The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (199 page)

‘Hate you, Edmond! Accuse you! Am I to hate the man who saved my son’s life – because it was your deadly and bloody intent, was it not, to kill the son of whom Monsieur de Morcerf was so proud? Oh, look at me and see if there is the glimmer of a reproach in me.’

The count looked up and fixed his eyes on Mercédès who, half standing, was holding both hands towards him.

‘Look at me,’ she went on, with a feeling of profound melancholy. ‘Today, a man can bear to see the sparkle in my eyes. The days have gone when I used to smile at Edmond Dantès, as he waited for me up there, by the window of the garret where his old father lived… Since then, many sad days have gone by, digging a gulf between me and that time. Accuse you, Edmond! Hate you, my friend! No, it is myself that I accuse and hate! Oh, wretch that I am!’ she cried, clasping her hands and raising her eyes to heaven. ‘Have I been punished enough! I had religion, innocence and love, the three gifts that make angels, and, wretch as I am, I doubted God.’

Monte Cristo took a step towards her and silently offered his hand; but she gently drew back her own. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, my friend, do not touch me. You have spared me, but of all those whom you have struck, I was the most guilty. The others acted out of hatred, greed or selfishness, but I was a coward. They wanted something, I was afraid. No, don’t squeeze my hand, Edmond. I can see that you are about to say something kind; but don’t… Keep it for someone else, I no longer deserve your affection. See…’ (she completely removed her veil) ‘See: misfortune has turned my hair grey and my eyes have shed so many tears that there are dark rings round them; and my forehead is furrowed. But you, Edmond, you are still young, still handsome and still proud. You did have faith, you had strength, you trusted in God, and God sustained you. I was a coward, I denied Him, so God abandoned me; and here I am!’

Mercédès burst into tears, her heart breaking under the weight of memory.

Monte Cristo took her hand and kissed it respectfully, but she herself felt that the kiss was passionless, as if his lips were pressing the marble hand of the statue of some saint.

‘Some lives,’ she continued, ‘are predestined, so that a single error destroys all that is to come. I thought you dead, I should have died. What was the sense in eternally mourning for you in my heart? Nothing, except to make a woman of fifty out of one of thirty-nine. What good did it do that, once I had recognized you, of everyone I managed to save only my son? Should I not also have saved the man, guilty though he was, whom I had accepted as my husband? Yet I let him die – oh, God! What am I saying! I contributed to his death by my cowardly insensitivity and my contempt, forgetting,
or not wanting to remember, that it was for my sake that he became a perjurer and a traitor. Finally, what is the use in my having accompanied my son here if I let him leave alone, if I abandon him, if I deliver him to the hungry land of Africa? Oh, I tell you, I was a coward. I disowned my love and, like a turncoat, I bring misfortune to all those around me.’

‘No, Mercédès,’ Monte Cristo said. ‘No, think better of yourself. You are a noble and devout woman, and your grief disarmed me. But behind me was God, an invisible, unknown and jealous God, whose envoy I was and who did not choose to restrain the lightning bolt that I unleashed. Oh, I implore that God, at whose feet I have prostrated myself every day for ten years, and I call on Him to witness that I did sacrifice my life to you and with it all the plans that depended on it. But – and I say this with pride, Mercédès – God needed me, and I lived. Look at the past, look at the present, try to divine the future and consider whether I am not the instrument of the Lord. The most frightful misfortunes, the most cruel suffering, the abandonment of all those who loved me and persecution by those who did not know me: this was the first part of my life. Then, suddenly, after captivity, solitude and misery, air, freedom and a fortune so brilliant, so imposing and so extravagant that, unless I was blind, I must have thought that God had sent it to me for some great purpose. From then on, that fortune seemed to me a holy vocation; from then on, there was not one further thought in me for that life, the sweetness of which you, poor woman, have sometimes partaken. Not an hour of calm, not a single hour. I felt myself driven like a cloud of flame through the sky to destroy the cities of the plain. Like those adventurous captains who set off on some dangerous voyage or prepare for a perilous expedition, I got together my supplies, I loaded my weapons and I gathered the means of attack and defence, making my body used to the most violent exercise and my soul to the roughest shocks, teaching my arm to kill, my eyes to see suffering and my mouth to smile at the most dreadful of spectacles. Kind, trustful and forgiving as I was, I made myself vengeful, secretive and cruel – or, rather, impassive like fate itself, which is deaf and blind. Then I launched myself down the road that I had opened, plunging forward until I reached my goal. Woe betide whomsoever I met on my path!’

