The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (196 page)

‘My mother thought me dead; my mother is not guilty. I have never wanted to know my mother’s name, and I do not know it.’

At that moment, a shrill cry, ending in a sob, rang out from the midst of the group which, as we have said, included a woman. She fell to the ground in a violent fit of hysteria and was taken out of the room. As she was being helped out, the thick veil hiding her face slipped aside and they recognized Mme Danglars. Though nearly paralysed by nervous exhaustion, and despite the humming in his ears and the sort of madness that had seized his brain, Villefort too recognized her and rose to his feet.

‘Proof!’ cried the presiding judge. ‘Proof! Prisoner, do you realize that this tissue of horrors must be supported by the most incontrovertible proof?’

‘Proof?’ Benedetto said, with a laugh. ‘Do you want proof?’

‘We do.’

‘Then look at Monsieur de Villefort, and ask me for further proof.’

Everyone turned towards the crown prosecutor who, beneath the weight of a thousand eyes turned towards him, stepped forward into the well of the court, staggering, his hair awry and his face blotchy from the pressure of his fingernails.

The whole room heaved a long murmur of astonishment.

‘Father, they are asking me for proof,’ said Benedetto. ‘Do you wish me to provide it?’

‘No,’ M. de Villefort stammered, in a strangled voice. ‘No, there is no need.’

‘What do you mean, no need?’ cried the judge.

‘I mean,’ said the crown prosecutor, ‘that I should struggle in vain against the deadly fate that holds me in its grasp. Gentlemen, I realize that I am in the hands of a vengeful God. No proof, there is no need. Everything this young man has just said is true!’

A dark and heavy silence, such as precedes some natural catastrophe, wrapped its leaden cloak around all those who heard these words, and the hair stood up on their heads.

‘What! Monsieur de Villefort,’ the judge cried, ‘are you sure you are not dreaming? Are you really in full command of your faculties? One might believe that such a strange accusation, so dreadful and so unexpected, must have troubled your mind. Come, now, pull yourself together.’

The crown prosecutor shook his head. His teeth were chattering violently like those of a man eaten up with fever; and yet he was deathly pale.

‘I am in full command of my faculties, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Only my body is unwell, as you may well understand. I admit my guilt for everything that the young man has accused me of, and I shall henceforth remain at home at the disposal of the crown prosecutor, my successor.’

After saying which, in a dull and almost inaudible voice, M. de Villefort staggered towards the door, which the duty usher automatically opened for him.

The whole company was left speechless and appalled by this revelation and this confession, making such a dreadful conclusion to all the various incidents that had shaken Parisian society over the preceding fortnight.

‘Well!’ Beauchamp said. ‘Let anyone now deny that drama is only in art and not in nature!’

‘Good Lord,’ said Château-Renaud. ‘I’d really much rather end like Monsieur de Morcerf: a pistol-shot is a kindness beside such a disaster.’

‘And it does kill you,’ said Beauchamp.

‘Just think! I briefly considered marrying his daughter,’ said Debray. ‘Poor child: my God, she did well to die!’

‘The session is ended, gentlemen,’ said the presiding judge. ‘The case will be adjourned to the next assizes. The matter must be investigated afresh and entrusted to another counsel.’

As for Andrea – calm as ever and much more interesting – he left the room, escorted by the gendarmes, who involuntarily showed him some sign of respect.

‘So, what do you think of that, my good man?’ Debray asked the sergeant-at-arms, slipping a
louis
into his hand.

‘They’ll find extenuating circumstances,’ he answered.

The crowd, closely packed though it was, opened to let M. de Villefort pass. Great sorrow is so august that, even in the most unfortunate times, there is no case recorded when the first reaction of the mass has not been to sympathize with a great catastrophe. Many hated people have been killed by the mob, but rarely has anyone unfortunate, even a criminal, been attacked by the men who were present when he was condemned to death.

Thus Villefort was able to pass through the ranks of spectators, guards and officials of the courts, and to walk away, having admitted his guilt but protected by his grief.

There are some situations which men instinctively comprehend but are unable to comment on intellectually. In such cases, the greatest poet is the one who emits the most powerful and the most natural cry. The crowd takes this cry for a complete story, and it is right to be satisfied with that, and still more so to find it sublime when it is truthful.

