LXVII. Le cabinet du procureur du roi.

LXVII

The King's Attorney's Study.

Let us leave the banker returning at the full gallop of his horses, and follow Madame Danglars on her morning excursion.

We have said that at half-past twelve Madame Danglars had ordered her horses and gone out in her carriage.

She directed her course toward the Faubourg Saint-Germain, took the Rue Mazarine, and had herself set down at the Passage du Pont-Neuf.

She got down and crossed the passage. She was very simply dressed, as befits a woman of taste going out in the morning.

In the Rue Guénégaud, she got into a hackney-coach, indicating as the goal of her drive the Rue du Harlay.

Scarcely was she in the carriage than she drew from her pocket a very thick black veil, which she fastened over her straw hat; then she put her hat back on her head, and saw with pleasure, looking into a small pocket mirror, that one could see of her only her white skin and the sparkling pupil of her eye.

The hackney-coach took the Pont-Neuf, and entered, by the Place Dauphine, into the courtyard of the Harlay; it was paid as the door was opened, and Madame Danglars, darting toward the staircase, which she lightly mounted, soon arrived at the Salle des Pas-Perdus.

In the morning, there is much business and still more busy people at the Palais; busy people do not look much at women; Madame Danglars therefore crossed the Salle des Pas-Perdus without being more noticed than ten other women who were watching for their lawyer.

There was a crowd in the antechamber of M. de Villefort; but Madame Danglars did not even need to pronounce her name, for as soon as she appeared, an usher rose, came to her, asked if she were not the person to whom the King's Attorney had given an appointment, and, on her affirmative reply, conducted her, by a private corridor, to M. de Villefort's study.

The magistrate was writing, seated in his armchair, his back turned to the door: he heard the door open, the usher pronounce these words: "Enter, madam!" and the door close again, without making a single movement; but scarcely had he felt the usher's steps die away as he withdrew, than he turned sharply, went to bolt the doors, draw the curtains, and inspect every corner of the study.

Then, when he had acquired the certainty that he could be neither seen nor heard, and was consequently at ease:

"Thank you, madam," said he, "thank you for your punctuality."

And he offered her a seat, which Madame Danglars accepted, for her heart was beating so violently that she felt herself near suffocation.

"Here," said the King's Attorney, seating himself in his turn and causing his armchair to describe a semicircle, so as to find himself facing Madame Danglars, "here it is a long time, madam, since it has fallen to my lot to have the happiness of conversing alone with you; and, to my great regret, we meet again to open a very painful conversation."

"Yet, sir, you see that I have come at your first summons, although certainly this conversation is even more painful for me than for you."

Villefort smiled bitterly.

"It is true, then," said he, answering his own thought rather than the words of Madame Danglars, "it is true, then, that all our actions leave their traces, some dark, others luminous, in our past! It is true that all our steps in this life resemble the track of the reptile on the sand and make a furrow! Alas! for many, that furrow is one of tears!

"Sir," said Madame Danglars, "you understand my emotion, do you not? Spare me, then, I beg you. This room where so many guilty ones have passed trembling and ashamed, this armchair where I sit in my turn ashamed and trembling!... Oh! look, I need all my reason not to see in myself a very guilty woman and in you a threatening judge."

Villefort shook his head and sighed.

"And I," resumed he, "and I, I tell myself that my place is not in the judge's seat, but rather on the accused's bench."

"You?" said Madame Danglars, astonished.

"Yes, I."

"I think that on your part, sir, your puritanism exaggerates the situation," said Madame Danglars, whose beautiful eye lit up with a fleeting gleam. "These furrows of which you spoke but now have been traced by all ardent youths. At the bottom of passions, beyond pleasure, there is always a little remorse; that is why the Gospel, that eternal resource of the unhappy, has given us, we poor women, for support, the admirable parable of the sinful woman and the adulteress. So, I confess to you, in looking back to the deliriums of my youth, I sometimes think that God will forgive me them, for if not the excuse, at least the compensation has been found in my sufferings; but you, what have you to fear from all that, you men whom everyone excuses and whom scandal ennobles?"

