CXII. Le départ.

CXII

The Departure.

The events that had just taken place occupied all of Paris. Emmanuel and his wife were recounting them to each other, with a quite natural surprise, in their little sitting room on the rue Meslay; they compared these three catastrophes, as sudden as they were unexpected, of Morcerf, Danglars, and Villefort.

Maximilien, who had come to pay them a visit, listened to them, or rather was present at their conversation, plunged in his habitual indifference.

"In truth," said Julie, "would one not say, Emmanuel, that all those rich people, so happy yesterday, had forgotten, in the calculation upon which they had built their fortune, their happiness, and their standing, the share of the evil genius, and that he, like the wicked fairies of Perrault's tales whom one has neglected to invite to some wedding or some christening, has suddenly appeared to avenge that fatal oversight?"

"What disasters!" said Emmanuel, thinking of Morcerf and Danglars.

"What sufferings!" said Julie, recalling Valentine, whom, by feminine instinct, she would not name before her brother.

"If it is God who has struck them," said Emmanuel, "it is that God, who is supreme goodness, found nothing in the past of those people that merited mitigation of the punishment; it is that those people were accursed."

"Are you not rather presumptuous in your judgment, Emmanuel?" said Julie. "When my father, pistol in hand, was ready to blow out his brains, if someone had said as you say at this hour: 'This man has deserved his punishment,' would not that someone have been mistaken?"

"Yes, but God did not permit our father to succumb, just as he did not permit Abraham to sacrifice his son. To the patriarch, as to us, he sent an angel who cut the wings of Death halfway."

He had scarcely finished pronouncing these words when the sound of the bell rang out.

It was the signal given by the concierge that a visitor had arrived.

Almost at the same instant the door of the sitting room opened, and the Count of Monte Cristo appeared on the threshold.

It was a double cry of joy from the two young people.

Maximilien raised his head and let it fall again.

"Maximilien," said the count, without seeming to notice the different impressions his presence produced upon his hosts, "I have come to fetch you."

"Fetch me?" said Morrel, as if waking from a dream.

"Yes," said Monte Cristo; "was it not agreed that I would take you away, and did I not warn you to hold yourself ready?"

"Here I am," said Maximilien; "I had come to say farewell to them."

"And where are you going, Count?" asked Julie.

"To Marseille first, madame."

"To Marseille?" repeated the two young people together.

"Yes, and I am taking your brother with me."

"Alas! Count," said Julie, "give him back to us cured!"

Morrel turned aside to hide his blush.

"So you had noticed he was unwell?" said the count.

"Yes," answered the young woman, "and I fear he is bored with us."

"I shall distract him," replied the count.

"I am ready, sir," said Maximilien. "Farewell, my good friends! Farewell, Emmanuel! Farewell, Julie!"

"What! farewell?" cried Julie. "You are leaving just like that, at once, without preparations, without passports?"

"It is delays that double the sorrow of partings," said Monte Cristo. "And Maximilien, I am sure, will have provided for everything: I had recommended it to him."

"I have my passport, and my trunks are packed," said Morrel with his monotonous tranquillity.

"Very well," said Monte Cristo, smiling, "there one recognizes the punctuality of a good soldier."

"And you are leaving us like this," said Julie, "this instant? You do not give us a day, not an hour?"

"My carriage is at the door, madame; I must be in Rome in five days."

"But Maximilien is not going to Rome?" said Emmanuel.

"I am going wherever it pleases the count to lead me," said Morrel with a sad smile; "I belong to him for another month."

"Oh my God! how he says that, Count!"

"Maximilien is accompanying me," said the count with his persuasive affability; "be reassured, then, about your brother."

"Farewell, my sister!" repeated Morrel; "farewell, Emmanuel!"

"He breaks my heart with his carelessness," said Julie. "Oh! Maximilien, Maximilien, you are hiding something from us."

"Bah!" said Monte Cristo, "you will see him return gay, laughing, and joyful."

Maximilien cast at Monte Cristo a glance almost disdainful, almost irritated.

"Let us depart!" said the count.

"Before you leave, Count," said Julie, "will you permit me to tell you all that the other day..."

"Madame," replied the count, taking both her hands, "whatever you might tell me will never be worth what I read in your eyes, what your heart has thought, what mine has felt. Like the benefactors of novels, I ought to have departed without seeing you again; but that virtue was beyond my strength, because I am a weak and vain man, because the moist, joyful, and tender gaze of my fellow beings does me good. Now I depart, and I push egoism so far as to tell you: Do not forget me, my friends, for probably you will never see me again."

