CXIII. Le passé.

CXIII

The Past.

The count left that house with a stricken soul, leaving Mercédès behind, never, in all probability, to see her again.

Since the death of little Édouard, a great change had come over Monte-Cristo. Having reached the summit of his vengeance by the slow and winding path he had followed, he had seen, on the other side of the mountain, the abyss of doubt.

There was more: the conversation he had just had with Mercédès had awakened so many memories in his heart that those memories themselves needed to be combated.

A man of the count's mettle could not long drift in that melancholy which may sustain vulgar minds by giving them an apparent originality, but which kills superior souls. The count told himself that, for having almost come to blame himself, some error must have crept into his calculations.

“I am looking at the past wrongly,” said he, “and I cannot have been thus mistaken.

“What! he went on, “the aim I had set myself would be a senseless aim! What! I should have been on the wrong track for ten years! What! a single hour would have sufficed to prove to the architect that the work of all his hopes was a work, if not impossible, at least sacrilegious!

“I will not grow accustomed to that idea; it would drive me mad. What is lacking in my reasoning of today is the exact appreciation of the past, because I see that past from the other end of the horizon. Indeed, as one advances, the past, like the landscape through which one walks, fades as one withdraws from it. What is happening to me is what happens to those who have wounded themselves in a dream: they look and feel their wound, but do not remember having received it.

“Come then, regenerated man; come, extravagant rich man; come, waking sleeper; come, all-powerful visionary; come, invincible millionaire, take up again for an instant that fatal perspective of the miserable and starving life; go back along the roads where fate drove you, where misfortune led you, where despair received you; too many diamonds, too much gold and happiness shine today upon the mirror where Monte-Cristo looks at Dantès—hide those diamonds, soil that gold, efface those rays; rich man, find again the poor man; free man, find again the prisoner; resurrected man, find again the corpse.”

And as he said this to himself, Monte-Cristo was following the rue de la Caisserie. It was the same street by which, twenty-four years before, he had been led by a silent, nocturnal guard; those houses, now cheerful and lively in aspect, had been dark, mute and shut on that night.

“And yet they are the same,” murmured Monte-Cristo, “only then it was night, today it is broad daylight; it is the sun that lights all this and makes all this joyful.”

He went down to the quay by the rue Saint-Laurent, and advanced toward the Consigne: it was the point of the port where he had embarked. A pleasure-boat was passing with its awning of canvas; Monte-Cristo called the boatman, who at once rowed toward him with the eagerness boatmen show at such exercise when they scent a good bargain.

The weather was magnificent, the voyage was a feast. On the horizon the sun was descending, red and flaming, into the waves that caught fire at its approach; the sea, smooth as a mirror, now and then wrinkled beneath the leaps of fish who, pursued by some hidden enemy, sprang out of the water to seek safety in another element; finally, on the horizon one saw passing, white and graceful as traveling gulls, the fishing-boats bound for the Martigues, or merchant vessels laden for Corsica or for Spain.

Despite that fair sky, those boats of graceful outline, that golden light flooding the landscape, the count, wrapped in his cloak, recalled, one by one, all the details of the terrible voyage: that single, isolated light burning at the Catalans, that sight of the Château d’If which told him where they were taking him, that struggle with the gendarmes when he wished to fling himself into the sea, his despair when he felt himself vanquished, and that cold sensation of the muzzle of a carbine pressed to his temple like a ring of ice.

And little by little, as those springs dried by summer, which when the clouds of autumn gather grow moist again and begin to ooze drop by drop, the Count of Monte-Cristo likewise felt oozing in his breast that old extravasated gall which had once flooded the heart of Edmond Dantès.

For him thenceforth there was no more fair sky, no more graceful boats, no more ardent light; the sky veiled itself in funeral crepe, and the apparition of the black giant called the Château d’If made him start, as if there had suddenly appeared before him the ghost of a mortal enemy.

They arrived.

Instinctively the count drew back to the end of the boat. The boatman called to him in his most coaxing voice:

“We are landing, sir.”

Monte-Cristo remembered that at that same spot, on that same rock, he had been violently dragged by his guards, and forced to mount that ramp with the point of a bayonet pricking his loins.

The road had once seemed very long to Dantès. Monte-Cristo found it very short; each stroke of the oar had made spring up, with the damp dust of the sea, a million thoughts and memories.

Since the July Revolution there had been no prisoners in the Château d’If; a post intended to prevent smuggling alone occupied its guardrooms; a keeper awaited the curious at the door to show them that monument of terror, become a monument of curiosity.