"Madam," replied Villefort, "you know me; I am not a hypocrite, or at least I do not practice hypocrisy without reason. If my brow is severe it is that many misfortunes have darkened it; if my heart has petrified, it is in order to be able to bear the shocks it has received. I was not thus in my youth, I was not thus that evening of the betrothal where we were all seated around a table in the Rue du Cours at Marseille. But since then, all has greatly changed in me and around me; my life has worn itself out in pursuing difficult things and in breaking, amid the difficulties, those who, voluntarily or involuntarily, by their free will or by chance, found themselves placed on my path to raise these things before me. It is rare that what one ardently desires is not ardently defended by those from whom one wishes to obtain it or whom one tries to wrest it from. Thus, most of men's evil deeds have come to meet them, disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, the evil deed committed in a moment of exaltation, of fear and of delirium, one sees that one could have passed by it while avoiding it. The means that would have been good to employ, which one did not see, blind as one was, presents itself to your eyes easy and simple; you say to yourself: How did I not do that instead of doing this? You, ladies, on the contrary, are very rarely tormented by remorse, for very rarely does the decision come from you; your misfortunes are almost always imposed upon you, your faults are almost always the crime of others."

"At any rate, sir, admit it," replied Madame Danglars, "if I have committed a fault, were that fault personal, I received yesterday its severe punishment."

"Poor woman!" said Villefort, pressing her hand, "too severe for your strength, for twice you have nearly succumbed to it, and yet...."

"Well?"

"Well, I must tell you... gather all your courage, madam, for you are not yet at the end."

"My God!" cried Madame Danglars, frightened, "what is there then still?"

"You see only the past, madam, and certainly it is dark. Well, picture to yourself a future still darker, a future... frightful certainly... bloody perhaps!..."

The baroness knew Villefort's calm; she was so terrified by his agitation that she opened her mouth to cry out, but the cry died in her throat.

"How is that terrible past resurrected?" cried Villefort; "how, from the bottom of the tomb and from the bottom of our hearts where it slept, has it come forth like a phantom to make our cheeks pale and our foreheads red?"

"Alas!" said Hermine, "doubtless chance!"

"Chance!" resumed Villefort; "no, no, madam, there is no chance!"

"But yes; is it not chance, fatal it is true but chance which has done all this? is it not by chance that the Count of Monte Cristo bought that house? is it not by chance that he had the earth dug up? is it not by chance, finally, that that unhappy child was disinterred under the trees? Poor innocent creature issued from me, to whom I could never give a kiss, but to whom I have given many tears. Ah! all my heart flew to meet the count when he spoke of that dear remains found beneath flowers."

"Well, no, madam; and that is what I had terrible to tell you," replied Villefort in a hollow voice: "no, there was no remains found beneath the flowers; no, there was no child disinterred; no, you must not weep; no, you must not moan: you must tremble!"

"What do you mean?" cried Madame Danglars, all a-tremble.

"I mean that M. Monte Cristo, in digging at the foot of those trees, could find neither child's skeleton nor chest's ironwork, because under those trees there was neither one nor the other."

"Neither one nor the other!" repeated Madame Danglars, fixing on the King's Attorney eyes whose pupil, frightfully dilated, indicated terror; "neither one nor the other!" she repeated again like a person who tries to fix by the sound of words and by the noise of the voice her ideas ready to escape her.

"No!" said Villefort, letting his forehead fall into his hands, "a hundred times no!..."

"But it was not there, then, that you had deposited the poor child, sir? Why deceive me? to what end, come, tell me?"

"It was there; but listen to me, listen to me, madam, and you will pity me, who have borne for twenty years, without casting the least part on you, the burden of sorrows that I am going to tell you."

"My God! you frighten me! but never mind, speak, I listen to you."

"You know how that sorrowful night was accomplished where you were dying on your bed, in that red damask chamber, while I, almost as breathless as you, awaited your delivery. The child came, was handed to me without motion, without breath, without voice: we believed it dead."

Madame Danglars made a rapid movement, as if she would have sprung from her chair.

But Villefort stopped her by joining his hands as if to implore her attention.