"Never see you again!" cried Emmanuel, while two large tears rolled down Julie's cheeks; "never see you again! but is it not a man, then, it is a god who leaves us, and this god is going to reascend to heaven after appearing on earth to do good!"

"Do not say that," replied Monte Cristo quickly; "never say that, my friends; the gods never do evil, the gods stop where they wish to stop; chance is no stronger than they, and it is they, on the contrary, who master chance. No, I am a man, Emmanuel, and your admiration is as unjust as your words are sacrilegious."

And pressing Julie's hand to his lips, who threw herself into his arms, he held out the other to Emmanuel; then, tearing himself from that house, a sweet nest where happiness was the guest, he drew behind him with a sign Maximilien, passive, insensible, and dismayed as he had been since the death of Valentine.

"Restore joy to my brother!" said Julie at Monte Cristo's ear.

Monte Cristo pressed her hand as he had pressed it eleven years before on the staircase leading to Morrel's study.

"Do you still trust Sinbad the Sailor?" he asked her, smiling.

"Oh! yes!"

"Well, then, sleep in the peace and the confidence of the Lord."

As we have said, the post-chaise was waiting; four vigorous horses bristled their manes and struck the pavement with impatience.

At the foot of the steps, Ali waited, his face shining with sweat; he seemed to have arrived from a long run.

"Well," the count asked him in Arabic, "have you been to the old man?"

Ali signified yes.

"And you unfolded the letter before his eyes, as I ordered you?"

"Yes," the slave again respectfully replied.

"And what did he say, or rather what did he do?"

Ali placed himself in the light, so that his master could see him, and, imitating with his so devoted intelligence the physiognomy of the old man, he closed his eyes as Noirtier did when he wished to say: Yes.

"Good, he accepts," said Monte Cristo; "let us depart!"

He had scarcely let this word escape when the carriage was already rolling and the horses were striking sparks from the pavement. Maximilien settled into his corner without saying a single word.

Half an hour passed; the calash suddenly stopped; the count had just pulled the silk cord corresponding to Ali's finger.

The Nubian descended and opened the door. The night sparkled with stars. They were at the top of the Villejuif ascent, on the plateau from which Paris, like a dark sea, agitates its millions of lights that appear as phosphorescent waves; waves indeed, waves more noisy, more passionate, more mobile, more furious, more greedy than those of the irritated Ocean, waves that know no calm like those of the vast sea, waves that always collide, always foam, always engulf!...

The count remained alone, and at a sign of his hand the carriage moved forward a few paces.

Then he considered for a long time, arms crossed, that furnace where all those ideas come to melt, twist, and take shape, that leap from the boiling gulf to agitate the world. Then, when he had fixed his powerful gaze upon that Babylon which makes religious poets as well as materialist scoffers dream:

"Great city!" he murmured, inclining his head and joining his hands as if in prayer, "less than six months ago I crossed your gates. I believe the spirit of God had led me there, he brings me back from it triumphant; the secret of my presence within your walls I have confided to that God who alone could read my heart; alone he knows that I withdraw without hatred and without pride, but not without regrets; alone he knows that I made use neither for myself nor for vain causes of the power he had entrusted to me. O great city! it is in your palpitating bosom that I have found what I sought; patient miner, I have stirred your entrails to bring forth the evil; now, my work is accomplished, my mission is ended; now you can offer me neither joys nor sorrows. Farewell, Paris! farewell!"

His gaze wandered again over the vast plain like that of a nocturnal genius; then, passing his hand over his brow, he remounted into his carriage, which closed upon him, and which soon disappeared on the other side of the ascent in a whirlwind of dust and noise.

They traveled two leagues without pronouncing a single word. Morrel dreamed, Monte Cristo watched him dream.

"Morrel," the count said to him, "would you repent having followed me?"

"No, Count; but to leave Paris..."

"If I had believed happiness awaited you in Paris, Morrel, I would have left you there."

"It is in Paris that Valentine rests, and to leave Paris is to lose her a second time."

"Maximilien," said the count, "the friends we have lost do not rest in the ear th, they are buried in our hearts, and it is God who willed it thus so that we might always be accompanied by them. As for me, I have two friends who thus always accompany me: one is he who gave me life, the other is he who gave me intelligence. Their spirit in both lives in me. I consult them in doubt, and if I have done some good, it is to their counsel I owe it. Consult the voice of your heart, Morrel, and ask it whether you should continue to make me this wretched face."

"My friend," said Maximilien, "the voice of my heart is very sad and promises me only misfortunes."

"It is the nature of weakened spirits to see all things through a crepe; it is the soul that makes its own horizons for itself; your soul is dark, it is she who makes you a stormy sky."

"That is perhaps true," said Maximilien.

