XLVIII. Idéologie.

XLVIII

Ideology.

If the Count of Monte Cristo had long lived in Parisian society, he would have appreciated at its full value the step that M. de Villefort was taking toward him.

Well in favor, whether the reigning king belonged to the elder or the younger branch, whether the governing minister was doctrinaire, liberal, or conservative; reputed able by all, as men generally are reputed able who have never met with political reverses; hated by many, but warmly protected by some, without, however, being loved by anyone, M. de Villefort held one of the high positions of the magistracy, and maintained himself at that height like a Harlay or a Molé. His salon, renewed by a young wife and by a daughter from his first marriage scarcely eighteen years of age, was none the less one of those severe Parisian salons where the cult of tradition and the religion of etiquette are observed. Cold politeness, absolute fidelity to governmental principles, a profound contempt for theories and theorists, a deep hatred of ideologues—such were the elements of the inward and public life professed by M. de Villefort.

M. de Villefort was not merely a magistrate; he was almost a diplomat. His relations with the old court, of which he always spoke with dignity and deference, made him respected by the new, and he knew so many things that not only was he always treated with consideration, but he was even sometimes consulted. Perhaps it would not have been so if one could have got rid of M. de Villefort; but he inhabited, like those feudal lords rebellious toward their suzerain, an impregnable fortress. That fortress was his office of king's attorney, the advantages of which he marvelously exploited, and which he would have quitted only to have himself elected deputy and thus to replace neutrality by opposition.

In general, M. de Villefort paid or returned few visits. His wife visited for him: it was a thing accepted in the world, where what was in reality nothing but a calculation of pride, a quintessence of aristocracy, the application, in short, of this axiom: *Pretend to esteem yourself, and others will esteem you*—an axiom a hundred times more useful in our society than that of the Greeks: *Know thyself*, replaced in our days by the less difficult and more advantageous art of knowing others—was set down to the account of the grave and numerous occupations of the magistrate.

To his friends, M. de Villefort was a powerful protector; to his enemies, a silent but relentless adversary; to the indifferent, the statue of the law made man: haughty bearing, impassive countenance, dull and dimmed eye, or insolently piercing and searching—such was the man whose pedestal four revolutions, skillfully piled one upon another, had first constructed and then cemented.

M. de Villefort had the reputation of being the least curious and least commonplace man in France; he gave a ball every year and appeared at it only a quarter of an hour, that is to say forty-five minutes less than the king does at his. Never was he seen at the theaters, at concerts, or in any public place; sometimes, but rarely, he would play a game of whist, and then care was taken to choose players worthy of him: some ambassador, some archbishop, some prince, some president, or, finally, some dowager duchess.

Such was the man whose carriage had just stopped before Monte Cristo's door.

The valet de chambre announced M. de Villefort at the moment when the count, leaning over a large table, was following on a map a route from Saint Petersburg to China.

The king's attorney entered with the same grave and measured step with which he entered the tribunal; it was indeed the same man, or rather the continuation of the same man, whom we have formerly seen as deputy attorney at Marseilles. Nature, consistent with her principles, had changed nothing for him in the course she was to follow. From slender he had become thin; from pale he had become yellow; his sunken eyes were hollow, and his gold-rimmed spectacles, resting on the orbit, seemed part of the face; except for his white cravat, the rest of his costume was perfectly black, and that funereal color was relieved only by the slight edging of red ribbon that passed imperceptibly through his buttonhole and seemed a line of blood traced with a brush.

Master of himself as Monte Cristo was, he examined with visible curiosity, while returning his bow, the magistrate who, suspicious by habit and little credulous especially as to social marvels, was more disposed to see in the noble foreigner—for so Monte Cristo was already called—a swindler come to exploit a new field, or a malefactor under sentence of banishment, than a prince of the Holy See or a sultan from the *Thousand and One Nights*.

"Sir," said Villefort, with that shrill tone affected by magistrates in their oratorical periods, and which they cannot or will not lay aside in conversation, "sir, the signal service you rendered yesterday to my wife and my son makes it my duty to thank you. I come, then, to discharge that duty and to express to you my full gratitude."

