XIII. Les Cent-Jours.

XIII

The Hundred Days.

M. Noirtier was a good prophet, and things moved quickly, as he had said. Everyone knows of that return from the island of Elba, a strange and miraculous return, without precedent in the past and probably without imitation in the future.

Louis XVIII made but a feeble attempt to parry so rude a blow: his lack of confidence in men deprived him of confidence in events. The royal authority, or rather the monarchy, barely reconstituted by him, trembled upon its still uncertain base, and a single gesture from the Emperor caused the whole edifice, that confused mixture of old prejudices and new ideas, to crumble. Villefort therefore received from his king only a recognition not merely useless for the moment, but even dangerous, and that cross of officer of the Legion of Honor, which he had the prudence not to display, although M. de Blacas, as the king had recommended to him, had carefully forwarded him the patent.

Napoleon would certainly have dismissed Villefort but for the protection of Noirtier, become all-powerful at the court of the Hundred Days, both by the perils he had braved and the services he had rendered. Thus, as he had promised him, the Girondin of '93 and the senator of 1806 protected him who had protected him the day before.

All Villefort's power was therefore limited, during this evocation of the empire—which, moreover, it was easy to foresee would have a second fall—to smothering the secret that Dantès had been on the point of divulging.

Only the king's attorney was dismissed, being suspected of lukewarmness in Bonapartism.

However, scarcely was the imperial power re-established, that is to say, scarcely had the emperor taken up residence in those Tuileries which Louis XVIII had just left, and launched his numerous and divergent orders from that little cabinet into which we, following Villefort, introduced our readers, and upon the walnut table of which he found again, still quite open and half full, the snuffbox of Louis XVIII, than Marseille, despite the attitude of its magistrates, began to feel fermenting within her those brands of civil war ever poorly extinguished in the South; it was close then to reprisals going beyond some charivaris with which royalists shut up in their homes were besieged, and public affronts with which those who ventured out were pursued.

By a quite natural reversal, the worthy shipowner, whom we have designated as belonging to the popular party, found himself in turn at this moment—we will not say all-powerful, for M. Morrel was a prudent and slightly timid man, like all those who have made a slow and laborious commercial fortune—but in a position, though outstripped by the zealous Bonapartists who treated him as a moderate man, in a position, I say, to raise his voice and make a complaint heard; this complaint, as may easily be guessed, had to do with Dantès.

Villefort had remained standing, despite the fall of his superior, and his marriage, though still decided upon, was nevertheless postponed to happier times. If the emperor kept the throne, it was another alliance that Gérard needed, and his father would undertake to find him one; if a second Restoration brought Louis XVIII back to France, the influence of M. de Saint-Méran, as well as his own, would be doubled, and the union became more suitable than ever.

The deputy king's attorney was therefore momentarily the first magistrate of Marseille, when one morning his door opened, and M. Morrel was announced to him.

Another would have hastened to go meet the shipowner, and, by that eagerness, would have shown his weakness; but Villefort was a superior man who had, if not the practice, at least the instinct of all things. He had Morrel wait in the antechamber, as he would have done under the Restoration, although he had no one near him, but for the simple reason that it is customary for a deputy king's attorney to make people wait; then, after a quarter of an hour which he spent reading two or three newspapers of different shades, he ordered that the shipowner be shown in.

M. Morrel expected to find Villefort cast down: he found him as he had seen him six weeks before, that is to say calm, firm, and full of that cold politeness, the most impassable of all barriers separating the elevated man from the common man.

He had entered Villefort's study convinced that the magistrate would tremble at the sight of him, and it was he, on the contrary, who found himself all a-tremble and all moved before this interrogating personage, who awaited him with his elbow resting on his desk.

He stopped at the door. Villefort looked at him, as if he had some difficulty recognizing him. At length, after a few seconds of examination and silence, during which the worthy shipowner turned and turned his hat between his hands:

“M. Morrel, I believe?” said Villefort.

“Yes, sir, myself,” answered the shipowner.

