LXXIV. Le caveau de la famille Villefort.

LXXIV

The Villefort Family Vault.

Two days later, a considerable crowd had gathered, toward ten o'clock in the morning, at the door of M. de Villefort, and a long line of mourning coaches and private carriages had been seen advancing along the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Rue de la Pépinière.

Among these carriages, there was one of a singular shape, which appeared to have made a long journey. It was a kind of van painted black, and which had been among the first to arrive at the funereal rendezvous.

Then inquiries were made, and it was learned that, by a strange coincidence, this vehicle contained the body of M. de Saint-Méran, and that those who had come for one procession would follow two corpses.

Their number was great; M. the Marquis de Saint-Méran, one of the most zealous and faithful dignitaries of King Louis XVIII and King Charles X, had retained a great many friends who, joined to the persons whom social conventions brought into relation with Villefort, formed a considerable troop.

The authorities were immediately notified, and it was arranged that the two processions should take place at the same time. A second carriage, decked with the same mortuary pomp, was brought before M. de Villefort's door, and the coffin was transferred from the post-chaise to the funeral car.

The two bodies were to be interred in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where M. de Villefort had long since caused to be erected the vault destined for the burial of all his family.

In this vault had already been laid the body of poor Renée, whom her father and mother were coming to rejoin after ten years of separation.

Paris, always curious, always moved by funereal pomp, watched with a religious silence the splendid cortège which accompanied to their last dwelling two of the names of that old aristocracy, the most celebrated for traditional spirit, for security in business, and for obstinate devotion to principle.

In the same mourning coach, Beauchamp, Albert, and Château-Renaud were talking of this almost sudden death.

"I saw Mme de Saint-Méran still last year at Marseille," said Château-Renaud; "I was returning from Algeria; she was a woman destined to live a hundred years, thanks to her perfect health, her ever-present mind, and her always prodigious activity. How old was she?

"Sixty-six," answered Albert, "at least so Franz assured me. But it is not age that killed her; it is the grief she felt at the marquis's death; it seems that since that death, which had violently shaken her, she never fully recovered her reason.

"But after all, what did she die of?" asked Beauchamp.

"Of a cerebral congestion, it appears, or a sudden apoplexy. Isn't that the same thing?

"Pretty nearly.

"Apoplexy?" said Beauchamp; "that is hard to believe. Mme de Saint-Méran, whom I also saw once or twice in my life, was small, slight in form, and of a constitution much more nervous than sanguine; apoplexies produced by grief are rare on a body of a constitution like Mme de Saint-Méran's.

"In any case," said Albert, "whatever the disease or the doctor that killed her, here is M. de Villefort, or rather Mlle Valentine, or rather again our friend Franz in possession of a magnificent inheritance: eighty thousand livres of income, I believe.

"An inheritance that will be almost doubled at the death of that old Jacobin Noirtier."

"There is a tenacious grandfather," said Beauchamp. "Tenacem propositi virum. He has bet against death, I believe, that he would bury all his heirs. He is succeeding, faith. He is indeed the old conventionnel of '93, who said to Napoleon in 1814:

"'You are declining, because your empire is a young shoot wearied by its growth; take the Republic for guardian, return with a good constitution to the battlefields, and I promise you five hundred thousand soldiers, another Marengo and a second Austerlitz. Ideas do not die, sire, they sometimes slumber, but they awaken stronger than before they slept.'

"It seems," said Albert, "that for him men are like ideas; only one thing troubles me, which is to know how Franz d'Épinay will accommodate himself to a grandfather-in-law who cannot do without his wife; but where is he, Franz?"

"Why, he is in the first carriage with M. de Villefort, who already regards him as family."

In each of the coaches that followed the mourning, the conversation was much the same; they wondered at these two deaths so close and so rapid, but in none did they suspect the terrible secret that M. d'Avrigny had revealed to M. de Villefort in his nocturnal walk.

After about an hour's march, they arrived at the cemetery gate: the weather was calm but gloomy, and consequently in fair harmony with the funereal ceremony they had come to accomplish. Among the groups that directed themselves toward the family vault, Château-Renaud recognized Morrel, who had come alone and in a cabriolet; he walked alone, very pale and silent, on the little path bordered with yews.

"You here!" said Château-Renaud, passing his arm under that of the young captain; "do you know M. de Villefort then? How is it, in that case, that I have never seen you at his house?"

