The count, it will be remembered, was a temperate guest. Albert remarked upon this, expressing the fear that from its very outset Parisian life might displease the traveler by its most material, yet most necessary, aspect.
“My dear count,” he said, “you see me beset by a fear: that the cooking of the rue du Helder may not please you as much as that of the Plaza de España. I ought to have asked your tastes and had some dishes prepared to your liking.
“Were you to know me better, sir,” the count replied with a smile, “you would not trouble yourself with a care almost humiliating for a traveler such as myself, who has successively lived on macaroni in Naples, polenta in Milan, olla podrida in Valencia, pilaf in Constantinople, karrick in India, and swallows’ nests in China. There is no cuisine for a cosmopolitan like me. I eat everything and everywhere, only I eat little; and today, when you reproach me for my sobriety, I am in one of my appetitive moods, for since yesterday morning I have eaten nothing.”
“What! since yesterday morning!” cried the guests. “You have not eaten for twenty-four hours?”
“No,” answered Monte Cristo; “I had been obliged to leave my route and gather information in the environs of Nîmes, so that I was a little behind, and I did not wish to stop.”
“And you ate in your carriage?” asked Morcerf.
“No, I slept, as happens to me when I am bored without the courage to amuse myself, or when I am hungry without the desire to eat.”
“But you command sleep, sir?” asked Morrel.
“Almost.”
“You have a recipe for that?”
“Infallible.”
“That would be excellent for us Africans, who do not always have something to eat, and rarely something to drink,” said Morrel.
“Yes,” said Monte Cristo; “unfortunately my recipe, excellent for a man like me who leads a wholly exceptional life, would be most dangerous applied to an army, which would not wake when one had need of it.”
“And may one know what this recipe is?” asked Debray.
“Oh, my God, yes,” said Monte Cristo; “I make no secret of it: it is a mixture of excellent opium that I went to fetch myself at Canton to be certain of its purity, and the best hashish harvested in the Orient, that is to say between the Tigris and the Euphrates; these two ingredients are combined in equal parts, and one makes sort of pills which are swallowed at the moment one needs them. Ten minutes later the effect is produced. Ask Baron Franz d’Épinay, I believe he tasted some one day.”
“Yes,” answered Morcerf; “he told me a few words of it, and indeed kept a very pleasant memory of it.”
“But,” said Beauchamp, who as a journalist was most incredulous, “you carry this drug always about you?”
“Always,” answered Monte Cristo.
“Would it be indiscreet to ask to see these precious pills?” continued Beauchamp, hoping to catch the foreigner out.
“No, sir,” replied the count.
And he drew from his pocket a marvelous bonbonnière hollowed from a single emerald and closed by a gold screw which, unscrewing, gave passage to a small ball of greenish color and the size of a pea. This ball had a sharp and penetrating odor; there were four or five like it in the emerald, which could hold a dozen.
The bonbonnière went round the table, but it was far more to examine this admirable emerald than to see or smell the pills, that the guests passed it among themselves.
“And it is your cook who prepares this treat for you?” asked Beauchamp.
“Not at all, sir,” said Monte Cristo; “I do not thus deliver my real enjoyments to the mercy of unworthy hands. I am sufficiently good a chemist, and I prepare my pills myself.”
“That is an admirable emerald, and the largest I have ever seen, though my mother has some rather remarkable family jewels,” said Château-Renaud.
“I had three like it,” resumed Monte Cristo; “I gave one to the Grand Seignior, who had it set on his saber; the other to our holy father the pope, who had it inlaid on his tiara facing an emerald almost alike, but less beautiful however, which had been given to his predecessor, Pius VII, by the Emperor Napoleon; I kept the third for myself, and had it hollowed, which took away half its value, but made it more convenient for the use I wished to make of it.”
Each looked at Monte Cristo with astonishment; he spoke with such simplicity that it was evident he was telling the truth or was mad; yet the emerald that remained in his hands naturally inclined one toward the first supposition.
“And what did these two sovereigns give you in exchange for this magnificent gift?” asked Debray.
“The Grand Seignior, the liberty of a woman,” answered the count; “our holy father the pope, the life of a man. So that once in my existence I was as powerful as if God had made me born on the steps of a throne.”
“And it is Peppino you freed, is it not?” cried Morcerf; “it is to him you made the application of your right of grace?”
“Perhaps,” said Monte Cristo smiling.
