The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (39 page)

His oval face had lengthened and his once merry lips had adopted a fixed, firm line that spoke of stern resolve. His eyebrows arched under a single, pensive line and his eyes themselves were imprinted with deep sadness, behind which from time to time could be seen dark flashes of misanthropy and hatred. His complexion, kept so long from daylight and the sun, had taken on the dull tones that give such aristocratic beauty to men of the north when black hair frames their faces. Moreover the knowledge that he had acquired gave a look of intelligent self-confidence to his whole face. Though naturally quite tall, his body had taken on the compact vigour of one that has learnt to concentrate all its strength within itself.

The elegance of lean, nervous limbs had been replaced by the solidity of a well-built, muscular man. His voice, accustomed to prayers, sobs and curses, had at times a strangely soft resonance, at others a rough edge that was almost husky. In addition, having been constantly in darkness or half-light, his eyes had acquired the
remarkable ability of seeing in the dark, like those of wolves and hyenas.

Edmond smiled when he saw himself. It would have been impossible for his best friend – if he had any friends left – to recognize him; he didn’t recognize himself.

The master of the
Jeune-Amélie
, who was very keen to keep someone of Edmond’s ability in his crew, had offered him an advance on his share of future profits and Edmond had accepted, so the first thing he did on leaving the barber’s where he had undergone this preliminary metamorphosis was to find a shop where he could buy a complete set of seaman’s clothes. Of course, this is very simple, consisting of white trousers, a striped shirt and a Phrygian cap.

Edmond returned the trousers and shirt that Jacopo had lent him, and appeared in his new dress before the master of the
Jeune-Amélie
, who asked him to repeat his story. The master could hardly recognize the heavily bearded man, half drowned and with seaweed in his hair, whom he had brought, naked and dying, on to the deck of his ship, in this smartly dressed and stylish sailor. Encouraged by this change in appearance, he repeated his offer to take Dantès on, but Dantès would accept it for only three months; he had plans of his own.

The crew of the
Jeune-Amélie
was a very busy one and subject to a master who was not used to wasting time. They had been hardly a week in Leghorn before the ship’s swelling hold was full of coloured muslin, forbidden cotton cloth, English powder, and tobacco on which the state monopoly had forgotten to put its stamp. They had to get all this out of Leghorn, duty paid, and unload it on the Corsican coast, from where certain speculators would take charge of conveying it to France.

They set sail, and Edmond found himself once more crossing the azure sea that had been the first horizon of his youth and which he had seen so often in his prison dreams. Leaving the Gorgone on their right and the Pianosa on their left, they set out for the birthplace of Paoli and Napoleon.

Coming up on deck early the following day, as was his custom, the master found Dantès leaning against the side of the ship with a strange look on his face as he stared out towards a heap of granite that the rising sun was bathing in rosy light: the island of Monte Cristo.

The
Jeune-Amélie
passed, some three-quarters of a league to starboard, and continued to make for Corsica.

As they sailed past this island, the name of which held such significance for him, Dantès was thinking that he had only to leap into the sea and within half an hour he would be in this promised land. But what would he do there, with no tools to recover his treasure and no weapons to defend himself? In any case, what would the sailors say? What would the master think? He must wait.

Waiting, fortunately, was something that he knew how to do. He had waited fourteen years for his freedom and, now that he was free, he could easily wait for six months or a year to obtain his wealth. Would he not have chosen freedom without wealth if he had been offered it? In any case, was the wealth not an illusion, which had been born in poor Abbé Faria’s sick brain and died with him? Yet Cardinal Spada’s letter was oddly precise – and Dantès repeated it in his head from beginning to end. He had not forgotten a single word.

Evening came. Edmond watched the island pass through all the colours of sunset and dusk, then fade into the darkness for all except himself: his eyes, accustomed to the darkness of a prison cell, doubtless continued to make out the island, since he was the last to leave the deck.

The next day they woke up off Aleria. All day they tacked, backwards and forwards, and in the evening bonfires were lit on shore. The placing of the fires must have shown that it was safe to disembark, because a lantern took the place of the flag on the little ship’s yard-arm and they sailed to within gunshot range of the coast.

Dantès had noticed that, approaching land on what he must consider solemn occasions, the master of the
Jeune-Amélie
would set up two little culverines on pivots, of the sort that might be used in defending a rampart and which, without making much noise, would project a quarter-pound shot a thousand paces.

This evening, however, the precaution proved unnecessary. Everything went off as peacefully and as genteelly as might be imagined. Four launches rowed quietly over to the ship which, no doubt to welcome them, put its own launch in the water; and between them the five rowing-boats had laboured so hard that, by two o’clock in the morning, the whole cargo had been transferred from the
Jeune-Amélie
to dry land.

The master of the ship was a man of such well-regulated habits that the very same night the bounty had been divided up. Each man had his share, a hundred Tuscan
lire
, which is about eighty francs in our money. But the voyage was not over. They set course for Sardinia, with a view to reloading the vessel that had just been unloaded. This second operation went as smoothly as the first; the
Jeune-Amélie
was in luck.

The new cargo was destined for the duchy of Lucca. It was almost entirely composed of Havana cigars, sherry and malaga wine.

Here, however, they had a brush with the excise, that eternal enemy of the
Jeune-Amélie
’s master. A Customs officer was laid low and two sailors were wounded; Dantès was one of them: a shot passed through his left shoulder, leaving a flesh wound.

He was almost happy at this skirmish and his wound. These hard tutors had taught him how he viewed danger and bore suffering. He had laughed at danger and, as the shot pierced him, said like a Greek philosopher: ‘Pain, you are not an evil.’

