XI. L'Ogre de Corse.
XI
The Corsican Ogre.
At the sight of that distraught face, Louis XVIII violently pushed back the table before which he stood.
“What is the matter with you, Baron?” he cried. “You seem quite overcome: has this confusion, this hesitation, to do with what M. de Blacas was saying, and what M. de Villefort has just confirmed to me?”
For his part, M. de Blacas hurried up to the baron; but the courtier’s terror prevented the statesman’s pride from triumphing. Indeed, in such a circumstance, it was far more advantageous for him to be humiliated by the prefect of police than to humiliate him on such a subject.
“Sire…” the baron stammered.
“Well, let us hear!” said Louis XVIII.
The Minister of Police, yielding then to a movement of despair, went and threw himself at the feet of Louis XVIII, who stepped back a pace, frowning.
“Will you speak?” said he.
“Oh! Sire, what a dreadful misfortune! am I not to be pitied? I shall never get over it!
“Sir,” said Louis XVIII, “I order you to speak.”
“Well, Sire, the usurper left the island of Elba on the 28th of February and landed on the 1st of March.”
“Where?” asked the king quickly.
“In France, Sire, in a small port; near Antibes, in the golfe Juan.”
“The usurper landed in France, near Antibes, in the golfe Juan, two hundred and fifty leagues from Paris, on the 1st of March, and you learn this news only today, the 3rd of March!… Why, sir, what you tell me is impossible: you must have been falsely informed, or you are mad.”
“Alas! Sire, it is only too true!”
Louis XVIII made an unspeakable gesture of anger and fright, and stood upright, as if an unexpected blow had struck him at once at the heart and in the face.
“In France!” he cried. “The usurper in France! But was no watch kept over that man? but who knows? was there then collusion with him?
“Oh! Sire,” cried the Duke de Blacas, “it is not a man like M. Dandré who can be accused of treason. Sire, we were all blind, and the Minister of Police shared the general blindness; that is all.”
“But…” said Villefort; then stopping suddenly: “Ah! pardon, pardon, Sire,” he said, bowing, “my zeal carries me away; may Your Majesty deign to excuse me.”
“Speak, sir, speak boldly,” said the king; “you alone forewarned us of the evil, help us to seek the remedy.”
“Sire,” said Villefort, “the usurper is detested in the South; it seems to me that if he ventures into the South, one can easily stir up Provence and Languedoc against him.”
“Yes, no doubt,” said the minister, “but he is advancing by Gap and Sisteron.”
“He is advancing, he is advancing,” said Louis XVIII; “then he is marching on Paris?”
The Minister of Police kept a silence that amounted to the most complete admission.
“And Dauphiné, sir,” the king asked Villefort, “do you think it can be roused like Provence?”
“Sire, I am sorry to tell Your Majesty a cruel truth; but the spirit of Dauphiné is far from equal to that of Provence and Languedoc. The mountaineers are Bonapartists, Sire.”
“Come,” murmured Louis XVIII, “he was well informed. And how many men has he with him?”
“Sire, I do not know,” said the Minister of Police.
“How, you do not know! You forgot to inquire into that circumstance? It is true it is of little importance,” he added with a crushing smile.
“Sire, I could not inquire; the dispatch contained only the announcement of the landing and of the route taken by the usurper.”
“And how then did this dispatch reach you?” asked the king.
The minister lowered his head, and a deep blush spread over his brow.
“By the telegraph, Sire,” he stammered.
Louis XVIII took a step forward and folded his arms as Napoleon would have done.
“So,” said he, growing pale with anger, “seven coalised armies shall have overthrown that man; a miracle of Heaven shall have restored me to the throne of my fathers after twenty-five years of exile; I shall have, during those twenty-five years, studied, sounded, analysed the men and the things of that France which was promised to me, only that, arrived at the goal of all my wishes, a force which I held in my hands should burst and break me!
“Sire, it is fate,” murmured the minister, feeling that such a weight, light for destiny, was enough to crush a man.
“But what our enemies said of us is then true: Nothing learned, nothing forgotten? If I were betrayed like him, still, I could console myself; but to be among men raised by me to dignities, who ought to have watched over me more precious than over themselves, for my fortune is theirs, before me they were nothing, after me they will be nothing, and to perish miserably through incapacity, through ineptitude! Ah! yes, sir, you are quite right, it is fate.”
The minister stood bowed beneath that frightful anathema.
M. de Blacas wiped his brow covered with sweat; Villefort smiled inwardly, for he felt his importance growing.
“To fall,” continued Louis XVIII, who at a glance had sounded the precipice toward which the monarchy was leaning, “to fall and learn one’s downfall by the telegraph! Oh! I would rather mount the scaffold of my brother Louis XVI than thus descend the staircase of the Tuileries, driven out by ridicule…. Ridicule, sir, you do not know what that is, in France, and yet you ought to know it.