“Come nearer, then,” continued the magistrate, making a protective gesture with his hand, “and tell me to what circumstance I owe the honor of your visit.”

“Do you not guess?” asked Morrel.

“No, not in the least; which does not prevent me from being quite disposed to oblige you, if the thing were in my power.”

“The thing depends entirely upon you, sir,” said Morrel.

“Explain yourself, then.”

“Sir,” continued the shipowner, recovering his assurance as he spoke, and emboldened besides by the justice of his cause and the clearness of his position, “you recall that, a few days before the landing of His Majesty the emperor was known, I came to claim your indulgence for an unhappy young man, a sailor, mate aboard my brig; he was accused, if you recall, of relations with the island of Elba: those relations, which were a crime at that time, are today titles of favor. You served Louis XVIII then, and did not spare him, sir; it was your duty. Today, you serve Napoleon, and you ought to protect him; it is still your duty. I come therefore to ask you what has become of him.”

Villefort made a violent effort upon himself.

“The name of that man?” he asked; “have the goodness to tell me his name.”

“Edmond Dantès.”

Evidently Villefort would as soon, in a duel, have faced his adversary's fire at twenty-five paces as have heard that name pronounced point-blank; nevertheless he did not flinch. “In this way,” Villefort said to himself, “no one will be able to accuse me of having made the arrest of that young man a purely personal matter.”

“Dantès?” he repeated; “Edmond Dantès, did you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

Villefort then opened a large register placed in a neighboring file, referred to a table, from the table passed to some dossiers, and, turning toward the shipowner:

“Are you quite sure you are not mistaken, sir?” he said to him with the most natural air.

Had Morrel been a more subtle man or better informed on this affair, he would have found it odd that the deputy king's attorney should deign to answer him on matters completely outside his jurisdiction; and he would have asked himself why Villefort did not refer him to the registers of commitment, to the prison governors, to the prefect of the department. But Morrel, seeking in vain for fear in Villefort, saw in him, from the moment all fear appeared absent, only condescension: Villefort had hit the mark.

“No, sir,” said Morrel, “I am not mistaken; besides, I have known the poor lad for ten years, and he has been in my service for four. I came, you remember? six weeks ago, to beg you to be merciful, as I come today to beg you to be just toward the poor lad; you received me even rather badly and answered me like a discontented man. Ah! it was that the royalists were hard on the Bonapartists in those days!”

“Sir,” answered Villefort, coming to the parry with his usual quickness and coolness, “I was a royalist then when I believed the Bourbons not only the legitimate heirs to the throne, but also the chosen of the nation; but the miraculous return of which we have just been witnesses has proved me wrong. The genius of Napoleon has prevailed: the legitimate monarch is the beloved monarch.”

“That's right!” cried Morrel with his good, hearty frankness; “you please me by speaking thus, and I augur well from it for the fate of Edmond.”

“Wait, though,” resumed Villefort, turning over a new register; “here I am: he is a sailor, is he not, who was marrying a Catalan girl? Yes, yes; oh! I recall now: the matter was very grave.”

“How so?”

“You know that on leaving my house he had been taken to the prisons of the palace of justice.”

“Yes, well?”

“Well, I made my report to Paris, I sent the papers found on him. It was my duty—what would you have... and a week after his arrest the prisoner was removed.”

“Removed!” cried Morrel; “but what can they have done with the poor lad?”

“Oh! rest easy. He will have been transported to Fenestrelle, to Pignerol, to the Sainte-Marguerite Islands, what is called in administrative terms displaced; and one fine morning you will see him come back to take command of his ship.”

“Let him come when he will, his place will be kept for him. But why has he not already returned? It seems to me that the first care of Bonapartist justice ought to have been to turn out those whom royalist justice had incarcerated.”

“Do not accuse rashly, my dear M. Morrel,” answered Villefort; “in all things one must proceed legally. The order of incarceration came from above; the order of liberty must also come from above. Now, Napoleon has been back scarcely fifteen days; the letters of abolition can scarcely have been dispatched as yet.”