"It is not M. de Villefort that I know," answered Morrel; "it is Mme de Saint-Méran that I knew."

At this moment Albert joined them with Franz.

"The place is ill-chosen for an introduction," said Albert; "but never mind, we are not superstitious. M. Morrel, allow me to present M. Franz d'Épinay, an excellent traveling companion with whom I made the tour of Italy. My dear Franz, M. Maximilien Morrel, an excellent friend I acquired in your absence, and whose name you will hear recur in my conversation whenever I have to speak of heart, wit, and amiability."

Morrel hesitated for a moment. He asked himself if it were not a condemnable hypocrisy to address this almost friendly greeting to the man he was secretly combating; but his oath and the gravity of the circumstances came back to his memory: he strove to let nothing appear on his face, and saluted Franz with self-restraint.

"Mlle de Villefort is very sad, is she not?" said Debray to Franz.

"Oh, sir," answered Franz, "with an inexplicable sadness; this morning she was so altered that I scarcely recognized her."

These words, so simple in appearance, broke Morrel's heart. This man had then seen Valentine, he had then spoken to her?

It was then that the young and impetuous officer needed all his strength to resist the desire to violate his oath.

He took Château-Renaud's arm and drew him rapidly toward the vault, before which the funeral employees had just deposited the two coffins.

"Magnificent dwelling," said Beauchamp, casting his eyes on the mausoleum; "summer palace, winter palace. You will dwell there in your turn, my dear d'Épinay, for you are soon of the family. I, in my quality of philosopher, want a little country house, a cottage there under the trees, and not so many cut stones on my poor body. In dying, I shall say to those around me what Voltaire wrote to Piron: Eo rus, and all will be finished.... Come, zounds! Franz, courage, your wife inherits."

"Truly, Beauchamp," said Franz, "you are insupportable. Political affairs have given you the habit of laughing at everything, and men who conduct affairs have the habit of believing in nothing. But after all, Beauchamp, when you have the honor of finding yourself with ordinary men, and the happiness of quitting politics for an instant, try then to recover your heart, which you leave at the cane desk of the Chamber of Deputies or the Chamber of Peers."

"Eh, my God!" said Beauchamp, "what is life? a halt in the antechamber of death."

"I take a dislike to Beauchamp," said Albert. And he withdrew four paces backward with Franz, leaving Beauchamp to continue his philosophical dissertations with Debray.

The vault of the Villefort family formed a square of white stones about twenty feet in height; an interior partition divided into two compartments the Saint-Méran family and the Villefort family, and each compartment had its entrance door.

One did not see, as in other tombs, those ignoble superimposed drawers in which an economical arrangement encloses the dead with an inscription resembling a label; all that was first perceived through the bronze door was a severe and somber antechamber, separated by a wall from the true tomb.

It was in the middle of this wall that opened the two doors of which we spoke just now, and which communicated with the Villefort and Saint-Méran sepulchers.

There, griefs could exhale in freedom without the frolicsome strollers, who make a visit to Père-Lachaise a pleasure party or an assignation of love, coming to trouble by their songs, their cries, or their running the mute contemplation or the tear-bathed prayer of the dweller in the vault.

The two coffins entered the vault on the right; it was that of the Saint-Méran family; they were placed on the trestles prepared, and which awaited in advance their mortuary deposit; Villefort, Franz, and a few near relatives alone penetrated into the sanctuary.

As the religious ceremonies had been accomplished at the door, and there was no discourse to pronounce, the attendants separated immediately; Château-Renaud, Albert, and Morrel withdrew on their side and Debray and Beauchamp on theirs.

Franz remained, with M. de Villefort, at the cemetery gate; Morrel stopped under the first pretext that offered; he saw Franz and M. de Villefort come out in a mourning carriage, and he concluded an ill omen from this tête-à-tête. He returned then to Paris, and, although he himself was in the same carriage as Château-Renaud and Albert, he did not hear a word of what the two young men said.

Indeed, at the moment when Franz was about to leave M. de Villefort:

"Baron," said the latter, "when shall I see you again?"

"When you wish, sir," had answered Franz.

"As soon as possible."

"I am at your orders, sir; would it please you that we return together?"

"If that causes you no inconvenience."

"None."

It was thus that the future father-in-law and the future son-in-law mounted into the same carriage, and that Morrel, seeing them pass, conceived with reason grave anxieties.