“Sire, Sire,” murmured the minister, “for pity’s sake!…
“Come hither, M. de Villefort,” the king continued, addressing the young man, who, standing, motionless and behind, was considering the course of this conversation where the destiny of a kingdom floated bewildered; “come hither and tell this gentleman that one might have known beforehand all that he has not known.”
“Sire, it was materially impossible to divine the plans that man hid from all the world.”
“Materially impossible! yes, there is a fine word, sir; unfortunately, it is with fine words as with great men, I have measured them. Materially impossible for a minister, who has an administration, offices, agents, informers, spies and fifteen hundred thousand francs of secret funds, to know what passes sixty leagues from the coasts of France! Why, look you, here is this gentleman, who had none of those resources at his disposal, here is this gentleman, a simple magistrate, who knew more than you with all your police, and who would have saved my crown had he, like you, the right to direct a telegraph.”
The Minister of Police’s glance turned with an expression of deep spite upon Villefort, who inclined his head with the modesty of triumph.
“I do not say that for you, Blacas,” Louis XVIII continued, “for if you discovered nothing, you, at least, had the good sense to persevere in your suspicion: another than you might perhaps have considered M. de Villefort’s revelation as insignificant, or else suggested by a venal ambition.”
These words alluded to what the Minister of Police had pronounced with such confidence an hour before.
Villefort understood the king’s game. Another, perhaps, would have been carried away by the intoxication of praise; but he feared to make a mortal enemy of the Minister of Police, though he felt that the latter was irrevocably lost. Indeed, the minister who, in the plenitude of his power, had not known how to divine Napoleon’s secret, might, in the convulsions of his agony, penetrate that of Villefort: he needed only, to that end, to question Dantès. He came therefore to the minister’s aid instead of crushing him.
“Sire,” said Villefort, “the rapidity of the event must prove to Your Majesty that God alone could have prevented it by raising a tempest; what Your Majesty believes on my part the effect of a deep perspicacity is due, purely and simply, to chance; I profited by that chance as a devoted servant, that is all. Grant me not more than I deserve, Sire, that you may never go back upon the first idea you shall have formed of me.”
The Minister of Police thanked the young man with an eloquent look, and Villefort understood that he had succeeded in his design, that is to say, that, without losing anything of the king’s gratitude, he had just made a friend on whom, should need arise, he could count.
“That is well,” said the king. “And now, gentlemen,” he continued, turning toward M. de Blacas and the Minister of Police, “I have no further need of you, and you may retire: what remains to be done belongs to the Minister of War.
“Happily, Sire,” said M. de Blacas, “we can count upon the army. Your Majesty knows how all the reports depict it as devoted to your government.”
“Do not speak to me of reports: now, duke, I know the confidence one may place in them. Why, but about reports, Baron, what have you learned new concerning the affair in the rue Saint-Jacques?”
“The affair in the rue Saint-Jacques!” cried Villefort, unable to repress an exclamation.
But stopping suddenly:
“Pardon, Sire,” said he, “my devotion to Your Majesty makes me continually forget, not the respect I bear it, that respect is too deeply graven in my heart, but the rules of etiquette.”
“Say and do, sir,” resumed Louis XVIII; “you have acquired today the right to interrogate.”
“Sire,” answered the Minister of Police, “I was come just today to give Your Majesty the new information I had gathered upon that event, when Your Majesty’s attention was diverted by the terrible catastrophe of the gulf; now, that information would have no further interest for the king.”
“On the contrary, sir, on the contrary,” said Louis XVIII, “this affair seems to me to have a direct relation with that which occupies us, and the death of General Quesnel is perhaps going to put us on the track of a great internal plot.”
At that name of General Quesnel, Villefort shuddered.
“Indeed, Sire,” resumed the Minister of Police, “everything would lead to the belief that this death is the result, not of a suicide, as was at first thought, but of a murder: General Quesnel was coming, it appears, from a Bonapartist club when he disappeared. An unknown man had come to fetch him that very morning, and had given him a rendezvous in the rue Saint-Jacques; unfortunately, the general’s valet de chambre, who was dressing his hair at the moment this unknown was shown into the study, plainly heard him name the rue Saint-Jacques, but did not retain the number.”
As the Minister of Police gave King Louis XVIII these details, Villefort, who seemed suspended on his lips, blushed and grew pale.
The king turned toward him.
“Is it not your opinion, as it is mine, M. de Villefort, that General Quesnel, who might have been thought attached to the usurper, but who was really wholly mine, perished the victim of a Bonapartist ambush?
“It is probable, Sire,” answered Villefort; “but has nothing more been learned?”
“The man who gave the rendezvous is being traced.”
“He is being traced?” repeated Villefort.
“Yes, the servant has given his description: he is a man of fifty to fifty-two years, dark, with black eyes covered by thick eyebrows, and wearing a moustache; he was clothed in a blue frock-coat, and wore in his buttonhole a rosette of an officer of the Legion of Honour. Yesterday an individual was followed whose description exactly answers to that which I have just given, and he was lost sight of at the corner of the rue de la Jussienne and the rue Coq-Héron.”