And yet, though informed of all these details, when he entered under the vault, when he descended the black staircase, when he was led to the dungeons he had asked to see, a cold pallor spread over his brow, whose icy sweat was driven back to his heart.

The count inquired whether any old turnkey from the Restoration period still remained; all had been retired or transferred to other posts. The keeper who conducted him had been there only since 1830.

He was taken to his own dungeon.

He saw again the wan daylight filtering through the narrow air-hole; he saw again the place where the bed had been, removed since, and, behind the bed, though stopped up, still visible by its newer stones, the opening pierced by Abbé Faria.

Monte-Cristo felt his legs give way; he took a wooden stool and sat down upon it.

“Are any stories told of this castle besides that of Mirabeau’s imprisonment?” asked the count. “Is there any tradition of these gloomy dwellings where one hesitates to believe that men ever enclosed a living man?”

“Yes, sir,” said the keeper, “and of this very dungeon the turnkey Antoine transmitted one to me.”

Monte-Cristo started. That turnkey Antoine was his turnkey. He had almost forgotten his name and face; but, at the name pronounced, he saw him again as he had been, with his bearded face, his brown jacket and his bunch of keys, whose jingling he seemed still to hear.

The count turned round and thought he saw him in the shadow of the corridor, made denser by the light of the torch burning in the keeper’s hands.

“Does monsieur wish me to tell it to him?” asked the keeper.

“Yes,” said Monte-Cristo, “say on.”

And he put his hand to his breast to compress a violent heartbeat, frightened at hearing his own story told.

“Tell it,” he repeated.

“This dungeon,” resumed the keeper, “was occupied by a prisoner, long ago, a very dangerous man, it would seem, and all the more dangerous because he was full of resource. Another man lived in this castle at the same time as he; that one was not wicked; he was a poor priest who was mad.”

“Ah! yes, mad,” repeated Monte-Cristo; “and what was his madness?”

“He offered millions if any one would restore him his liberty.”

Monte-Cristo raised his eyes to heaven, but he did not see heaven: there was a veil of stone between him and the firmament. He thought that there had been no less thick a veil between the eyes of those to whom Abbé Faria offered treasures and those treasures he offered them.

“Could the prisoners see each other?” asked Monte-Cristo.

“Oh! no, sir, it was expressly forbidden; but they eluded the prohibition by piercing a gallery which went from one dungeon to the other.”

“And which of the two pierced that gallery?”

“Oh! the young man, certainly,” said the keeper; “the young man was resourceful and strong, while the poor abbé was old and weak; besides, his mind was too unsettled to follow an idea.”

“Blind men!…” murmured Monte-Cristo.

“So it was,” continued the keeper, “that the young man pierced a gallery; with what? no one knows; but he pierced it, and the proof is that the trace of it is still seen; look, do you see it?”

And he brought his torch near the wall.

“Ah! yes, indeed,” said the count in a voice stifled by emotion.

“The result was that the two prisoners communicated together. How long did that communication last? no one knows. Now, one day the old prisoner fell ill and died. Guess what the young one did?” said the keeper, breaking off.

“Tell me.”

“He carried away the dead man, whom he laid in his own bed, face to the wall, then he returned to the empty dungeon, stopped up the hole, and slipped into the dead man’s sack. Did you ever see such an idea?”

Monte-Cristo closed his eyes and felt pass over him again all the impressions he had experienced when that coarse cloth, still marked with the cold the corpse had communicated to it, had rubbed his face.

The turnkey continued:

“You see, that was his plan: he believed they buried the dead at the Château d’If, and as he suspected they did not go to the expense of a coffin for prisoners, he counted on raising the earth with his shoulders; but unfortunately there was at the castle a custom which disarranged his plan: they did not bury the dead; they merely attached a cannon-ball to their feet and flung them into the sea: that is what was done. Our man was thrown into the water from the top of the gallery; the next day the real dead man was found in his bed, and all was guessed, for the buriers then said what they had not dared say until then: that at the moment the body was launched into the void they had heard a terrible cry, stifled instantly by the water into which it had vanished.”

The count breathed painfully, the sweat ran down his brow, anguish clutched his heart.

“No!” he murmured, “no! that doubt I felt was a beginning of forgetfulness; but here the heart hollows itself anew and becomes hungry for vengeance again.”

“And the prisoner,” he asked, “has no one ever heard of him since?”

“Never, never in the world; you understand, one of two things: either he fell flat, and, as he fell from some fifty feet, he was killed on the spot.”

“You said they had attached a cannon-ball to his feet: he would have fallen upright.”