Moreover he had looked at the mortally wounded Customs man and – whether because his blood was up or because his feelings were chilled – the sight made very little impression on him. Dantès was on the track that he wished to follow, proceeding towards the end that he wished to attain: his heart was turning to stone in his breast.

Jacopo, seeing him fall, had thought him dead and rushed to his side, raised him up and finally, when he was under cover, tended him like the good friend he was.

In short, could it be that the world was neither as good as Doctor Pangloss
¹
pretended, nor as bad as it seemed to Dantès, since this man, who had nothing to expect from his friend except to inherit his part of the bounty, had felt such distress at seeing him fall dead?

Happily, as we have said, Dantès was only wounded. With the help of some herbs picked at special times and sold to the smugglers by old Sardinian women, the wound quickly healed. So Edmond wanted to tempt Jacopo: as a reward for his care, he offered him his share of the bounty, but Jacopo refused indignantly.

As a result of this kind of sympathetic devotion that Jacopo had accorded to Edmond from the first moment that they met, Edmond conceded a certain degree of affection to Jacopo. The latter asked for nothing better: he had perceived in Edmond a great superiority
to his present state, something that Edmond had managed to conceal from the others; so the good sailor was satisfied with the little that Edmond gave him.

In this way, during the long days on board, when the ship was safely gliding across an azure sea with a favourable wind swelling its sails and needing no more than the attention of its helmsman, Edmond would take a chart of the coast and make himself Jacopo’s instructor as poor Abbé Faria had become Edmond’s. He showed him how to take bearings in coastal waters, explained the compass to him and taught him to read in that great open book above our heads which is called the sky and in which God writes on the blue firmament in diamond letters.

When Jacopo asked him: ‘What is the use of teaching all these things to a poor sailor like me?’, Edmond replied: ‘Who knows? One day you may be captain of a ship. Your fellow-countryman Bonaparte became emperor!’

We forgot to mention that Jacopo was a Corsican.

Two and a half months passed in such successive journeys. Edmond had become as skilled in navigating the coastal waters as he had once been on the open sea. He got to know all the smugglers around the Mediterranean and learned the Masonic signs that these semi-pirates used to recognize one another.

Twenty times he had sailed one way or the other past his island of Monte Cristo, but not once had he found an opportunity to land there. So he made a resolution, which was that, as soon as his contract with the master of the
Jeune-Amélie
came to an end, he would hire a little boat on his own account (which he could well do, having saved around a hundred
piastres
on his different voyages) and, on some pretext or other, sail to Monte Cristo.

There he would be free to hunt for his treasure.

Well, not entirely free, since he would no doubt be spied upon by those who had crossed with him. But in this world one must learn to take some risks. However, prison had made Edmond cautious and he would have preferred not to risk anything.

Hard though he tried and fertile though his imagination was, he could not find any other means of reaching the island except to get someone to take him there.

Dantès was still racked by doubt when one evening the master, who had great confidence in him and was very anxious to retain his services as a member of the crew, took his arm and led him to
a tavern in the Via del Oglio, where the cream of the smuggling profession in Leghorn was accustomed to meet.

This is where affairs along the coast were usually discussed. Dantès had already been to this maritime exchange two or three times and, at the sight of these bold buccaneers – the product of a coast of some two thousand leagues in circumference – he had wondered what power a man might wield if his will could manage to direct all these divergent or united threads.

This time, an important matter was under discussion. There was a ship loaded with Turkish carpets and cloth from the Levant and Kashmir. They had to find some neutral ground on which the exchange could take place, before bringing these goods to the coast of France. The bounty was so large that, if they were successful, each man should have fifty or sixty
piastres
.

The master of the
Jeune-Amélie
proposed disembarking on the island of Monte Cristo: since it was deserted and there were no soldiers or Customs men on it, it seemed to have been set down in the midst of the sea in the days of the pagan Olympus by Mercury, God of Tradesmen and Thieves – two sorts of people whom we consider separate, if not entirely distinct, but whom Antiquity appears to have classed together.

At the name of Monte Cristo, Dantès trembled with joy. He got up to hide his emotion and paced round the smoke-filled tavern, in which every dialect of the known world was blended into a single lingua franca.

When he returned to the discussion, it had been decided that they would land on Monte Cristo, setting off on this expedition the following night. Edmond was consulted and he confirmed that the island offered the greatest possible security and that, if they were to succeed, great enterprises needed to be undertaken promptly.

So the plan was adhered to, and it was agreed that they would get under way the following evening, meaning, if they had a calm sea and a favourable wind, that the day after next they would find themselves in the waters off the shore of the neutral island.

At last, by one of those unexpected chances which sometimes happen to people on whom misfortune has exhausted its ingenuity, Dantès was going to reach his goal by a simple, natural means and set foot on his island without arousing any suspicion. Only one night separated him from this long-awaited departure.

That night was one of the least restful that Dantès had ever spent. In the course of it he ran over every good and bad eventuality in his mind: if he closed his eyes, he saw Cardinal Spada’s letter written in blazing letters on the wall; if he fell asleep for a moment, the most insane dreams raced around his skull. He was going down into caves paved with emeralds, with walls of ruby and diamond stalactites. Pearls fell drop by drop in place of the water that habitually filters through the ground.

Edmond, delighted, wondering, filled his pockets with precious stones, then clambered up into the daylight, only to find them turned into nothing but ordinary rocks. Then he tried to get back into the marvellous caverns which he had only glimpsed, but the path twisted into infinite spirals and the entrance had become invisible. He searched through his tired brain for the mysterious, magic word that had opened the wonderful caves of Ali Baba to the Arab fisherman; but all in vain. The vanished treasure had reverted to the ownership of the genii of the earth, from whom he had momentarily hoped to ravish it.