“But,” asked Morrel, “is there no way to hasten the formalities, now that we are triumphant? I have some friends, some influence; I can obtain a lifting of the sentence.”

“There has been no sentence.”

“Of commitment, then.”

“In political matters there is no register of commitment; sometimes governments have an interest in making a man disappear without leaving a trace of his passage: commitment notes would guide the searches.”

“That may have been so under the Bourbons, perhaps, but now....”

“That is so at all times, my dear M. Morrel; governments succeed one another and resemble one another; the penitentiary machine set up under Louis XIV still runs today, the Bastille apart. The Emperor has always been stricter in the regulation of his prisons than the Great King himself; and the number of those incarcerated of whom the registers keep no trace is incalculable.”

So much good will would have diverted certainties, and Morrel had not even suspicions.

“But finally, M. de Villefort,” said he, “what counsel would you give me that would hasten the return of poor Dantès?”

“Only one, sir: draw up a petition to the Minister of Justice.”

“Oh! sir, we know what petitions are: the minister receives two hundred a day and reads not four.”

“Yes,” resumed Villefort, “but he will read a petition sent by me, annotated by me, addressed directly by me.”

“And you would undertake to forward this petition, sir?”

“With the greatest pleasure. Dantès could be guilty then; but he is innocent today, and it is my duty to procure the liberty of him whom it was my duty to have imprisoned.”

Villefort thus forestalled the danger of an inquiry, improbable but possible, an inquiry which would have ruined him without recourse.

“But how does one write to the minister?”

“Sit there, M. Morrel,” said Villefort, yielding his place to the shipowner; “I am going to dictate to you.”

“You would have that kindness?”

“Certainly. Let us lose no time; we have already lost too much.”

“Yes, sir, let us think that the poor lad is waiting, suffering, and perhaps despairing.”

Villefort shuddered at the idea of that prisoner cursing him in silence and darkness; but he was too far engaged to draw back: Dantès must be broken between the wheels of his ambition.

“I am waiting, sir,” said the shipowner, seated in Villefort's armchair and a pen in his hand.

Villefort then dictated a request in which, with an excellent purpose, there was no doubt of it, he exaggerated the patriotism of Dantès and the services rendered by him to the Bonapartist cause; in this request, Dantès had become one of the most active agents of Napoleon's return; it was evident that, on seeing such a document, the minister must do justice instantly, if justice were not already done.

The petition finished, Villefort read it aloud.

“That is it,” said he, “and now rely upon me.”

“And the petition will go soon, sir?”

“This very day.”

“Annotated by you?”

“The best annotation I can put, sir, is to certify as true all that you say in this request.”

And Villefort sat down in his turn, and upon a corner of the petition applied his certificate.

“Now, sir, what is to be done?” asked Morrel.

“Wait,” resumed Villefort; “I answer for everything.”

This assurance restored hope to Morrel: he left the deputy king's attorney delighted with him, and went to announce to the old father of Dantès that he would soon see his son again.

As for Villefort, instead of sending it to Paris, he carefully kept this request in his hands, which, to save Dantès in the present, compromised him so frightfully in the future, supposing a thing that the aspect of Europe and the turn of events already permitted one to suppose, namely a second Restoration.

Dantès therefore remained a prisoner: lost in the depths of his dungeon, he heard not the formidable noise of the fall of the throne of Louis XVIII, nor that, yet more terrible, of the collapse of the empire.

But Villefort, he, had followed everything with a vigilant eye, listened to everything with an attentive ear. Twice, during that brief imperial apparition called the Hundred Days, Morrel had returned to the charge, insisting always for the liberty of Dantès, and each time Villefort had calmed him with promises and hopes; at length Waterloo came. Morrel did not reappear at Villefort's: the shipowner had done for his young friend all that it was humanly possible to do; to attempt new steps under this second Restoration was to compromise himself uselessly.

Louis XVIII remounted the throne. Villefort, for whom Marseille was full of memories become for him remorse, asked for and obtained the post of king's attorney vacant at Toulouse; fifteen days after his installation in his new residence, he married Mlle Renée de Saint-Méran, whose father was more in favor at court than ever.