And, in uttering these words, the severe eye of the magistrate had lost nothing of its habitual arrogance. These words which he had just spoken he had articulated with his voice of attorney general, with that inflexible stiffness of neck and shoulders which made, as we have repeated, his flatterers say that he was the living statue of the law.

"Sir," replied the count in his turn, with glacial coldness, "I am very happy to have been able to preserve a son to his mother, for it is said that the sentiment of maternity is the holiest of all, and this happiness that befalls me dispensed you, sir, from fulfilling a duty whose performance honors me, no doubt, since I know that M. de Villefort does not lavish the favor he does me, but which, precious as it is, is not worth to me the inward satisfaction."

Villefort, astonished at this sally which he had not expected, started like a soldier who feels the blow dealt him under the armor that covers him, and a crease of his disdainful lip indicated that from the first he did not hold the Count of Monte Cristo for a very civil gentleman.

He cast his eyes around him to catch at something the conversation that had fallen, and that seemed to have broken in falling.

He saw the map which Monte Cristo was examining at the moment he entered, and he resumed:

"You occupy yourself with geography, sir? It is a rich study, for you especially, who, it is said, have seen as many countries as there are engraved on that atlas."

"Yes, sir," answered the count, "I have wished to do upon the human species, taken in the mass, what you practice every day upon exceptions, that is to say, a physiological study. I have thought it would be easier for me to descend afterward from the whole to the part, than from the part to the whole. It is an algebraic axiom which requires that one proceed from the known to the unknown, and not from the unknown to the known.... But do sit down, sir, I beg of you."

And Monte Cristo with his hand pointed out to the king's attorney an armchair which the latter was obliged to take the trouble to draw forward himself, while he had only the trouble of letting himself fall back into the one on which he was kneeling when the king's attorney entered; in this way the count found himself half turned toward his visitor, with his back to the window and his elbow resting on the geographical map which for the moment formed the subject of the conversation—a conversation which, as at Morcerf's and at Danglars', was taking a turn quite analogous, if not to the situation, at least to the personages.

"Ah! you philosophize," resumed Villefort after a moment of silence, during which, like an athlete who encounters a sturdy adversary, he had stored up force. "Well, sir, upon my word! if, like you, I had nothing to do, I should seek a less melancholy occupation."

"True, sir," resumed Monte Cristo, "and man is an ugly caterpillar for him who studies him under the solar microscope. But you have just said, I believe, that I had nothing to do. Come now, do you by chance believe you have something to do, you, sir? or, to speak more plainly, do you believe that what you do is worth the trouble of being called something?"

Villefort's astonishment redoubled at this second blow so roughly dealt by this strange adversary; it was long since the magistrate had heard anyone say a paradox of such force to him, or rather, to speak more exactly, it was the first time he heard it.

The king's attorney set to work to reply.

"Sir," said he, "you are a foreigner, and, you say yourself, I believe, a portion of your life has passed in oriental countries; you do not know, then, how human justice, summary in those barbarous regions, has among us prudent and measured ways."

"Indeed I do, sir, indeed; it is the antique *pede claudo*. I know all that, for it is especially the justice of all countries that I have occupied myself with; it is the criminal procedure of all nations that I have compared with natural justice; and, I must say, sir, it is still that law of primitive peoples, that is to say the law of retaliation, that I have found most according to the heart of God."

"If that law were adopted, sir," said the king's attorney, "it would greatly simplify our codes, and then for once our magistrates would, as you were saying just now, have hardly anything to do."

"That may come," said Monte Cristo, "you know that human inventions proceed from the compound to the simple, and that the simple is always perfection."

"Meanwhile, sir," said the magistrate, "our codes exist with their contradictory articles, drawn from Gallic customs, Roman laws, Frankish usages; now, the knowledge of all those laws, you will agree, is not acquired without long labors, and it requires long study to acquire that knowledge, and great power of mind, that knowledge once acquired, not to forget it."