And he fell back into his reverie.

The journey was made with that marvelous rapidity which was one of the count's powers; the towns passed like shadows on their route; the trees, shaken by the first winds of autumn, seemed to come toward them like disheveled giants, and fled rapidly once they had overtaken them. The next morning, in the early hours, they arrived at Châlons, where the count's steamboat awaited them; without losing an instant, the carriage was transported aboard; the two travelers were already embarked.

The boat was built for speed; one would have said an Indian pirogue; its two wheels seemed two wings with which it skimmed the water like a traveling bird; Morrel himself felt that sort of intoxication of speed; and at times the wind that made his hair float seemed ready for a moment to dispel the clouds from his brow.

As for the count, as he drew away from Paris, an almost superhuman serenity seemed to envelop him like an aureole. One would have said an exile regaining his homeland.

Soon Marseille, white, warm, living; Marseille, the younger sister of Tyre and Carthage, and who has succeeded them in the empire of the Mediterranean; Marseille, always younger as she grows old, appeared to their eyes. It was for both of them aspects fertile in memories, that round tower, that Saint-Nicolas fort, that town hall of Puget, that port with its brick quays where both had played as children.

Also, by common accord, they both stopped on the Canebière.

A vessel was departing for Algiers; the packages, the passengers heaped on the deck, the crowd of relatives, of friends who said farewell, who cried and wept, a spectacle always moving, even for those who witness this spectacle every day, this movement could not distract Maximilien from an idea that had seized him from the moment he set foot on the broad flagstones of the quay.

"See," he said, taking Monte Cristo's arm, "here is the spot where my father stopped when the _Pharaon_ entered the port; here the brave man whom you saved from death and dishonor threw himself into my arms; I still feel the impression of his tears on my face, and he did not weep alone, many people also wept seeing us.

Monte Cristo smiled.

"I was there," said he, pointing out to Morrel the corner of a street.

As he said this, and in the direction the count indicated, a painful groan was heard, and a woman was seen who was signaling to a passenger on the departing ship. This woman was veiled; Monte Cristo followed her with his eyes with an emotion that Morrel would easily have noticed, if, quite contrary to the count, his eyes had not been fixed on the vessel.

"Oh my God!" cried Morrel, "I am not mistaken! that young man who salutes with his hat, that young man in uniform, it is Albert de Morcerf!"

"Yes," said Monte Cristo, "I had recognized him."

"How so? you were looking the opposite way."

The count smiled, as he did when he did not wish to answer.

And his eyes turned back to the veiled woman, who disappeared around the corner of the street.

Then he turned around.

"Dear friend," he said to Maximilien, "have you nothing to do in this country?"

"I have to weep upon my father's tomb," Morrel answered somberly.

"Very well, go and wait for me there; I will rejoin you."

"You are leaving me?"

"Yes... I too have a pious visit to make."

Morrel let his hand fall into the hand the count held out to him; then, with a movement of the head whose melancholy it would be impossible to express, he left the count and directed himself toward the east of the city.

Monte Cristo let Maximilien move away, remaining in the same place until he had disappeared, then he made his way toward the Allées de Meilhan, in order to find the little house that the beginnings of this story must have made familiar to our readers.

This house still stood in the shade of the great avenue of lindens that serves as a promenade for idle Marseillais, hung with vast curtains of vine that crossed, upon the stone yellowed by the ardent sun of the Midi, their arms blackened and tattered by age. Two stone steps, worn by the rubbing of feet, led to the entrance door, a door made of three planks which never, despite their annual repairs, had known putty and paint, patiently awaiting the return of moisture to bring them together.

This house, wholly charming despite its decrepitude, wholly joyful despite its apparent misery, was indeed the same that old Dantès had once inhabited. Only the old man lived in the garret, and the count had put the whole house at Mercédès's disposal.

It was there that the woman with the long veil whom Monte Cristo had seen move away from the departing ship entered; she was closing the door at the very moment he appeared at the corner of a street, so that he saw her disappear almost as soon as he found her again.

For him, the worn steps were old acquaintances; he knew better than anyone how to open that old door, on which a broad-headed nail lifted the inner latch.

So he entered without knocking, without warning, like a friend, like a host.

At the end of a brick-paved walk opened, rich in warmth, sun, and light, a little garden, the same where, in the indicated place, Mercédès had found the sum whose delicacy the count had made appear as deposited twenty-four years before; from the threshold of the street door one caught sight of the first trees of this garden.

Arrived on the threshold, Monte Cristo heard a sigh that resembled a sob; this sigh guided his gaze, and under an arbor of Virginia jasmine with thick foliage and long purple flowers, he perceived Mercédès seated, inclined, and weeping.