Villefort and Franz returned to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

The king's attorney, without entering anyone's room, without speaking either to his wife or his daughter, had the young man pass into his study, and, showing him a chair:

"M. d'Épinay," said he to him, "I think I recall to you, and the moment is perhaps not so ill-chosen as one might believe at first sight, for obedience to the dead is the first offering that must be laid on the coffin; I ought then to recall to you the vow expressed the day before yesterday by Mme de Saint-Méran on her deathbed, that Valentine's marriage suffer no delay. You know that the affairs of the deceased are perfectly in order; that her will assures to Valentine the whole fortune of the Saint-Mérans; the notary showed me yesterday the deeds which permit the definitive drawing up of the marriage contract. You may see the notary and have these deeds communicated to you on my behalf. The notary is M. Deschamps, Place Beauveau, Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

"Sir," answered d'Épinay, "this is perhaps not the moment for Mlle Valentine, plunged as she is in grief, to think of a husband; truly, I should fear....

"Valentine," interrupted M. de Villefort, "will have no keener desire than that of fulfilling her grandmother's last intentions; thus the obstacles will not come from that side, I guarantee it to you."

"In that case, sir," answered Franz, "since they will not come from mine either, do as you think fit; my word is pledged, and I shall acquit it, not only with pleasure, but with happiness."

"Then," said Villefort, "nothing stops you further; the contract was to have been signed three days ago, we shall find it all prepared: it may be signed this very day."

"But the mourning?" said Franz hesitatingly.

"Be tranquil, sir," resumed Villefort; "it is not in my house that conventions are neglected. Mlle de Villefort may retire during the required three months to her estate of Saint-Méran; I say her estate, for this property is hers. There, in eight days, if you will, quietly, without noise, without pomp, the civil marriage shall be concluded. It was a desire of Mme de Saint-Méran that her granddaughter be married in that estate. The marriage concluded, sir, you may return to Paris, while your wife passes the time of her mourning with her stepmother."

"As you please, sir," said Franz.

"Then," resumed M. de Villefort, "take the trouble to wait half an hour, Valentine will come down to the salon. I shall send for M. Deschamps, we shall read and sign the contract then and there, and, this very evening, Mme de Villefort will take Valentine to her estate, where in eight days we shall come to join them."

"Sir," said Franz, "I have but one request to make of you."

"Which?"

"I desire that Albert de Morcerf and Raoul de Château-Renaud be present at this signing; you know they are my witnesses."

"Half an hour suffices to warn them; will you go fetch them yourself? will you send to fetch them?"

"I prefer to go, sir."

"I shall await you then in half an hour, baron, and in half an hour Valentine will be ready."

Franz saluted M. de Villefort and went out.

Scarcely had the street door closed behind the young man, than Villefort sent to warn Valentine that she was to come down to the salon in half an hour, because the notary and M. d'Épinay's witnesses were expected.

This unexpected news produced a great sensation in the house. Mme de Villefort would not believe it, and Valentine was crushed by it as by a thunderbolt.

She looked all around her as if to see to whom she could ask for help.

She wished to go down to her grandfather, but she met M. de Villefort on the stairs, who took her by the arm and led her into the salon.

In the antechamber Valentine met Barrois, and cast at the old servant a desperate glance.

An instant after Valentine, Mme de Villefort entered the salon with little Édouard. It was visible that the young woman had had her share of the family griefs; she was pale and seemed horribly fatigued.

She sat down, took Édouard on her knees, and from time to time pressed, with almost convulsive movements, upon her breast, this child on whom seemed concentrated her whole life.

Soon they heard the noise of two carriages entering the court.

One was the notary's, the other Franz's and his friends'.

In an instant, all were assembled in the salon.

Valentine was so pale, that one saw the blue veins of her temples trace themselves around her eyes and run along her cheeks.

Franz could not defend himself from a rather lively emotion.

Château-Renaud and Albert looked at each other with astonishment: the ceremony which had just finished did not seem to them sadder than that which was about to begin.

Mme de Villefort had placed herself in the shadow, behind a velvet curtain, and, as she was constantly bent over her son, it was difficult to read on her face what passed in her heart.

M. de Villefort was, as always, impassible. The notary, after having, with the method ordinary to men of law, arranged the papers on the table, taken his place in his armchair, and raised his spectacles, turned toward Franz:

"Is it you who are M. Franz de Quesnel, Baron d'Épinay?" he asked, though he knew it perfectly well.