"I am of that opinion, sir; but all that you know, you, with respect to that French code, I know myself, not only with respect to the code of all nations: the English, Turkish, Japanese, Hindu laws, are as familiar to me as the French laws; and I had, then, reason to say that, relatively (you know that all is relative, sir), that relatively to all I have done, you have very little to do, and that relatively to all I have learned, you still have many things to learn."

"But to what end have you learned all that?" resumed Villefort, astonished.

Monte Cristo smiled.

"Well, sir," said he, "I see that, despite the reputation they have given you of a superior man, you view everything from the material and vulgar point of view of society, beginning with man and ending with man, that is to say from the most restricted and narrow point of view that human intelligence has been permitted to embrace."

"Explain yourself, sir," said Villefort, more and more astonished, "I do not understand you... very well."

"I say, sir, that, your eyes fixed on the social organization of nations, you see only the springs of the machine, and not the sublime workman who makes it act; I say that you recognize before you and around you only the holders of places whose patents have been signed by ministers or by a king, and that the men whom God has placed above the holders, the ministers, and the kings, giving them a mission to pursue instead of a place to fill, I say that those escape your short sight. It is the property of human weakness to have feeble and incomplete organs. Tobias took the angel who came to restore his sight for an ordinary young man. The nations took Attila, who was to annihilate them, for a conqueror like all conquerors, and it needed that all should reveal their celestial missions in order that they might be recognized; it needed that one should say: 'I am the angel of the Lord'; and the other: 'I am the hammer of God,' in order that the divine essence of both might be revealed."

"Then," said Villefort, more and more astonished and believing himself to be speaking to an illuminist or a madman, "you regard yourself as one of those extraordinary beings you have just cited?"

"Why not?" said Monte Cristo coldly.

"Pardon, sir," resumed Villefort, bewildered, "but you will excuse me if, in presenting myself at your house, I was ignorant that I was presenting myself at the house of a man whose knowledge and whose mind so far surpass the ordinary knowledge and the habitual mind of men. It is not the custom among us, unhappy corrupt ones of civilization, that gentlemen possessing like you an immense fortune, at least so it is said—observe that I do not interrogate, that I merely repeat—it is not the custom, I say, that these privileged ones of wealth lose their time in social speculations, in philosophical dreams, made at most to console those whom fate has disinherited of the goods of the earth."

"Eh! sir," resumed the count, "have you then arrived at the eminent situation you occupy without having admitted, and even without having met with, exceptions, and do you never exercise your glance, which would yet so need fineness and sureness, to divine at a single cast upon what man your glance has fallen? Should not a magistrate be, not the best applicator of the law, not the most cunning interpreter of the obscurities of chicanery, but a steel probe to try hearts, but a touchstone to assay the gold of which every soul is always made with more or less alloy?"

"Sir," said Villefort, "you confound me, upon my word, and I have never heard anyone speak as you do."

"It is that you have constantly remained shut up within the circle of general conditions, and that you have never dared to rise at a stroke of the wing into the superior spheres with which God has peopled the invisible or exceptional beings."

"And you admit, sir, that those spheres exist, and that the exceptional and invisible beings mingle with us?"

"Why not? do you see the air you breathe and without which you could not live?"

"Then we do not see those beings of whom you speak?"

"Indeed you do; you see them when God permits them to materialize, you touch them, you jostle them, you speak to them and they answer you."

"Ah!" said Villefort, smiling, "I confess I should like to be warned when one of those beings finds himself in contact with me."

"You have been served to your liking, sir; for you were warned just now, and now: again, I warn you."

"Thus yourself?"