“Sir count, you have no idea of the pleasure I feel in hearing you speak thus!” said Morcerf. “I had announced you in advance to my friends as a fabulous man, as an enchanter of the Thousand and One Nights, as a sorcerer of the Middle Ages; but Parisians are such subtle handlers of paradoxes that they take for caprices of the imagination the most incontestable truths, when those truths do not fall within all the conditions of their daily existence. For example, here is Debray who reads, and Beauchamp who prints every day that a member of the Jockey-Club, belated, has been arrested and robbed on the boulevard; that four persons have been assassinated in the rue Saint-Denis or the faubourg Saint-Germain; that ten, fifteen, twenty thieves have been arrested, whether in a café on the boulevard du Temple, or in the Thermes de Julien, and who dispute the existence of the bandits of the Maremmes, of the Roman campagna, or of the Pontine marshes. Tell them yourself, I beg you, sir count, that I was taken by those bandits, and that, without your generous intercession, I should probably be awaiting today, in the catacombs of Saint-Sebastian, the eternal resurrection, instead of giving them dinner in my unworthy little house in the rue du Helder.”
“Bah!” said Monte Cristo; “you had promised me never to speak to me of that trifle.”
“It is not I, sir count!” cried Morcerf; “it is some other to whom you will have rendered the same service as to me and whom you have confused with me. Let us speak of it, on the contrary, I pray you; for if you decide to speak of this circumstance, perhaps not only will you repeat to me a little of what I know, but also much of what I do not know.”
“But it seems to me,” said the count smiling, “that you played in all that affair a role sufficiently important to know as well as I what happened.”
“Will you promise me, if I tell all I know,” said Morcerf, “to tell in your turn all I do not know?”
“That is but fair,” answered Monte Cristo.
“Well,” resumed Morcerf, “though my self-love may suffer, I believed for three days that I was the object of the coquetries of a mask whom I took for some descendant of Tullia or Poppaea, whereas I was quite purely and simply the object of the coquetries of a contadina; and note that I say contadina to avoid saying peasant girl. What I know is that, like a ninny, more ninny even than the one I spoke of just now, I took for this peasant girl a young bandit of fifteen or sixteen, beardless of chin, slender of waist, who, at the moment I wished to emancipate myself so far as to deposit a kiss on her chaste shoulder, put a pistol to my throat, and, with the help of seven or eight of his companions, conducted or rather dragged me to the depths of the catacombs of Saint-Sebastian, where I found a chief of bandits quite lettered, faith, who was reading the Commentaries of Caesar, and who deigned to interrupt his reading to tell me that if, by the next day at six in the morning, I had not poured four thousand crowns into his coffer, at a quarter past six I should have perfectly ceased to exist. The letter exists, it is in the hands of Franz, signed by me, with a postscript by Master Luigi Vampa. If you doubt it, I will write to Franz, who will have the signatures legalized. That is what I know. Now, what I do not know is how you managed, sir count, to strike such great respect into the bandits of Rome, who respect so little. I confess that Franz and I were ravished with admiration.”
“Nothing simpler, sir,” answered the count; “I had known the famous Vampa for more than ten years. Quite young and when he was still a shepherd, one day that I gave him I know not what gold coin because he had shown me my way, he gave me, in his turn, so as to owe me nothing, a dagger carved by him and which you must have seen in my collection of arms. Later, whether he had forgotten this exchange of little gifts which should have maintained friendship between us, or whether he did not recognize me, he tried to arrest me; but it was I, on the contrary, who took him with a dozen of his men. I could have delivered him to Roman justice, which is summary and which would have hastened all the more in his favor, but I did nothing of the kind. I sent him back, him and his own.”
“On condition that they would sin no more,” said the journalist laughing. “I am pleased to see that they scrupulously kept their word.”
“No, sir,” answered Monte Cristo; “on the simple condition that they would always respect me, and those of mine. Perhaps what I am about to tell you will seem strange to you, gentlemen socialists, progressives, humanitarians; but I never concern myself with my neighbor, but I never try to protect a society which does not protect me, and which, I will even say, generally concerns itself with me only to harm me; and, in suppressing them in my esteem and keeping neutrality toward them, it is still society and my neighbor who are in my debt.”
“Bravo!” cried Château-Renaud; “here is the first courageous man I have heard preach selfishness loyally and brutally: it is very fine, that! Bravo, sir count!”
“It is frank at least,” said Morrel; “but I am sure that sir count did not repent of having once failed the principles he has however just expounded to us so absolutely.”
“How did I fail in those principles, sir?” asked Monte Cristo, who from time to time could not help looking at Maximilien with such attention that two or three times already the bold young man had lowered his eyes before the clear and limpid gaze of the count.