"Yes, sir," answered Franz.

The notary bowed.

"I ought then to warn you, sir," said he, "and that on behalf of M. de Villefort, that your projected marriage with Mlle de Villefort has changed the dispositions of M. Noirtier toward his granddaughter, and that he entirely alienates the fortune he was to transmit to her. Let us hasten to add," continued the notary, "that the testator having the right to alienate but a part of his fortune, and having alienated the whole, the will shall not resist attack but be declared null and void."

"Yes," said Villefort; "only I warn M. d'Épinay in advance, that, during my lifetime, never shall my father's will be attacked, my position forbidding me even the shadow of a scandal."

"Sir," said Franz, "I am sorry that such a question has been raised before Mlle Valentine. I have never inquired as to the amount of her fortune, which, however reduced it may be, will still be more considerable than mine. What my family has sought in the alliance of M. de Villefort is consideration; what I seek is happiness."

Valentine made an imperceptible sign of thanks, while two silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

"Besides, sir," said Villefort addressing his future son-in-law, "apart from this loss of a portion of your expectations, this unexpected will has nothing that should personally wound you; it is explained by the weakness of mind of M. Noirtier. What displeases my father is not that Mlle de Villefort marries you, it is that Valentine marries: a union with anyone else would have inspired him with the same sorrow. Old age is selfish, sir, and Mlle de Villefort made for M. Noirtier a faithful companion that the Baroness d'Épinay can no longer make him. The unhappy state in which my father finds himself causes him to be rarely spoken to of serious affairs, which the weakness of his mind would not permit him to follow, and I am perfectly convinced that at this hour, while retaining the memory that his granddaughter is marrying, M. Noirtier has forgotten even the name of him who is about to become his grandson."

Scarcely had M. de Villefort finished these words, to which Franz replied by a bow, than the salon door opened and Barrois appeared.

"Gentlemen," said he in a voice strangely firm for a servant who speaks to his masters in so solemn a circumstance, "gentlemen, M. Noirtier de Villefort desires to speak forthwith to M. Franz de Quesnel, Baron d'Épinay."

He too, like the notary, and so that there could be error of no one, gave all his titles to the fiancé.

Villefort started, Mme de Villefort let her son slip from her knees, Valentine rose pale and mute as a statue.

Albert and Château-Renaud exchanged a second glance more astonished still than the first.

The notary looked at Villefort.

"It is impossible," said the king's attorney; "besides M. d'Épinay cannot leave the salon at this moment."

"It is precisely at this moment," resumed Barrois with the same firmness, "that M. Noirtier, my master, desires to speak of important affairs to M. Franz d'Épinay."

"He speaks then, now, good papa Noirtier?" asked Édouard with his habitual impertinence.

But this sally did not even make Mme de Villefort smile, so preoccupied were minds, so solemn did the situation appear.

"Tell M. Noirtier," resumed Villefort, "that what he asks cannot be."

"Then M. Noirtier warns these gentlemen," resumed Barrois, "that he is having himself brought to the salon."

Astonishment was at its height.

A kind of smile traced itself on the face of Mme de Villefort. Valentine, as despite herself, raised her eyes to the ceiling to thank Heaven.

"Valentine," said M. de Villefort, "go and see, if you please, what this new fancy of your grandfather is."

Valentine made quickly a few steps to go out, but M. de Villefort thought better of it.

"Wait," said he, "I will accompany you."

"Pardon, sir," said Franz in his turn; "it seems to me that, since it is I whom M. Noirtier has sent for, it is especially for me to yield to his wishes; besides, I shall be happy to present him my respects, having not yet had the occasion to solicit that honor."

"Oh, my God!" said Villefort with visible uneasiness, "do not trouble yourself."

"Excuse me, sir," said Franz in the tone of a man who has taken his resolution. "I desire not to miss this occasion of proving to M. Noirtier how wrong he would be to conceive against me repugnances that I am determined to vanquish, whatever they may be, by my profound devotion."

And, without allowing himself to be detained longer by Villefort, Franz rose in his turn and followed Valentine, who was already descending the stairs with the joy of a shipwrecked man who lays his hand on a rock.

M. de Villefort followed them both.

Château-Renaud and Morcerf exchanged a third glance yet more astonished than the two first.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”