"I am one of those exceptional beings, yes, sir, and I believe that, until this day, no man has found himself in a position similar to mine. The kingdoms of kings are limited, either by mountains, or by rivers, or by a change of manners, or by a mutation of language. My kingdom, mine, is as large as the world, for I am neither Italian, nor French, nor Hindu, nor American, nor Spaniard: I am a cosmopolitan. No country can say it saw me born. God alone knows what land will see me die. I adopt all customs, I speak all languages. You believe me French, you, do you not, for I speak French with the same facility and purity as you? well! Ali, my Nubian, believes me Arab; Bertuccio, my steward, believes me Roman; Haydée, my slave, believes me Greek. So you understand, being of no country, asking protection of no government, recognizing no man as my brother, not one of the scruples that arrest the powerful or of the obstacles that paralyze the weak paralyzes or arrests me. I have but two adversaries; I will not say two conquerors, for with persistence I subdue them: distance and time. The third, and the most terrible, is my condition of mortal man. That alone can arrest me on the road I walk, and before I have attained the goal toward which I tend: all the rest, I have calculated it. What men call the chances of fate, that is to say ruin, change, eventualities, I have foreseen them all; and if some can reach me, none can overthrow me. Unless I die, I shall always be what I am; that is why I tell you things you have never heard, even from the mouths of kings, for kings have need of you and other men fear you. Who is there who does not say to himself, in a society as ridiculously organized as ours: 'Perhaps one day I shall have to do with the king's attorney!'"

"But you yourself, sir, can you say that, for, from the moment you inhabit France, you are naturally subject to the French laws."

"I know it, sir," answered Monte Cristo; "but when I am to go into a country, I begin by studying, by means that are my own, all the men of whom I can have anything to hope or to fear, and I come to know them as well, and perhaps even better, than they know themselves. Whence this result: that the king's attorney, whoever he might be, with whom I should have to do, would certainly be more embarrassed than myself."

"Which means," resumed Villefort with hesitation, "that human nature being weak, every man according to you has committed... faults?"

"Faults... or crimes," answered Monte Cristo negligently.

"And that you alone, among the men whom you do not recognize as your brothers, you have said so yourself," resumed Villefort in a slightly altered voice, "and that you alone are perfect?"

"Not perfect," answered the count; "impenetrable, that is all. But let us break off there, sir, if the conversation displeases you; I am no more threatened by your justice than you are by my double sight."

"No, no, sir!" said Villefort quickly, who no doubt feared to seem to abandon the ground; "no! By your brilliant and almost sublime conversation, you have raised me above ordinary levels; we no longer chat, we discourse. Now, you know how much the theologians in the Sorbonne pulpit, or the philosophers in their disputes, sometimes say cruel truths to one another: let us suppose we are doing social theology and theological philosophy, I shall then say to you this, rough as it is: My brother, you sacrifice to pride; you are above others, but above you there is God."

"Above all, sir!" answered Monte Cristo with an accent so profound that Villefort involuntarily shuddered. "I have my pride for men, serpents always ready to rear against him who surpasses them with his brow without crushing them with his foot. But I lay down that pride before God, who drew me from nothingness to make me what I am."

"Then, Count, I admire you," said Villefort, who for the first time in this strange dialogue had just employed that aristocratic formula toward the foreigner whom he had hitherto called only sir. "Yes, I tell you, if you are really strong, really superior, really holy or impenetrable, which, you are right, comes to about the same thing, be proud, sir; it is the law of dominations. But you have, however, some ambition?"

"I have one, sir."

"What?"

"I too, as has happened to every man once in his life, was carried away by Satan onto the highest mountain of the earth; arrived there, he showed me the whole world, and, as he had formerly said to Christ, he said to me: 'Come, child of men, to worship me what wilt thou?' Then I reflected long, for a terrible ambition had long been devouring my heart; then I answered him: 'Listen, I have always heard speak of Providence, and yet I have never seen it, nor anything resembling it, which makes me believe it does not exist; I wish to be Providence, for what I know of most beautiful, greatest, and most sublime in the world is to reward and to punish.' But Satan lowered his head and sighed. 'You are mistaken,' said he, 'Providence exists; only you do not see it, because, daughter of God, it is invisible like its Father. You have seen nothing resembling it, because it proceeds by hidden springs and walks by obscure paths; all I can do for you is to make you one of the agents of that Providence.' The bargain was struck; I shall perhaps lose my soul thereby, but no matter," resumed Monte Cristo, "and the bargain were to be made again I would make it again."

Villefort looked at Monte Cristo with sublime astonishment.

"Count," said he, "have you relatives?"

"No, sir, I am alone in the world."

"So much the worse!"

"Why?" asked Monte Cristo.

