第九章: 订婚之夜 The Evening of the Betrothal_基督山伯爵

"How now, head-cutter, pillar of the state, royalist Brutus!" cried one. "Tell us what's up!"

Villefort, as we mentioned, had set out to return to the Place du Grand-Cours and, on arriving back at the house of Mme de Saint-Méran, discovered that the guests he had left at table were now taking coffee in the drawing-room. Renée was waiting for him with an impatience shared by the rest of the company and he was greeted with general acclaim.

"Madame la Marquise," said Villefort, going over to his future mother-in-law, "I have come to ask you to excuse me for being obliged to leave you in this way… Marquis, could I beg the favour of a word or two in private?"

"Yes, are we threatened with a new Reign of Terror?" asked another.

"Oh! So it really is serious?" the marquise asked, seeing the cloud that had settled on Villefort's brow.

"So much so that I have to take leave of you for a few days." He turned towards Renée. "So you can understand that the matter must be serious indeed."

The marquis took Villefort's arm and they went out.

"But how can I sell them from here?"

"My whole fortune is in bonds, around six or seven hundred thousand francs."

Everybody exchanged glances.

"You asked for a moment of my time?" the marquis said.

"Something that I believe to be of the utmost importance, which requires my immediate departure for Paris. Marquis, excuse my bluntness and indiscretion, but do you have any government stock?"

"Alas, Mademoiselle, I must," Villefort replied.

"You're going away?" Renée exclaimed, unable to hide her feelings at this unexpected news.

"Yes. If you please, let us go to your study."

"Then sell them, Marquis, sell them, or you are ruined."

"Now, tell me what this is about," he asked when they reached the study.

"And where are you going?" the marquise asked.

"That, Madame, must remain a secret under the law. However, if anyone here has some message for Paris, one of my friends is leaving for there tonight and will be delighted to undertake the errand."

"You have a broker, don't you?"

"I am not asking you to do so yourself, but to request it of Monsieur de Salvieux. He must give me a letter that will allow me to approach His Majesty without having to go through all the formalities of requesting an audience, which might waste valuable time."

"But I dare not take it upon myself to write to His Majesty."

"For the king."

"For whom?"

"Yes."

"The king?"

"Now that I have this letter," Villefort said, folding it and putting it carefully into his pocket-book, "I need another."

"Give me a letter for him, so that he can sell without losing a minute or even a second. Even so, I may be too late."

He sat down at a table and wrote a letter to his broker, instructing him to sell at any price.

"Yes."

"Damn!" the marquis exclaimed. "Let's not waste time."

"No doubt, but why should someone else share the credit for the news that I carry? Do you follow me? The chancellor would naturally relegate me to a subordinate role and deprive me of any benefit I might obtain in the matter. I can tell you only one thing, Marquis: my career is guaranteed if I can arrive first at the Tuileries, because I shall have done the king a service that he will be unable to forget."

"What about the Lord Chancellor, who has free access to the Tuileries? Through him, you could contact the king at any time of the day or night."

"Tell the Comte de Salvieux that I am expecting him… Now, you must go," he added, to Villefort.

"I shall be back immediately."

"They will both be waiting in the study for you to make your own farewells."

At his front door he saw a pale, ghost-like figure waiting for him, upright and motionless in the shadows. It was the lovely young Catalan who, having no news of Edmond, had slipped out of the district around the Pharo at nightfall to come in person and see if she could discover the reasons for her lover's arrest.

The marquis rang and a servant appeared.

"In that case, dear boy, go and pack. I shall call de Salvieux and ask him to write a letter that will act as your passport to His Majesty."

"Of course. Please make my excuses to the marquise. And to Mademoiselle de Saint-Méran -- from whom, today of all days, I part with the profoundest regret."

Villefort ran out but, on reaching the door, realized that the sight of a deputy crown prosecutor in such a hurry could upset the tranquillity of an entire town, so he slowed to his normal pace, which was quite magisterial.

"Have the carriage draw up in front of the door."

"Pray lose no time, for I must be in my chaise within a quarter of an hour."

"Thank you a hundred times. Look after my letter."

"The man of whom you speak," he replied brusquely, "is a major criminal and I can do nothing for him, Mademoiselle."

"I don't know, he is no longer my responsibility," Villefort replied. And, embarrassed by her keen look and attitude of entreaty, he pushed Mercédès aside and went in, slamming the door as though to shut out the sorrow that she had brought him.

"At least tell me where he is, so that I can find out if he is alive or dead."

But sorrow is not so easily put aside. The stricken man carried it with him like the fatal stamp of which Virgil speaks. Villefort went in and closed the door, but when he reached the living-room, his legs too gave way beneath him, he let out a sigh that was more like a sob, and slumped into a chair.

When Villefort approached, she stepped out of the shadow of the wall against which she was leaning and barred his path. Dantès had told the prosecutor about his fiancée, and Villefort recognized Mercédès without her giving her name. He was surprised at the beauty and dignity of the woman and, when she asked him what had become of her lover, he felt as though he was the defendant and she was the judge.

Mercédès could not repress a sob and, as Villefort tried to go past, stopped him again.

Even now, there was a moment's hesitation in his heart. Many times before he had called for the death penalty, with no more emotion than that aroused by the contest between the accuser and the accused; and these convicts, who had gone to their deaths because of the thundering eloquence with which he had convinced the judges or the jury, had left no shadow on his brow: they had been guilty; or, at least, so Villefort believed.