“Or he fell upright,” resumed the keeper, “and then the weight of the ball dragged him to the bottom, where he remained, poor dear man!”

“You pity him?”

“Upon my word, yes, though he was in his element.”

“What do you mean?”

“That there was a rumor going about that the poor fellow was, in his time, a naval officer detained for Bonapartism.”

“Truth,” murmured the count; “God made thee to float above the waves and the flames. Thus the poor sailor lives in the memory of a few story-tellers; his terrible story is recited by the fireside and one shudders at the moment when he clove the air to engulf himself in the deep sea.”

“No one ever knew his name?” asked the count aloud.

“Ah! indeed, said the guard, how should they? he was known only under the name of Number 34.”

“Villefort, Villefort!” murmured Monte-Cristo, “that is what many a time thou must have said to thyself when my importunate ghost troubled thy sleepless nights.”

“Does monsieur wish to continue the visit?” asked the keeper.

“Yes, especially if you will show me the room of the poor abbé.”

“Ah! Number 27.”

“Yes, Number 27,” repeated Monte-Cristo.

And it seemed to him again to hear the voice of Abbé Faria when he had asked his name, and the latter had cried that number through the wall.

“Come.”

“Wait,” said Monte-Cristo, “let me cast one last look over all the faces of this dungeon.”

“That falls well,” said the guide, “I have forgotten the key of the other.”

“Go and fetch it.”

“I leave you the torch.”

“No, take it.”

“But you will remain without light.”

“I see in the night.”

“Why, that is like him.”

“Who, him?”

“Number 34. They say he had so accustomed himself to the darkness that he would have seen a pin in the darkest corner of his dungeon.”

“It took him ten years to get to that,” murmured the count.

The guide went off, carrying the torch.

Monte-Cristo had spoken truly: scarcely had he been a few seconds in the darkness than he distinguished everything as in broad daylight.

Then he looked all around him, then he recognized indeed his dungeon.

“Yes,” said he, “there is the stone on which I used to sit! there is the mark of my shoulders which hollowed their impress in the wall! there is the trace of the blood that flowed from my brow, one day when I would break my forehead against the wall… Oh! those figures… I remember them… I made them one day when I was calculating my father’s age to know if I should find him alive, and Mercédès’ age to know if I should find her free… I had a moment of hope after finishing that calculation… I reckoned without hunger and without infidelity!”

And a bitter laugh escaped the count’s mouth. He had just seen, as in a dream, his father borne to the tomb… Mercédès walking to the altar!

On the other side of the wall, an inscription struck his eye. It stood out, still white, on the greenish wall:

“MY GOD!” read Monte-Cristo, “PRESERVE ME MY MEMORY!”

“Oh! yes,” he cried, “there is the only prayer of my later days. I no longer asked for liberty, I asked for memory, I feared to go mad and to forget. My God! thou hast preserved me my memory, and I have remembered. Thanks, thanks, my God!”

At that moment, the light of the torch glimmered on the walls; it was the guide descending.

Monte-Cristo went to meet him.

“Follow me,” said he.

And, without needing to remount toward the day, he made him follow an underground corridor which led to another entrance.

There again Monte-Cristo was assailed by a world of thoughts.

The first thing that struck his eyes was the meridian traced on the wall, by means of which Abbé Faria counted the hours; then the remains of the bed on which the poor prisoner had died.

At this sight, instead of the anguish the count had felt in his dungeon, a sweet and tender feeling, a feeling of gratitude swelled his heart, two tears rolled from his eyes.

“It is here,” said the guide, “that the mad abbé was; it is by there that the young man came to him. (And he showed Monte-Cristo the opening of the gallery which, on this side, had remained gaping.) By the color of the stone,” he continued, “a scholar has recognized that the two prisoners must have communicated together some ten years ago. Poor fellows, they must have been sorely bored during those ten years.”

Dantès took some louis from his pocket, and held out his hand to that man who, for the second time, pitied him without knowing him.

The keeper accepted them, thinking he was receiving some small change, but by the light of the torch he recognized the value of the sum the visitor gave him.

“Sir,” he said, “you have made a mistake.”

“How so?”

“It is gold you have given me.”

“I know it.”

“What! you know it?”

“Yes.”

“Your intention is to give me this gold?”

“Yes.”

“And I may keep it in all conscience?”

“Yes.”

The keeper looked at Monte-Cristo with astonishment.

“And honesty,” said the count like Hamlet.

“Sir,” resumed the keeper, who dared not believe his good fortune, “sir, I do not understand your generosity.”