Villefort had leaned against the back of an armchair, for as the Minister of Police spoke, he felt his legs giving way beneath him; but when he saw that the unknown had escaped the researches of the agent who followed him, he breathed again.
“You will seek this man, sir,” the king said to the Minister of Police; “for, if, as everything leads me to believe, General Quesnel, who would have been so useful to us at this moment, was the victim of a murder, Bonapartist or not, I wish his assassins cruelly punished.”
Villefort needed all his self-possession not to betray the terror this recommendation of the king inspired in him.
“Strange thing!” continued the king with a movement of ill-humour, “the police thinks it has said all when it has said: a murder has been committed, and thinks it has done all when it has added: the guilty are being traced.”
“Sire, Your Majesty, on this point at least, shall be satisfied, I hope.”
“That is well, we shall see; I detain you no longer, Baron; M. de Villefort, you must be fatigued with that long journey, go and rest. You are, no doubt, staying with your father?”
A dazzle passed over Villefort’s eyes.
“No, Sire,” said he, “I am staying at the Hôtel de Madrid, rue de Tournon.”
“But you have seen him?”
“Sire, I had myself conducted first to the Duke de Blacas.”
“But you will see him, at least?”
“I do not think so, Sire.”
“Ah! that is just,” said Louis XVIII, smiling in a manner to prove that all these reiterated questions had not been put without intention; “I forgot that you are on cold terms with M. Noirtier, and that that is a fresh sacrifice made to the royal cause, for which I must indemnify you.”
“Sire, the kindness Your Majesty shows me is a reward which so far surpasses all my ambitions, that I have nothing more to ask of the king.”
“No matter, sir, and we shall not forget you, be tranquil; meanwhile” (the king detached the cross of the Legion of Honour which he ordinarily wore on his blue coat, near the cross of Saint-Louis, above the plaque of the order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and of Saint Lazarus, and gave it to Villefort), “meanwhile,” said he, “take this cross.”
“Sire,” said Villefort, “Your Majesty is mistaken, that cross is an officer’s cross.”
“My faith, sir,” said Louis XVIII, “take it as it is; I have not time to have another asked for. Blacas, you will see that the patent is made out to M. de Villefort.”
Villefort’s eyes filled with a tear of proud joy; he took the cross and kissed it.
“And now,” he asked, “what are the orders with which Your Majesty does me the honour to charge me?”
“Take the rest you need and bear in mind that, without force at Paris to serve me, you may be of the greatest utility to me at Marseilles.”
“Sire,” answered Villefort, bowing, “in an hour I shall have left Paris.”
“Go, sir,” said the king, “and if I should forget you—kings’ memories are short—fear not to remind me of myself… Baron, give orders to go for the Minister of War. Blacas, remain.”
“Ah! sir,” said the Minister of Police to Villefort on leaving the Tuileries, “you enter by the right door and your fortune is made.”
“Will it be long?” murmured Villefort, saluting the minister, whose career was ended, and seeking with his eyes a carriage to take him home.
A hackney-coach was passing on the quay; Villefort made it a sign, the coach came up; Villefort gave his address and threw himself into the bottom of the carriage, abandoning himself to his dreams of ambition. Ten minutes after, Villefort was home; he ordered his horses for two hours hence, and bade them serve him dinner.
He was about to sit down to table when the bell rang under a frank and firm hand: the valet de chambre went to open, and Villefort heard a voice pronouncing his name.
“Who can already know I am here?” the young man asked himself.
At this moment the valet de chambre returned.
“Well,” said Villefort, “what is it then? who rang? who asks for me?”
“A stranger who will not give his name.”
“How! a stranger who will not give his name? and what does this stranger want of me?”
“He wishes to speak to monsieur.”
“To me?”
“Yes.”
“He named me?”
“Perfectly.”
“And what does this stranger look like?”
“Why, monsieur, he is a man of about fifty years.”
“Short? tall?”
“About monsieur’s height.”
“Dark or fair?”
“Dark, very dark: black hair, black eyes, black eyebrows.”
“And dressed,” asked Villefort quickly, “dressed how?”
“In a large blue frock-coat buttoned from top to bottom; decorated with the Legion of Honour.”
“It is he,” murmured Villefort, turning pale.
“Why, zounds!” said the individual whose description we have already given twice, appearing on the threshold, “what a deal of ceremony; is it the custom at Marseilles for sons to make their father wait in the ante-chamber?”
“My father!” cried Villefort; “then I was not mistaken… and I suspected it was you.”
“Then, if you suspected it was me,” resumed the new-comer, placing his cane in a corner and his hat on a chair, “allow me to tell you, my dear Gérard, that it is scarce friendly in you to make me wait thus.”
“Leave us, Germain,” said Villefort.
The servant went out, showing visible signs of astonishment.
“Stories of the world, in your language.”