She had raised her veil, and alone before heaven, her face hidden by her two hands, she gave free course to her sighs and sobs, so long contained by the presence of her son.

Monte Cristo advanced a few steps; the sand creaked beneath his feet.

Mercédès raised her head and uttered a cry of fright at seeing a man before her.

"Madame," said the count, "it is no longer in my power to bring you happiness, but I offer you consolation: will you deign to accept it as coming from a friend?"

"I am indeed very unhappy," replied Mercédès; "alone in the world... I had only my son, and he has left me."

"He did well, madame," replied the count; "he is a noble heart. He understood that every man owes a tribute to his country: some their talents, others their industry; these their vigils, those their blood. In remaining with you, he would have worn out near you a life become useless, he could not have accustomed himself to your sorrows. He would have become hateful through impotence: he will become great and strong in struggling against his adversity which he will change into fortune. Let him reconstitute the future for you both, madame; I dare promise you he is in sure hands."

"Oh!" said the poor woman, sadly shaking her head, "that fortune of which you speak, and for which from the bottom of my soul I pray God to grant him, I shall not enjoy it, I. So many things have broken in me and around me, that I feel near my tomb. You did well, Count, to bring me near the place where I was so happy: it is where one has been happy that one should die."

"Alas!" said Monte Cristo, "all your words, madame, fall bitter and burning upon my heart, the more bitter and burning in that you are right to hate me; it is I who have caused all your woes: why do you not pity me instead of accusing me? you would render me yet more unhappy..."

"Hate you, accuse you, you, Edmond... Hate, accuse the man who saved the life of my son, for it was your fatal and bloody intention, was it not, to kill in M. de Morcerf that son of whom he was proud? Oh! look at me, and you will see if there is in me the appearance of a reproach."

The count lifted his gaze and fixed it on Mercédès, who, half risen, held out both hands toward him.

"Oh! look at me," she continued with a sentiment of profound melancholy; "one can bear the brightness of my eyes today, it is no longer the time when I came smiling to Edmond Dantès, who awaited me up there, at the window of that garret his old father inhabited... Since that time, many painful days have flowed by, which have dug like an abyss between me and that time. Accuse you, Edmond, hate you, my friend! no, it is myself I accuse and hate! Oh! wretched that I am!" she cried, joining her hands and raising her eyes to heaven. "Have I been punished!... I had religion, innocence, love, those three felicities that make the angels, and, wretched that I am, I doubted God!"

Monte Cristo took a step toward her and silently held out his hand.

"No," said she, gently withdrawing her own; "no, my friend, do not touch me. You spared me, and yet of all those you struck, I was the most guilty. All the others acted through hatred, through cupidity, through selfishness; I acted through cowardice. They desired, I was afraid. No, do not press my hand. Edmond, you are meditating some affectionate word, I feel it, do not say it: keep it for another, I am no longer worthy of it, I. See..." (she quite uncovered her face) "see, misfortune has made my hair gray; my eyes have shed so many tears that they are circled with violet veins; my brow wrinkles. You, on the contrary, Edmond, you are always young, always handsome, always proud. It is that you had faith, you; it is that you had strength; it is that you reposed in God, and God sustained you. I was cowardly, I renounced; God abandoned me, and here I am."

Mercédès melted into tears, the heart of the woman broke at the shock of memories.

Monte Cristo took her hand and kissed it respectfully, but she herself felt that this kiss was without ardor, like that which the count would have bestowed upon the marble hand of a statue of a saint.

"There are," she continued, "predestined existences whose first fault breaks all the future. I believed you dead, I should have died; for what did it serve that I eternally wore your mourning in my heart? to make of a woman of thirty-nine a woman of fifty, that is all. What did it serve that, alone among all, having recognized you, I only saved my son? Should I not also have saved the man, guilty though he was, whom I had accepted for husband? yet I let him die; what am I saying, my God! I contributed to his death by my cowardly insensibility, by my contempt, not recalling, not wishing to recall that it was for me he had made himself perjurer and traitor! What finally serves that I accompanied my son hither, since here I abandon him, since I let him depart alone, since I deliver him to that devouring land of Africa? Oh! I was cowardly, I tell you; I renounced my love, and, like renegades, I bring misfortune to all that surrounds me!"