Thus it was that Dantès, during the Hundred Days and after Waterloo, remained under lock and key, forgotten, if not by men, at least by God.

Danglars understood the full reach of the blow with which he had struck Dantès, on seeing Napoleon return to France: his denunciation had hit home, and, like all men of a certain capacity for crime and a mediocre intelligence for ordinary life, he called this bizarre coincidence a _decree of Providence_.

But when Napoleon was back in Paris and his voice resounded anew, imperious and powerful, Danglars grew afraid; at every instant, he expected to see Dantès reappear, Dantès knowing all, Dantès threatening and strong for all vengeances; then he manifested to M. Morrel the desire to leave the sea service, and had himself recommended by him to a Spanish merchant, with whom he entered as a clerk about the end of March, that is to say ten or twelve days after Napoleon's return to the Tuileries; he therefore departed for Madrid, and nothing more was heard of him.

Fernand, he, understood nothing. Dantès was absent, that was all he needed. What had become of him? he did not seek to know. Only, during all the respite his absence gave him, he busied himself, partly in deceiving Mercédès as to the motives of that absence, partly in meditating plans of emigration and abduction; from time to time also, and these were the dark hours of his life, he sat upon the tip of the cape Pharo, from that spot whence one distinguishes at once Marseille and the village of the Catalans, looking, sad and immobile as a bird of prey, whether he might not see, by one of those two roads, return the handsome young man with the free step and the high head who, for him too, had become the messenger of a harsh vengeance. Then Fernand's design was fixed: he would break Dantès' head with a gunshot and kill himself after, saying to himself, to color his assassination. But Fernand deceived himself: that man would never have killed himself, for he always hoped.

Meanwhile, and amid so many painful fluctuations, the empire called a last levy of soldiers, and all who were in a state to bear arms rushed out of France, at the resounding voice of the emperor. Fernand departed like the others, leaving his cabin and Mercédès, and gnawed by that dark and terrible thought that, behind him perhaps, his rival was going to return and marry her he loved.

If Fernand had ever been to kill himself, it was on leaving Mercédès that he would have done it.

His attentions to Mercédès, the pity he seemed to give to her misfortune, the care he took to anticipate her slightest desires, had produced the effect always produced upon generous hearts by the appearances of devotion: Mercédès had always loved Fernand with friendship; her friendship increased for him by a new sentiment, gratitude.

“My brother,” said she, fastening the conscript's sack upon the Catalan's shoulders, “my brother, my only friend, do not get yourself killed, do not leave me alone in this world, where I weep and where I shall be alone as soon as you are no longer in it.”

These words, spoken at the moment of departure, gave Fernand some hope. If Dantès did not return, Mercédès might therefore one day be his.

Mercédès remained alone upon that bare earth, which had never seemed to her so arid, and with the immense sea for horizon. All bathed in tears, like that madwoman whose sorrowful history is told us, she was seen to wander ceaselessly around the little village of the Catalans: now stopping under the burning sun of the South, standing, immobile, mute as a statue, and looking at Marseille; now seated on the edge of the shore, listening to that moaning of the sea, eternal as her grief, and asking herself without cease whether it were not better to lean forward, let herself go by her own weight, open the abyss and be engulfed in it, than to suffer thus all those cruel alternatives of a hopeless waiting.

It was not courage that failed Mercédès to accomplish this design; it was religion that came to her aid and saved her from suicide.

Caderousse was called, like Fernand; only, as he was eight years older than the Catalan, and was married, he formed part only of the third levy, and was sent to the coasts.

Old Dantès, who had been sustained only by hope, lost hope at the fall of the emperor.

Five months, to the day, after having been separated from his son, and almost at the same hour at which he had been arrested, he breathed his last sigh in the arms of Mercédès.

M. Morrel provided for all the expenses of his burial, and paid the poor little debts that the old man had contracted during his illness.

There was more than charity in acting thus, there was courage. The South was in flames, and to succor, even on his deathbed, the father of a Bonapartist as dangerous as Dantès was a crime.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”