"We believed it dead," he repeated; "I put it in a chest which was to replace the coffin, I went down into the garden, I dug a grave and buried it in haste. I had scarce finished covering it with earth, than the Corsican's arm extended toward me. I saw as a shadow rise, as a lightning flash gleam. I felt a pain, I wished to cry out, a glacial shiver ran through my whole body and clutched at my throat.... I fell dying, and believed myself killed. I shall never forget your sublime courage, when, returned to myself, I dragged myself dying to the foot of the stairs, where, yourself dying, you came to meet me. Silence had to be kept on the terrible catastrophe; you had the courage to regain your house, supported by your nurse; a duel was the pretext for my wound. Contrary to all expectation, the secret was kept from both of us, I was taken to Versailles; for three months, I struggled against death; finally as I seemed to cling to life, I was ordered the sun and air of the South. Four men carried me from Paris to Châlons, making six leagues a day. Mme de Villefort followed the litter in her carriage. At Châlons, they put me on the Saône, then I passed on the Rhône, and, by the sole speed of the current, I descended to Arles, then from Arles, I resumed my litter and continued my road to Marseille. My convalescence lasted six months; I heard no more spoken of you, I dared not inquire what had become of you. When I returned to Paris, I learned that, widow of M. de Nargonne, you had married M. Danglars.

"What had I thought of since consciousness returned to me? Always the same thing, always that child's corpse which, each night, in my dreams, flew from the bosom of the earth, and hovered above the grave menacing me with look and gesture. So, scarcely back in Paris, I inquired; the house had not been inhabited since we left it, but it had just been let for nine years. I went to the tenant, I pretended to have a great desire not to see pass into strange hands this house which belonged to the father and mother of my wife; I offered an indemnity that the lease might be broken; six thousand francs were asked of me: I would have given ten thousand, I would have given twenty thousand. I had them on me, I had, then and there, the cancellation signed; then, when I held this so-desired assignment, I set off at a gallop for Auteuil. No one, since I had left it, had entered the house.

"It was five in the afternoon, I went up into the red chamber and awaited night.

"There, all that I had said to myself for a year in my continual agony presented itself again, far more threatening than ever, to my thought.

"That Corsican who had declared the vendetta against me, who had followed me from Nîmes to Paris; that Corsican, who was hidden in the garden, who had struck me, had seen me dig the grave, had seen me bury the child; he might come to know you; perhaps he knew you already.... Would he not one day make you pay for the secret of that terrible affair?... Would it not be for him a sweet vengeance, when he learned that I was not dead from his stab? It was urgent then that, before all things, and at all hazards, I should make disappear the traces of that past, that I should destroy all material vestige of it; there would always be too much reality in my memory.

"It was for that I had annulled the lease, it was for that I had come, it was for that I awaited.

"Night arrived, I let it thicken well; I was without light in that chamber, where breaths of wind made the portières tremble behind which I always believed I saw some spy in ambush; from time to time I started, it seemed to me behind me, in that bed, to hear your plaints, and I dared not turn round. My heart beat in the silence, and I felt it beat so violently that I believed my wound about to reopen; at last, I heard die away, one after the other, all those diverse noises of the countryside. I understood that I had nothing more to fear, that I could be neither seen nor heard, and I decided to go down.

"Listen, Hermine, I believe myself as brave as another man, but when I drew from my breast that little key of the staircase, which we both cherished, and which you had wished to have attached to a gold ring, when I opened the door, when, through the windows, I saw a pale moon cast, upon the spiral steps, a long band of white light like a spectre, I held myself to the wall and was near crying out; it seemed to me I was about to go mad.

"At last, I managed to master myself. I descended the staircase step by step; the only thing I had not been able to conquer was a strange trembling in the knees. I clung to the rail; had I let go an instant, I should have precipitated myself.

"I arrived at the door below; outside that door, a spade was leaning against the wall. I had provided myself with a dark lantern; in the middle of the lawn, I stopped to light it, then I continued my way.

"November was ending, all the garden's verdure had disappeared, the trees were but skeletons with long fleshless arms, and the dead leaves cried with the sand under my steps.

"Dread clutched so strongly at my heart, that in approaching the thicket I drew a pistol from my pocket and cocked it. I still believed I saw appear through the branches the face of the Corsican.

"I lit the thicket with my dark lantern; it was empty. I cast my eyes all around me; I was quite alone; no noise troubled the silence of the night, save the song of an owl which threw its shrill and lugubrious cry like a call to the phantoms of the night.