‘Enough!’ Mercédès cried. ‘Edmond, enough! You may believe that the only person to recognize you was also the only one who
could understand. But, Edmond, the woman who recognized and understood you, even if you had found her standing in your way and broken her like glass, would have had to admire you, Edmond! Just as there is a gulf between me and the past, so there is a gulf between you and other men, and my most painful torture, I can tell you, is to make comparisons. There is no one in the world your equal; there is nothing that resembles you. Now, say farewell to me, Edmond, and let us be parted.’

‘Before I go, what do you want, Mercédès?’ Monte Cristo asked.

‘Only one thing, Edmond: for my son to be happy.’

‘Pray God, who alone holds the lives of men in His hands, to spare him from death, and I shall take care of the rest.’

‘Thank you, Edmond.’

‘And you, Mercédès?’

‘I need nothing. I am living between two tombs. One is that of Edmond Dantès, who died so long ago – I loved him! The word is no longer appropriate on my shrunken lips, but my heart still remembers and I would not exchange that memory of the heart for anything in the world. The other is that of a man whom Edmond Dantès killed. I approve of the murder, but I must pray for the dead man.’

‘Your son will be happy, Madame,’ the count repeated.

‘Then I shall be as happy as I can be.’

‘But… what will you do?’

Mercédès smiled sadly.

‘If I were to tell you that I should live in this place as Mercédès once did, that is to say by working, you would not believe me. I can no longer do anything except pray, but I do not need to work. The little treasure that you buried was still in the place that you mentioned. People will wonder who I am, and ask what I do, and have no idea how I live; but that is of no significance! It is between God, yourself and me.’

‘Mercédès,’ the count said, ‘I am not reproaching you, but you did make too much of a sacrifice when you gave up the whole of the fortune that Monsieur de Morcerf had accumulated: at least half of it was rightly yours, because of your good management and your vigilance.’

‘I know what you are about to suggest, but I cannot accept, Edmond. My son would forbid me.’

‘And I will be careful not to do anything for you that would not
have Monsieur Albert de Morcerf’s approval. I shall find out what he intends and act accordingly. But, if he accepts what I want to do, would you cheerfully do the same?’

‘You know, Edmond, I am no longer a thinking creature. I have no further resolve except that of never again being resolved about anything. God has so shaken me with storms that I have lost all willpower. I am in His hands, like a sparrow in the claws of an eagle. Since I am alive, He does not want me to die. If He sends me any succour, it will be because He wants it, and I shall accept.’

‘Take care, Madame,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘That is not how God should be worshipped. He wants us to understand and debate His power: that is why He gave us free will.’

‘Wretch!’ Mercédès cried. ‘Don’t speak like that to me. If I believed that God had given me free will, what would remain to save me from despair!’

Monte Cristo paled slightly and bowed his head, overwhelmed by the extremity of her suffering.

‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to me?’ he asked, holding out his hand.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Mercédès said, solemnly pointing to heaven. ‘I will say au revoir, to prove to you that I still hope.’

She touched the count’s hand with her own, trembling, then ran up the stairs and vanished from his sight.

Monte Cristo slowly left the house and turned back towards the port. Mercédès did not see him leave, even though she was at the window of the little room that had been his father’s. Her eyes were searching the distant horizon for the ship taking her son across the open sea. But her voice, almost involuntarily, muttered softly: ‘Edmond, Edmond, Edmond!’