“But it seems to me,” resumed Morrel, “that in delivering M. de Morcerf, whom you did not know, you served your neighbor and society.”
“Of which he makes the finest ornament,” said Beauchamp gravely, emptying at a single draught a glass of Champagne.
“Sir count!” cried Morcerf; “you are caught by the argument, you, that is to say one of the hardest logicians I know; and you will see that it is about to be clearly demonstrated to you that, far from being an egoist, you are on the contrary a philanthropist. Ah! sir count, you call yourself Oriental, Levantine, Malay, Indian, Chinese, savage; you are called Monte Cristo by your family name, Sinbad the Sailor by your baptismal name, and behold that from the day you set foot in Paris you possess by instinct the greatest merit or the greatest defect of our eccentric Parisians, that is to say that you usurp the vices you do not have and hide the virtues you have!”
“My dear viscount,” said Monte Cristo, “I see in all I have said or done not a single word that earns me, from you and these gentlemen, the pretended praise I have just received. You were not a stranger to me, since I knew you, since I had given you up two rooms, since I had offered you luncheon, since I had lent you one of my carriages, since we had seen the masks pass together in the Corso, and since we had watched from a window on the Piazza del Popolo that execution which so impressed you that you nearly fainted. Now, I ask all these gentlemen, could I leave my host in the hands of those frightful bandits, as you call them? Besides, you know, I had, in saving you, an ulterior thought, which was to make use of you to introduce me into the salons of Paris when I came to visit France. For some time you may have considered this resolution a vague and fleeting project; but today, you see, it is a good and fair reality, to which you must submit under pain of failing your word.”
“And I shall keep it,” said Morcerf; “but I greatly fear you will be quite disenchanted, my dear count, you who are used to broken terrain, picturesque events, fantastic horizons. With us, not the slightest episode of the kind to which your adventurous life has accustomed you. Our Chimborazo is Montmartre; our Himalaya, Mont Valérien; our Great Desert, the plain of Grenelle, yet even there they are sinking an artesian well so the caravans may find water. We have thieves, many even, though not as many as is said, but these thieves dread infinitely more the smallest informer than the greatest lord; finally, France is so prosaic a country, and Paris so civilized a city, that you will not find, in searching our eighty-five departments—I say eighty-five departments, for of course I except Corsica from France—you will not find in our eighty-five departments the least mountain without a telegraph upon it, and the least rather black grotto in which a police commissioner has not had a gas jet installed. There is therefore but one service I can render you, my dear count, and for that I place myself at your disposal: to present you everywhere, or have you presented by my friends, that goes without saying. Besides, you need no one for that; with your name, your fortune, and your wit (Monte Cristo bowed with a slightly ironic smile), one presents oneself everywhere, and is well received everywhere. I can therefore in reality be good to you for but one thing. If some habit of Parisian life, some experience of comfort, some knowledge of our bazaars can recommend me to you, I place myself at your disposal to find you a suitable house. I dare not propose you share my lodging as I shared yours at Rome, I who do not profess egoism, but who am egoist par excellence; for at my home, except for me, there would not hold a shadow, unless that shadow were that of a woman.”
“Ah!” said the count; “here is a thoroughly conjugal reservation. You did indeed, sir, at Rome let fall a few words of a marriage begun; am I to congratulate you on your approaching happiness?”
“The matter is still at the project stage, sir count.”
“And he who says project,” resumed Debray, “means eventuality.”
“Not so!” said Morcerf; “my father insists upon it, and I hope soon to present you, if not my wife, at least my betrothed: Mademoiselle Eugénie Danglars.”
“Eugénie Danglars!” resumed Monte Cristo; “wait now: is not her father M. le Baron Danglars?”
“Yes,” answered Morcerf; “but baron of recent creation.”
“Oh! what does it matter?” answered Monte Cristo; “if he has rendered services to the state that merited him this distinction.”
“Enormous ones,” said Beauchamp. “Although a liberal at heart, he completed in 1829 a loan of six millions for King Charles X, who, faith, made him baron and knight of the Legion of Honor, so that he wears the ribbon, not in the pocket of his waistcoat, as one might believe, but right plainly in the buttonhole of his coat.”
“Ah!” said Morcerf laughing; “Beauchamp, Beauchamp, keep that for the Corsaire and the Charivari; but before me spare my future father-in-law.”
Then turning toward Monte Cristo:
“But you just pronounced his name like someone who would know the baron?” said he.