"I attached my lantern to a forked branch which I had already noticed a year before, at the very spot where I stopped to dig the grave.

"The grass had, during the summer, grown very thick at that place, and, autumn come, no one had been there to mow it. However, a less furnished spot attracted my attention; it was evident that it was there I had turned up the earth. I set to work.

"I had then arrived at that hour which I had awaited for more than a year!

"So, as I hoped, as I worked, as I sounded each tuft of grass, believing to feel resistance at the end of my spade; nothing! and yet I made a hole twice as large as the first had been. I thought myself mistaken, deceived as to the place; I oriented myself, I looked at the trees, I sought to recognize the details which had struck me. A cold and sharp north wind whistled through the stripped branches, and yet the sweat streamed on my forehead. I recalled that I had received the stab at the moment when I was trampling the earth to recover the grave; in trampling that earth, I was leaning on a false ebony; behind me was an artificial rock destined to serve as a bench for walkers; for in falling, my hand, which had just left the ebony, had felt the coolness of that stone. To my right was the false ebony, behind me was the rock, I fell placing myself likewise, I rose and set to digging and widening the hole: nothing! still nothing! the little chest was not there.

"The little chest was not there?" murmured Madame Danglars, suffocated by fright.

"Do not think that I confined myself to that attempt," continued Villefort; "no. I searched all the thicket; I thought that the assassin, having disinterred the chest and believing it a treasure, had wished to appropriate it, had carried it off; then perceiving his error, had in his turn made a hole and deposited it there; nothing. Then there came to me this idea, that he had taken no such precautions, and had purely and simply thrown it in some corner. In that last hypothesis, it was needful, for my researches, to await daylight. I went up into the chamber and awaited.

"Oh! my God!"

"Day come, I went down again. My first visit was to the thicket; I hoped to find there traces which had escaped me in the darkness. I had turned up the earth over a surface of more than twenty square feet, and to a depth of more than two feet. A day would scarce have sufficed a hired man for what I had done, myself, in an hour. Nothing, I saw absolutely nothing.

"Then I set to searching for the chest, according to the supposition I had formed that it had been thrown in some corner. It must have been on the path leading to the little exit door; but this new investigation was as useless as the first, and, heart wrung, I returned to the thicket, which itself left me no further hope.

"Oh!" cried Madame Danglars, "there was cause to go mad."

"I hoped it for an instant," said Villefort, "but I had not that happiness; however, recalling my strength and consequently my ideas: 'Why would that man have carried off that corpse?' I asked myself.

"But you have said it," replied Madame Danglars, "to have a proof."

"Eh! no, madam, it could no longer be that; one does not keep a corpse for a year, one shows it to a magistrate, and makes one's deposition. Now, none of that had happened."

"Well, then?..." asked Hermine, all palpitating.

"Then, there is something more terrible, more fatal, more frightful for us: it is that the child was perhaps alive, and that the assassin saved it."

Madame Danglars uttered a terrible cry, and seizing Villefort's hands:

"My child was alive!" said she; "you buried my child alive, sir! You were not sure my child was dead, and you buried it! ah!..."

Madame Danglars had reared up, and she stood before the King's Attorney, whose wrists she clasped between her delicate hands, upright and almost menacing.

"What do I know? I tell you that as I would tell you anything else," replied Villefort with a fixedness of gaze which indicated that this man so powerful was near reaching the limits of despair and madness.

"Ah! my child, my poor child!" cried the baroness, falling back on her seat and stifling her sobs in her handkerchief.

Villefort returned to himself, and understood that to turn aside the maternal storm gathering over his head, he must make pass into Madame Danglars the terror he himself felt.

"You understand then that if it is thus," said he, rising in his turn and approaching the baroness to speak to her in a lower voice, "we are lost: that child lives, and someone knows it lives, someone has our secret; and since Monte Cristo speaks before us of a child disinterred where that child no longer was, that secret is his."

"God, just God, avenging God!" murmured Madame Danglars.

Villefort replied only with a kind of roar.

"But that child, that child, sir?" resumed the obstinate mother.