“It is easy to understand, however, my friend,” said the count; “I have been a sailor, and your story must have touched me more than another.”

“Then, sir,” said the guide, “since you are so generous, you deserve that I should offer you something.”

“What have you to offer me, my friend? shells, straw work? thank you.”

“No, sir, no; something connected with the story of just now.”

“Indeed!” cried the count eagerly; “what is it?”

“Listen,” said the keeper; “here is what happened: I said to myself: One always finds something in a room where a prisoner has stayed fifteen years, and I set about sounding the walls.”

“Ah!” cried Monte-Cristo, remembering the abbé’s double hiding-place, “indeed.”

“By dint of searching,” continued the keeper, “I discovered that it rang hollow at the head of the bed and under the hearth of the chimney.”

“Yes,” said Monte-Cristo, “yes.”

“I raised the stones, and I found…”

“A rope-ladder, tools?” cried the count.

“How do you know that?” asked the keeper with astonishment.

“I do not know it, I guess it,” said the count; “it is ordinarily such things that are found in prisoners’ hiding-places.”

“Yes, sir,” said the guide, “a rope-ladder, tools.”

“And you still have them?” cried Monte-Cristo.

“No, sir; I have sold those different objects, which were very curious, to visitors; but I have something else left.”

“What?” asked the count impatiently.

“I have left a kind of book written on strips of cloth.”

“Oh!” cried Monte-Cristo, “you have that book left?”

“I do not know if it is a book,” said the keeper; “but I have left what I tell you.”

“Go fetch it for me, my friend, go,” said the count; “and, if it is what I suppose, be at ease.”

“I am off, sir.”

And the guide went out.

Then he went to kneel piously before the remains of that bed of which death had made for him an altar.

“O my second father,” said he, “thou who gavest me liberty, science, riches; thou who, like creatures of an essence superior to ours, hadst the knowledge of good and evil; if in the depths of the tomb something of us remains that thrills at the voice of those who have stayed upon the earth; if in the transfiguration the corpse undergoes some animated thing floats where we have much loved or much suffered; noble heart, supreme spirit, profound soul, by a word, by a sign, by some revelation, I conjure thee, in the name of that paternal love thou gavest me and of that filial respect I vowed thee, take from me this remnant of doubt which, if it change not into conviction, will become remorse.”

The count bowed his head and joined his hands.

“Here, sir!” said a voice behind him.

Monte-Cristo started and turned round.

The keeper was holding out to him those strips of cloth on which Abbé Faria had poured all the treasures of his science. That manuscript was the great work of Abbé Faria on the monarchy in Italy.

The count seized it eagerly, and his eyes falling first upon the epigraph, he read: “Thou shalt pluck out the dragon’s teeth, and shalt tread the lions under foot, saith the Lord.”

“Ah!” he cried, “there is the answer! thanks, my father, thanks!”

Drawing from his pocket a small portfolio which contained ten bank-notes of a thousand francs each:

“Here,” he said, “take this portfolio.”

“You give it me?”

“Yes, but on condition that you look inside it only when I am gone.”

And, placing upon his breast the relic he had just found again and which for him had the worth of the richest treasure, he sprang out of the underground, and remounting into the boat:

“To Marseilles!” said he.

Then, as he drew away, his eyes fixed upon the dark prison:

“Woe,” said he, “to those who had me shut up in that dark prison, and to those who forgot that I was shut up there!”

In passing before the Catalans, the count turned aside, and wrapping his head in his cloak, he murmured the name of a woman.

The victory was complete; the count had twice overthrown doubt.

That name, which he pronounced with an expression of tenderness that was almost love, was the name of Haydée.

On landing, Monte-Cristo made his way toward the cemetery, where he knew he should find Morrel.

He too, ten years before, had piously sought a tomb in that cemetery, and had sought it in vain. He who returned to France with millions had not been able to find the tomb of his father dead of hunger.

Morrel had indeed had a cross put there, but that cross had fallen, and the gravedigger had made a fire of it, as gravediggers do of all that old wood lying in cemeteries.

The worthy merchant had been more fortunate: dead in the arms of his children, he had been, led by them, laid near his wife, who had preceded him by two years into eternity.

Two broad marble slabs, on which their names were written, lay one beside the other in a small enclosure fenced with an iron railing and shaded by four cypresses.

Maximilien was leaning against one of those trees, and fixed upon the two tombs eyes without gaze.

His grief was deep, almost distraught.

“Maximilien,” said the count to him, “it is not there one must look, it is there!”

And he pointed to heaven.

“The dead are everywhere,” said Morrel; “is not that what you told me yourself when you made me leave Paris?”