Now, in the depths of that sick heart the first seeds of a mortal abscess began to spread. That man whom he was sacrificing to his own ambition, that innocent man who was paying the price for the guilt of Villefort's father, appeared before him, pale and menacing, clasping the hand of a fiancée who was no less pale, and bearing remorse in his train: not the remorse that makes its victims leap up like a Roman raging against his fate, but that bitter, muffled blow that intermittently chimes on the soul and sears it with the memory of some past action, an agonizing wound that lacerates, deeper and deeper until death.

If at that moment Renée's sweet voice had sounded in his ear calling for clemency, or if the lovely Mercédès had come in and said: "In the name of the God who sees us and judges us, give me back my betrothed," then, surely, that brow, already half prepared to submit to the inevitable, would have bent altogether, and he would no doubt have taken the pen in his numbed fingers and, despite the risk to himself, signed the order to set Dantès free. But no voice spoke in the silence and the door opened only to Villefort's valet de chambre, who had come to tell him that the post-horses were harnessed to his barouche.

But the wound that Villefort had suffered was one that would not heal; or one that would close, only to re-open, more bloody and painful than before.

This time, however, it was a different matter. He had just condemned a man to perpetual incarceration, but an innocent man, poised on the brink of good fortune, depriving him not only of freedom, but also of happiness. He was not a judge this time, but an executioner. And when he thought of that, he felt the muffled blow that we described, something that he had not previously experienced, sounding in the depths of his heart and filling his breast with a vague feeling of apprehension. Thus a wounded man will be put on his guard by a powerful and instinctive prescience of pain and tremble whenever his finger approaches the site of an open, bleeding wound, for as long as it remains unhealed.

She loved Villefort, and he was leaving at the very moment when he was about to become her husband. He could not tell her when he would return, and Renée, instead of feeling pity for Dantès, was cursing the man whose crime was the cause of her separation from her lover.

He got up or, rather, leapt up, like a man resolving some inner struggle, ran across to his writing desk, emptied the gold from one of its drawers into his pockets, paced distractedly around his room for a moment, with his hand on his forehead, muttering incomprehensibly, then at last, feeling the coat which his valet had just put across his shoulders, went out, sprang into his carriage and snapped out the order to stop off at M. de Saint-Méran's in the Rue du Grand-Cours.

The sentence on the unhappy Dantès was confirmed.

As M. de Saint-Méran had promised, Villefort found the marquise and Renée in the study. The young man shuddered on seeing Renée, thinking that she might once more ask him to free Dantès. But, alas, it must be said, to the discredit of self-centred humankind, that the beautiful young woman was concerned with only one thing: Villefort's departure.

So there was nothing that Mercédès could say!

"Ah, it's you," she said finally, turning towards Fernand.

On the corner of the Rue de la Loge, poor Mercédès had met Fernand, who was following her. She had returned to Les Catalans and thrown herself on her bed in an extremity of desperation. Fernand knelt beside the bed and, clasping an icy hand that Mercédès did not think to take from him, covered it with ardent kisses that Mercédès did not even feel. So she spent the night. The lamp went out when the oil was exhausted, but she no more noticed the darkness than she had noticed the light. When day returned, she was unaware of that also. Sorrow had covered her eyes with a blindfold that showed her only Edmond.

"I have not left your side since yesterday," he replied, with a pitiful sigh.

M. Morrel would not admit defeat: he had learned that Dantès had been taken to prison, after being questioned, so he hastened to see all his friends and visit anyone in Marseille who might have some influence there. But already the rumour was spreading that the young man had been arrested as a Bonapartist agent. Since at that time even the most daring considered any attempt by Napoleon to recover the throne as an insane fantasy, M. Morrel was greeted everywhere with indifference, fear or rejection, and returned home in despair, admitting that the position was serious and that no one could do anything about it.

Danglars was alone, but neither troubled nor disturbed. Danglars was even happy, because he had taken revenge on an enemy and ensured himself the place on board the Pharaon that he had feared he might lose. Danglars was one of those calculating men who are born with a pen behind their ear and an inkwell instead of a heart. To him, everything in this world was subtraction or multiplication, and a numeral was much dearer than a man, when it was a numeral that would increase the total (while a man might reduce it). So Danglars had gone to bed at his usual hour and slept peacefully.

Caderousse, for his part, was deeply disturbed and troubled. Instead of following M. Morrel's example, going out and attempting to do something for Dantès (which was, in any case, impossible), he shut himself in with two bottles of cassis and tried to drown his anxiety in drunkenness. But such was his state of mind that two bottles were not enough to extinguish his thoughts; so he remained, too drunk to fetch any more wine, not drunk enough to forget, seated in front of his two empty bottles, with his elbows on a rickety table, watching all the spectres that Hoffmann scattered across manuscripts moist with punch, dancing like a cloud of fantastic black dust in the shadows thrown by his long-wicked candle.

Dantès' father was perishing from grief and anxiety.

As for Edmond, we know what had become of him…

Villefort, after receiving the letter from M. de Salvieux, had embraced Renée on both cheeks, kissed the hand of Mme de Saint-Méran and shaken that of the marquis, and was travelling post-haste along the road for Aix.