“I do not know him,” said Monte Cristo negligently; “but I shall probably not be long in making his acquaintance, seeing I have a credit opened on him by the houses of Richard and Blount of London, Arstein and Eskeles of Vienna, and Thomson and French of Rome.”
And in pronouncing these last two names, Monte Cristo glanced from the corner of his eye at Maximilien Morrel.
If the foreigner had expected to produce an effect on Maximilien Morrel, he was not mistaken. Maximilien started as if he had received an electric shock.
“Thomson and French,” said he; “do you know that house, sir?”
“They are my bankers in the capital of the Christian world,” answered the count tranquilly; “can I be of some service to you with them?”
“Oh! sir count, you could perhaps help us in researches hitherto fruitless; that house once rendered a service to ours, and has always, I know not why, denied having rendered us that service.”
“At your orders, sir,” answered Monte Cristo bowing.
“But,” said Morcerf, “we have singularly strayed, on the subject of M. Danglars, from the topic of our conversation. It was a question of finding a suitable dwelling for the Count of Monte Cristo; come, gentlemen, let us pool our ideas. Where shall we lodge this new guest of Greater Paris?”
“Faubourg Saint-Germain,” said Château-Renaud; “monsieur will find there a charming little hôtel between court and garden.”
“Bah! Château-Renaud,” said Debray; “you know only your dreary and sullen Faubourg Saint-Germain; do not listen to him, sir count, lodge yourself on the Chaussée-d’Antin: it is the true center of Paris.”
“Boulevard de l’Opéra,” said Beauchamp; “on the first floor, a house with a balcony. Monsieur le Comte will have silver-cloth cushions brought up, and will see, smoking his chibouque or swallowing his pills, all the capital file past beneath his eyes.”
“Have you no ideas, you, Morrel,” said Château-Renaud, “that you propose nothing?”
“Indeed I have,” said the young man smiling; “on the contrary, I have one, but I waited until monsieur let himself be tempted by one of the brilliant offers just made him. Now that he has not answered, I think I may offer him an apartment in a charming little hôtel, all Pompadour, which my sister has rented for a year past in the rue Meslay.”
“You have a sister?” asked Monte Cristo.
“Yes, sir, and an excellent sister.”
“Married?”
“For nearly nine years.”
“Happy?” asked the count again.
“As happy as a human creature may be,” answered Maximilien; “she married the man she loved, he who remained faithful to us in our bad fortune: Emmanuel Herbault.”
Monte Cristo smiled imperceptibly.
“I live there during my half-year,” continued Maximilien; “and I shall be, with my brother-in-law Emmanuel, at the disposition of monsieur le comte for all the information he may need.”
“A moment!” cried Albert before Monte Cristo had time to answer; “take care what you do, M. Morrel, you are going to shut up a traveler, Sinbad the Sailor, in family life; a man who has come to see Paris you are going to make a patriarch.”
“Oh! not at all,” answered Morrel smiling; “my sister is twenty-five, my brother-in-law thirty; they are young, gay, and happy; besides, monsieur le comte will be in his own rooms, and will meet his hosts only as much as it pleases him to go down to them.”
“Thank you, sir, thank you,” said Monte Cristo; “I shall content myself with being presented by you to your sister and your brother-in-law, if you will do me that honor; but I have accepted none of these gentlemen’s offers, seeing I already have my lodging all ready.”
“What!” cried Morcerf; “you are going to put up at a hotel then? That will be very dreary for you.”
“Was I so badly off at Rome?” asked Monte Cristo.
“Why, at Rome,” said Morcerf, “you had spent fifty thousand piastres to have an apartment furnished; but I presume you are not disposed to renew such an expense every day.”
“That is not what stopped me,” answered Monte Cristo; “but I was resolved to have a house in Paris, a house of my own, I mean. I sent my valet de chambre ahead and he was to buy this house and have it furnished for me.”
“But tell us then that you have a valet de chambre who knows Paris!” cried Beauchamp.
“It is the first time, like me, that he comes to France; he is a Negro and does not speak,” said Monte Cristo.
“Then it is Ali?” asked Albert amid general surprise.
“Yes, sir, it is Ali himself, my Nubian, my mute, whom you saw at Rome, I believe.”
“Yes, certainly,” answered Morcerf; “I remember him perfectly. But how did you charge a Nubian with buying you a house in Paris, and a mute with furnishing it? He will have done everything backwards, the poor wretch.”
