count of Monte Cristo is one of those fishermen.
He has even a name taken from the book, since he calls himself Sinbad
the Sailor, and has a cave filled with gold.”
“And you have seen this cavern, Morcerf?” asked Beauchamp.
“No, but Franz has; for heaven’s sake, not a word of this before him.
Franz went in with his eyes blindfolded, and was waited on by mutes and
by women to whom Cleopatra was a painted strumpet. Only he is not quite
sure about the women, for they did not come in until after he had taken
hashish, so that what he took for women might have been simply a row of
statues.”
The two young men looked at Morcerf as if to say,—“Are you mad, or are
you laughing at us?”
“And I also,” said Morrel thoughtfully, “have heard something like this
from an old sailor named Penelon.”
“Ah,” cried Albert, “it is very lucky that M. Morrel comes to aid me;
you are vexed, are you not, that he thus gives a clew to the
labyrinth?”
“My dear Albert,” said Debray, “what you tell us is so extraordinary.”