"Oh! how I have sought it!" resumed Villefort, writhing his arms; "how often I have called it in my long sleepless nights! how often I have desired a royal riches to buy a million secrets from a million men, and to find my secret among theirs! At last, one day that for the hundredth time I took up the spade, I asked myself for the hundredth time what the Corsican could have done with the child: a child embarrasses a fugitive; perhaps, perceiving it still lived, he had thrown it into the river.

"Oh! impossible!" cried Madame Danglars; "one assassinates a man from vengeance, one does not drown a child in cold blood!"

"Perhaps," continued Villefort, "he had put it at the Foundling Hospital."

"Oh! yes, yes!" cried the baroness, "my child is there! sir!"

"I ran to the hospice, and I learned that that very night, the night of the 20th of September, a child had been deposited in the turning; it was wrapped in half a fine linen towel, torn with intention. That half towel bore half a baron's coronet and the letter H."

"That is it, that is it!" cried Madame Danglars, "all my linen was marked thus; M. de Nargonne was a baron, and I am called Hermine. Thank you, my God! my child was not dead!"

"No, it was not dead!"

"And you tell me this! you tell me this without fearing to make me die of joy, sir! Where is he? where is my child?"

Villefort shrugged his shoulders.

"Do I know?" said he; "and do you think that if I knew it I would make you pass through all these gradations, as a playwright or a novelist would? No, alas! no! I do not know. A woman, some six months ago, had come to claim the child with the other half of the towel. That woman had furnished all the guarantees the law requires, and it had been given to her."

"But you should have informed yourself of that woman, you should have discovered her."

"And of what do you think I occupied myself, madam? I feigned a criminal investigation, and all the fine sleuth-hounds, the adroit agents that the police has, I set them on her track. Her traces were found as far as Châlons; at Châlons, they were lost."

"Lost?"

"Yes, lost; lost forever."

Madame Danglars had listened to this account with a sigh, a tear, a cry for each circumstance.

"And that is all," said she; "and you confined yourself to that?"

"Oh! no," said Villefort, "I have never ceased to seek, to inquire, to inform myself. However, for two or three years, I have given some relaxation. But today, I am going to begin again with more perseverance and fierceness than ever; and I shall succeed, you see; for it is no longer conscience that drives me, it is fear."

"But," resumed Madame Danglars, "the Count of Monte Cristo knows nothing; otherwise, it seems to me, he would not seek us out as he does."

"Oh! the wickedness of men is deep," said Villefort, "since it is deeper than the goodness of God. Did you notice the eyes of that man, while he spoke to us?"

"No."

"But have you examined him profoundly at times?"

"Doubtless. He is bizarre, but that is all. One thing only that struck me, is that of all that exquisite meal he gave us, he touched nothing, is that of no dish would he take his part."

"Yes, yes!" said Villefort, "I noticed that too. If I had known what I know now, I too would have touched nothing; I should have believed he wished to poison us."

"And you would have been mistaken, you see."

"Yes, doubtless; but believe me, that man has other projects. That is why I wished to see you, that is why I asked to speak with you, that is why I wished to warn you against everyone, but against him above all. Tell me," continued Villefort, fixing his eyes even more deeply than he had done hitherto upon the baroness, "you have spoken of our liaison to no one?"

"Never, to no one."

"You understand me," resumed Villefort affectionately; "when I say to no one, forgive me this insistence, to no one in the world, is it not?"

"Oh! yes, yes, I understand very well," said the baroness, blushing; "never! I swear it to you."

"You have not the habit of writing in the evening what passed in the morning? you keep no journal?"

"No! Alas! my life passes carried away by frivolity; I myself forget it."

"You do not dream aloud, that you know of?"

"I have a child's sleep; do you not recall it?"

The purple mounted to the baroness's face, and pallor invaded that of Villefort.

"It is true," said he so low he was scarce heard.

"Well?" asked the baroness.

"Well, I understand what remains for me to do," resumed Villefort. "Within a week from now, I shall know what M. de Monte Cristo is, whence he comes, where he goes, and why he speaks before us of children disinterred in his garden."

Villefort pronounced these words with an accent which would have made the count shudder had he been able to hear them.

Then he pressed the hand which the baroness was reluctant to give him, and conducted her with respect to the door.

Madame Danglars took another hackney-coach, which brought her back to the passage, on the other side of which she found her carriage and her coachman, who, while waiting for her, slept peacefully on his seat.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”