The count came away heavy-hearted from this house where he was leaving Mercédès, in all probability never to see her again.

Since the death of little Edouard, a great change had overtaken Monte Cristo. Having reached the summit of his vengeance by the
slow and tortuous route that he had followed, he had looked over the far side of the mountain and into the abyss of doubt.

There was more than that: the conversation that he had just had with Mercédès had awoken so many memories in his heart that these memories themselves needed to be overcome.

A man of the count’s stamp could not long exist in that state of melancholy which may give life to vulgar souls by endowing them with an appearance of originality, but which destroys superior beings. The count decided that if he had reached the stage where he was blaming himself, then there must be some mistake in his calculations.

‘I think ill of the past,’ he said, ‘and cannot have been mistaken in that way. What! Could the goal that I set myself have been wrong? What, have I been on the wrong road for the past ten years? What, can it be that in a single hour the architect can become convinced that the work into which he has put all his hopes was, if not impossible, then sacrilegious?

‘I cannot accept that idea, because it would drive me mad. What my thinking today lacks is a proper assessment of the past, because I am looking at this past from the other end of the horizon. Indeed, as one goes forward, so the past, like the landscape through which one is walking, is gradually effaced. What is happening to me is what happens to people who are wounded in a dream: they look at their wound and they feel it but cannot remember how it was caused.

‘Come, then, resurrected man; come, extravagant Croesus; come, sleepwalker; come, all-powerful visionary; come, invincible millionaire, and, for an instant, rediscover that dread prospect of a life of poverty and starvation. Go back down the roads where fate drove, where misfortune led and where despair greeted you. Too many diamonds, gold and happiness now shine from the glass of the mirror in which Monte Cristo gazes on Dantès. Hide the diamonds, dull the gold, dampen the rays. Let the rich man rediscover the poor one, the free man the prisoner, and the resurrected man the corpse.’

Even as he was saying this to himself, Monte Cristo went down the Rue de la Caisserie. This was the same street down which, one night twenty-four years before, he had been led by a silent guard. These houses, now bright and full of life, had then been dark, silent and shuttered.

‘Yet they are the same,’ Monte Cristo muttered. ‘The difference is that then it was night and now it is full daylight. It is the sun that brings light and joy to all this.’

He went down on to the quays along the Rue Saint-Laurent and walked towards the Consigne. This was the point on the port from which he had been brought to the ship. A pleasure-boat was going past with its superstructure covered in cotton twill. Monte Cristo called the master, who immediately turned the boat towards him with the eagerness shown in such circumstances by a boatman who senses a good tip in the offing.

The weather was splendid, the journey a delight. The sun was setting on the horizon, blazing red in the waters that caught fire as it descended towards them. The sea was flat as a mirror, but wrinkled from time to time by leaping fish, chased by some unseen enemy, that jumped out of the water to look for safety in another element. Finally, on the horizon could be seen the fishing boats on their way to Les Martigues or the merchant ships bound for Corsica or Spain, passing by as white and elegant as travelling gulls.

Despite the clear sky and the finely shaped ships, despite the golden light flooding the scene, the count, wrapped in his cloak, recalled one by one all the details of the dreadful journey: the lone light burning in Les Catalans, the sight of the Château d’If that told him where he was being taken, the struggle with the gendarmes when he tried to jump into the water, his despair when he felt himself overcome, and the cold touch of the muzzle of the carbine pressed to his temple like a ring of ice.

Little by little, just as the springs that dry up in the summer heat are moistened bit by bit when the autumn clouds gather and begin to well up, drop by drop, so the Count of Monte Cristo also felt rising in his breast the old overflowing gall that had once filled the heart of Edmond Dantès.

From now on there was no more clear sky, or graceful boats, or radiant light for him. The sky was clouded over with a funereal veil and the appearance of the black giant known as the Château d’If made him shudder, as though he had suddenly seen the ghost of a mortal enemy.