"No, Mercédès," said Monte Cristo, "no; take a better opinion of yourself. No; you are a noble and holy woman, and you had disarmed me by your sorrow; but, behind me, invisible, unknown, irritated, there was God, of whom I was but the agent and who did not wish to hold back the thunderbolt I had launched. Oh! I adjure that God, at whose feet for ten years I prostrate myself each day, I call to witness that God to whom I had made the sacrifice of my life, and with my life that of the projects enchained therein. But, I say it with pride, Mercédès, God had need of me, and I lived. Examine the past, examine the present, try to divine the future, and see if I am not the instrument of the Lord; the most frightful misfortunes, the most cruel sufferings, the abandonment of all who loved me, the persecution of those who knew me not, behold the first part of my life; then, all at once, after captivity, solitude, misery, air, liberty, a fortune so dazzling, so prestigiously, so immoderately great, that, unless blind, I must have thought God sent it me in great designs. Thenceforth, this fortune seemed to me a priesthood; thenceforth, not a thought in me for that life of which you, poor woman, have sometimes savored the sweetness; not an hour of calm, not one: I felt myself driven like the cloud of fire passing in the sky to burn the accursed cities. Like those adventurous captains who embark for a dangerous voyage, who meditate a perilous expedition, I prepared provisions, I loaded arms, I amassed means of attack and defense, accustoming my body to the most violent exercises, my soul to the roughest shocks, instructing my arm to kill, my eyes to see suffering, my mouth to smile at the most terrible aspects; from good, trusting, forgetful that I was, I have made myself vindictive, dissembling, wicked, or rather impassive like deaf and blind fate. Then, I launched myself into the way opened to me, I traversed space, I touched the goal: woe to those I encountered on my path!"

"Enough!" said Mercédès; "enough, Edmond! believe that she who alone could recognize you could alone also understand you. Now, Edmond, she who knew how to recognize you, she who could understand you, that one, had you met her on your road and had you broken her like glass, that one must have admired you, Edmond! As there is an abyss between me and the past, there is an abyss between you and other men, and my most painful torture, I tell you, is to compare; for there is nothing in the world that equals you, nothing that resembles you. Now, say farewell to me, Edmond, and let us part."

"Before I leave you, what do you desire, Mercédès?" asked Monte Cristo.

"I desire but one thing, Edmond: that my son be happy."

"Pray the Lord, who alone holds the existence of men between his hands, to ward death from him; I charge myself with the rest."

"Thank you, Edmond."

"But you, Mercédès?"

"I have need of nothing; I live between two tombs: one is that of Edmond Dantès, dead so long ago; I loved him! That word ill befits my withered lip, but my heart still remembers, and for nothing in the world would I lose that memory of the heart. The other is that of a man whom Edmond Dantès killed; I approve the murder, but I must pray for the dead."

"Your son will be happy, madame," repeated the count.

"Then I shall be as happy as I can be."

"But... finally... what will you do?"

Mercédès smiled sadly.

"To tell you that I shall live in this country like the Mercédès of old, that is to say by working, you would not believe it; I no longer know how to pray, but I have no need to work; the little treasure buried by you was found again in the place you indicated; they will seek who I am, they will ask what I do, they will ignore how I live, what matters! it is a matter between God, you, and me."

"Mercédès," said the count, "I do not reproach you for it, but you have exaggerated the sacrifice in abandoning all that fortune amassed by M. de Morcerf, of which half returned by right to your economy and your vigilance."

"I see what you are going to propose; but I cannot accept, Edmond, my son would forbid it."

"Also I shall guard against doing anything for you that does not have the approval of M. Albert de Morcerf. I shall learn his intentions and submit to them. But, if he accepts what I wish to do, will you imitate him without repugnance?"

"You know, Edmond, that I am no longer a thinking creature; of determination I have none save that of never taking any. God has so shaken me in his storms that I have lost the will. I am in his hands like a sparrow in the claws of the eagle. He does not wish me to die since I live. If he sends me relief, it is that he wills it and I shall take it."

"Take care, madame," said Monte Cristo, "it is not thus that one adores God! God wishes one to understand him and to discuss his power: it is for that he has given us free will."

"Unhappy man!" cried Mercédès; "do not speak to me thus; if I believed God had given me free will, what then would remain to me to save me from despair!"

Monte Cristo paled slightly and lowered his head, crushed by that vehemence of sorrow.

"Will you not say farewell to me?" he said, holding out his hand.

"On the contrary, I say farewell to you," replied Mercédès, showing him heaven with solemnity; "that is to prove to you that I still hope."

And after having touched the count's hand with her trembling hand, Mercédès ran up the staircase and disappeared from the count's eyes.

Monte Cristo then slowly left the house and took the road back to the port.

But Mercédès did not see him depart, though she was at the window of the little room of Dantès's father. Her eyes sought afar the vessel bearing her son toward the vast sea.

It is true that her voice, as despite herself, murmured low:

"Edmond, Edmond, Edmond!"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”