“Undeceive yourself, sir; I am certain, on the contrary, that he will have chosen everything to my taste; for, as you know, my taste is not that of everyone. He arrived a week ago; he will have run all over the town with the instinct a good dog might have hunting alone; he knows my caprices, my fancies, my needs; he will have organized everything to my liking. He knew I would arrive today at ten o’clock; since nine he was waiting for me at the Fontainebleau gate; he handed me this paper; it is my new address: here, read it.”
And Monte Cristo passed a paper to Albert.
“Champs-Élysées, 30,” read Morcerf.
“Ah! that is truly original!” could not help saying Beauchamp.
“And very princely,” added Château-Renaud.
“What! you do not know your own house?” asked Debray.
“No,” said Monte Cristo; “I already told you I would not miss the hour. I made my toilet in my carriage and got down at the viscount’s door.”
The young men looked at one another; they did not know if it were a comedy played by Monte Cristo; but all that came from the mouth of this man had, despite his original character, such a stamp of simplicity, that one could not suppose he would lie. Besides, why would he have lied?
“We must therefore content ourselves,” said Beauchamp, “with rendering M. le Comte all the little services in our power. I, in my quality as journalist, open to him all the theaters of Paris.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Monte Cristo smiling; “my steward already has orders to hire me a box in each of them.”
“And your steward is also a Nubian, a mute?” asked Debray.
“No, sir; he is simply a compatriot of yours, if indeed a Corsican is compatriot of anyone: but you know him, M. de Morcerf.”
“Would it by chance be the brave Signor Bertuccio, who understands so well the hiring of windows?”
“Exactly, and you saw him at my house the day I had the honor of receiving you at luncheon. He is a very worthy man, who has been a bit of a soldier, a bit of a smuggler, a bit of everything one can be in short. I would not even swear he has not had some brush with the police over a trifle, something like a stab with a knife.”
“And you chose this honest citizen of the world for your steward, sir count?” said Debray; “how much does he rob you of per year?”
“Well, upon my word,” said the count, “no more than another, I am sure; but he suits me, knows no impossibility, and I keep him.”
“Then,” said Château-Renaud, “you are with a house set up: you have an hôtel on the Champs-Élysées, servants, steward, all that is lacking to you is a mistress.”
Albert smiled; he was thinking of the beautiful Greek he had seen in the count’s box at the Teatro Valle and the Teatro Argentina.
“I have better than that,” said Monte Cristo; “I have a slave. You hire your mistresses at the Opéra, at the Vaudeville, at the Variétés; I bought mine at Constantinople; it cost me more, but in that regard I need trouble myself no further.”
“But you forget,” said Debray laughing, “that we are, as King Charles said, free by name, free by nature; that on setting foot on the soil of France, your slave has become free?”
“Who will tell her so?” asked Monte Cristo.
“Why, the first comer.”
“She speaks only Romaic.”
“Then it is another matter.”
“But shall we at least see her?” asked Beauchamp; “or, having already a mute, have you also eunuchs?”
“Faith no,” said Monte Cristo; “I do not push Orientalism that far: all around me is free to leave me, and in leaving me will need me or anyone no more; that is perhaps why no one leaves me.”
They had long since passed to dessert and cigars.
“My dear,” said Debray rising, “it is half past two, your guest is charming, but there is no company so good one does not leave it, and sometimes even for bad; I must return to my ministry. I will speak of the count to the minister, and we must indeed learn who he is.”
“Take care,” said Morcerf; “the cleverest have given it up.”
“Bah! we have three millions for our police: true they are almost always spent in advance; but no matter; there will always be some fifty thousand francs left to put to that.”
“And when you know who he is, you will tell me?”
“I promise you. Farewell, Albert; gentlemen, your very humble.”
And, on leaving, Debray cried very loud in the antechamber:
“Have my carriage brought round!”
“Good,” said Beauchamp to Albert; “I shall not go to the Chamber, but I have to offer my readers better than a speech of M. Danglars.”
“For mercy’s sake, Beauchamp,” said Morcerf, “not a word, I beg you; do not take from me the merit of presenting him and explaining him. Is he not curious?”
“He is better than that,” answered Château-Renaud; “and he is truly one of the most extraordinary men I have seen in my life. Are you coming, Morrel?”
“The time to give my card to M. le Comte, who is kind enough to promise to pay us a little visit, rue Meslay, 14.”
“Be sure I shall not fail,” said the count bowing.
And Maximilien Morrel went out with the Baron de Château-Renaud, leaving Monte Cristo alone with Morcerf.