“Maximilien,” said the count, “you asked me during the journey to stop a few days at Marseilles: is that still your wish?”

“I have no more wishes, count, but it seems to me I shall wait less painfully here than elsewhere.”

“So much the better, Maximilien, for I leave you and carry away your word, do I not?”

“Ah! I shall forget it, count,” said Morrel, “I shall forget it!”

“No! you shall not forget it, because you are a man of honor before all, Morrel, because you have sworn, because you are going to swear again.”

“O Count, have pity on me! Count, I am so unhappy!”

“I have known a man more unhappy than you, Morrel.”

“Impossible.”

“Alas!” said Monte-Cristo, “it is one of the prides of our poor humanity, that each man believes himself more unhappy than another unhappy man who weeps and groans beside him.”

“What is more unhappy than the man who has lost the only good he loved and desired in the world?”

“Listen, Morrel,” said Monte-Cristo, “and fix your mind for an instant on what I am going to tell you. I have known a man who, like you, had rested all his hopes of happiness on a woman. That man was young; he had an old father whom he loved, a betrothed whom he adored; he was about to marry her when suddenly one of those caprices of fate which would make one doubt the goodness of God, if God did not reveal himself later in showing that all is for him a means of leading to his infinite unity—when suddenly a caprice of fate took from him his liberty, his mistress, the future he dreamed and believed his own (for, blind as he was, he could read only in the present), to plunge him into the depths of a dungeon.”

“Ah!” said Morrel, “one gets out of a dungeon at the end of eight days, at the end of a month, at the end of a year.”

“He remained there fourteen years, Morrel,” said the count, laying his hand on the young man’s shoulder.

Maximilien started.

“Fourteen years!” he murmured.

“Fourteen years,” repeated the count; “he too, during those fourteen years, had many moments of despair; he too, like you, Morrel, believing himself the most unhappy of men, wished to kill himself.”

“Well?” asked Morrel.

“Well, at the supreme moment, God revealed himself to him by a human means; for God works no more miracles: perhaps at first (it takes time for eyes veiled with tears to be wholly cleared) he did not understand that infinite mercy of the Lord, but at last he took patience and waited. One day he came miraculously out of the tomb, transfigured, rich, powerful, almost a god; his first cry was for his father: his father was dead!

“And my father too is dead,” said Morrel.

“Yes, but your father died in your arms, loved, happy, honored, rich, full of days; his father had died poor, in despair, doubting God; and when, ten years after his death, his son sought his tomb, that tomb itself had disappeared, and no one could tell him: ‘There rests in the Lord the heart that so loved you.’”

“Oh!” said Morrel.

“That man was therefore a more unhappy son than you, Morrel, for that man did not even know where to find his father’s tomb.”

“But,” said Morrel, “at least there remained to him the woman he had loved.”

“You are mistaken, Morrel; that woman…”

“She was dead?” cried Maximilien.

“Worse than that: she had been unfaithful; she had married one of her betrothed’s persecutors. You see then, Morrel, that that man was a more unhappy lover than you!”

“And to that man,” asked Morrel, “did God send consolation?”

“He sent him at least calm.”

“And that man may yet be happy one day?”

“He hopes so, Maximilien.”

The young man let his head fall upon his breast.

“You have my promise,” said he after a moment of silence, holding out his hand to Monte-Cristo; “only remember…”

“The 5th of October, Morrel, I expect you at the island of Monte-Cristo. On the 4th, a yacht will await you in the port of Bastia; that yacht will be called the Eurus; you will name yourself to the patron who will conduct you to me. Is it said, is it not, Maximilien?”

“It is said, count, and I shall do as is said; but remember that on the 5th of October…”

“Child, who does not yet know what the promise of a man is… I have told you twenty times that on that day, if you still wish to die, I will help you, Morrel. Farewell.”

“You are leaving me?”

“Yes, I have business in Italy: I leave you alone, alone face to face with unhappiness, alone with that eagle of powerful wings which the Lord sends to his elect to bear them to his feet. The story of Ganymede is no fable, Maximilien, it is an allegory.”

“When do you leave?”

“This very instant; the steamboat awaits me; in an hour I shall already be far from you; will you accompany me to the port, Morrel?”

“I am all yours, count.”

“Embrace me.”

Morrel escorted the count to the port; already the smoke issued, like an immense plume, from the black tube that launched it to the skies. Soon the vessel departed, and an hour later, as Monte-Cristo had said, that same tuft of whitish smoke streaked, scarce visible, the eastern horizon, darkened by the first mists of night.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”