"Because you might have seen a spectacle proper to break your pride. You fear nothing but death, you say?"

"I do not say I fear it, I say that alone can arrest me."

"And old age?"

"My mission will be fulfilled before I am old."

"And madness?"

"I came near becoming mad, and you know the axiom: *non bis in idem*; it is a criminal axiom, and which, consequently, is within your jurisdiction."

"Sir," resumed Villefort, "there is yet something else to fear than death, than old age, or than madness: there is, for example, apoplexy, that thunderbolt which strikes you without destroying you, and after which, however, all is finished. It is still you, and yet you are no longer yourself; you who touched, like Ariel, the angel, are no longer but an inert mass which, like Caliban, touches the brute; that is called, plainly, as I told you, in the human tongue, an apoplexy. Come, if you please, to continue this conversation at my house, Count, on a day when you shall have a mind to meet an adversary capable of understanding you and eager to refute you, and I will show you my father, M. Noirtier de Villefort, one of the most fiery Jacobins of the French Revolution, that is to say the most brilliant audacity put at the service of the most vigorous organization; a man who, like you, had perhaps not seen all the kingdoms of the earth, but had helped to overturn one of the most powerful; a man who, like you, pretended to be one of the envoys, not of God, but of the Supreme Being, not of Providence, but of Fate; well, sir, the rupture of a blood vessel in a lobe of the brain has broken all that, not in a day, not in an hour, but in a second. The eve, M. Noirtier, former Jacobin, former senator, former carbonaro, laughing at the guillotine, laughing at the cannon, laughing at the dagger, M. Noirtier, playing with revolutions. M. Noirtier, for whom France was but a vast chessboard from which pawns, rooks, knights, and queen were to disappear provided the king were checkmated, M. Noirtier, so redoubtable, was the next day *poor M. Noirtier*, an immovable old man, delivered up to the will of the weakest being in the house, that is to say his granddaughter Valentine; a mute and frozen corpse, finally, who lives without suffering only to give time to matter to arrive without shock at its entire decomposition."

"Alas! sir," said Monte Cristo, "this spectacle is strange neither to my eyes nor to my thought; I am something of a physician, and I have, like my brethren, sought more than once the soul in living matter or in dead matter; and, like Providence, it has remained invisible to my eyes, though present to my heart. A hundred authors, since Socrates, since Seneca, since Saint Augustine, since Gall, have made in prose or in verse the comparison you have just made; but nevertheless I understand that the sufferings of a father may work great changes in the mind of his son. I will go, sir, since you are kind enough to invite me, to contemplate, to the profit of my humility, that terrible spectacle which must greatly sadden your house."

"That would be doubtless, if God had not given me a large compensation. Facing the old man who drags himself down toward the tomb are two children who enter into life: Valentine, a daughter of my first marriage with Mlle de Saint-Méran, and Edward, that son whose life you have saved."

"And what do you conclude from that compensation, sir?" asked Monte Cristo.

"I conclude, sir," answered Villefort, "that my father, led astray by passions, has committed some of those faults which escape human justice, but which come within the justice of God, and that God, wishing to punish but one person, has struck him alone."

Monte Cristo, a smile on his lips, uttered from the depth of his oppressed heart a roar which would have put Villefort to flight, could Villefort have heard it.

"Adieu, sir," resumed the magistrate, who for some time past had been standing and was speaking on his feet; "I leave you, carrying away a remembrance of esteem which, I hope, may be agreeable to you when you shall know me better, for I am not a commonplace man, far from it. Besides, you have made for yourself in Mme de Villefort an eternal friend."

The count bowed and contented himself with accompanying Villefort only to the door of his study, who regained his carriage preceded by two lackeys who, at a sign from their master, hastened to open it for him.

Then, when the king's attorney had disappeared:

"Come," said Monte Cristo, drawing with effort a smile from his oppressed breast; "come, enough of that poison, and now that my heart is full of it, come seek the antidote."

And striking a blow upon the resonant bell:

"I am going up to madame's apartments," said he to Ali; "let the carriage be ready in half an hour!"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”