In any case, it would have been impossible to express the state of stupefaction in which Villefort found himself on leaving the courts, or to describe the fever that made every artery throb, tensed every fibre, swelled every vein to bursting and dissected every point of his mortal body in millions of agonies.

He dragged himself along the corridors, guided solely by habit. He threw the magistrate’s gown off his shoulders, not because he felt it was proper for him to quit it, but because it had become an overwhelming burden, a shirt of Nessus,
¹
full of torments.

Staggering, he reached the Cour Dauphine, saw his carriage, woke the coachman by opening the door himself and slumped back against the cushions, while pointing towards the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The coachman set off.

The full weight of his devastated fortune had come down upon his head and this weight was crushing him. He did not know what the outcome would be, he had not measured it; he felt it, but did not assess the legal consequences like a cold murderer commenting on the letter of the law.

God was in the depth of his heart.

‘God!’ he murmured, without even knowing what he was saying. ‘God, God!’

He could only see the hand of God behind the maelstrom that had overwhelmed him.

The carriage sped along. Writhing on his cushions, Villefort felt something underneath them.

He reached for it: it was a fan that Mme de Villefort had lost between the cushion and the back wall of the carriage. The fan woke some memory, and the memory was like a flash of lightning in the dark.

Villefort thought of his wife.

‘Oh!’ he cried, as if a hot iron had traversed his heart.

For the past hour he had had only one side of his misfortune before his eyes; now, suddenly, his mind saw another, and one no less terrible than the first.

He had just assumed the role of implacable judge with this woman, condemning her to death; and she, stricken with terror, crushed with remorse and sunk beneath the shame that he had aroused in her with the eloquence born of his own spotless virtue, she, a poor, feeble woman, defenceless against this absolute and supreme authority, might perhaps at this very moment be preparing to die.

An hour already had elapsed since her condemnation: no doubt she was going over all her crimes in her memory, asking for God’s mercy and writing a letter to humbly beg forgiveness of her virtuous husband, a favour that she would purchase at the cost of her life… Villefort gave another roar of pain and fury.

‘Oh!’ he cried, writhing on the satin upholstery of his carriage. ‘This woman only became a criminal because she touched me. I am oozing with crime. She caught it off me as one may catch typhus, or cholera, or the plague! And I am punishing her! I dared to tell her: “Repent and die…” I! No, no, she shall live! She will follow me. We will flee, leave France, wander as far as the earth will carry us. I spoke to her of the scaffold! Good Lord! How did I dare utter the word! The scaffold waits also for me. We shall flee… I shall confess all to her. Yes, every day I shall tell her, prostrating myself, that I too have committed a crime. What a marriage of the tiger and the snake – worthy wife of a husband such as I! She must live! My infamy must make hers pale into insignificance!’

And Villefort slammed down the window in the front of the carriage, rather than opening it, crying: ‘Faster! Faster!’ in a voice that made the coachman leap up on his seat. The horses, carried forward by fear, flew to the house.

‘Yes, yes,’ Villefort repeated as he drew closer to home. ‘The woman must live; she must repent and bring up my son, my poor child, the only one apart from the indestructible old man, who has survived the destruction of the family. She loved him: everything she did was for him. One must never despair of the heart of a mother who loves her child; she will repent. No one will know that she was guilty: the crimes that were committed in my house, which now trouble people’s thoughts, will be forgotten in time; or, if some enemies of mine do remember them, they will add them to the list of my crimes. One, two, three more: what does it matter! My wife will escape, taking some money with her or, and above all, taking my son, far from the abyss into which I feel everyone must tumble with me. She will live, she will be happy again, since all her love is invested in her son and her son will never leave her. I shall have done a good deed; my heart grows lighter at the thought.’ The crown prosecutor breathed more freely than he had for a long time.

The carriage drew up in the courtyard of the house. Villefort leapt from the running board on to the steps. He saw that the servants were surprised at his early return. He read nothing else on
their faces; no one said anything to him. They stopped in his path, as usual, to let him pass; nothing more.

He passed Noirtier’s room and, through the half-open door, he saw as it were two shadows; but he did not concern himself about the other person who was with his father: all his thoughts were drawing him somewhere else.

‘Come,’ he said, climbing the little stairway leading to his wife’s apartments and Valentine’s empty room. ‘Come, nothing here has changed.’

He took particular care to close the landing door.

‘No one must bother us here,’ he said. ‘I must be able to speak freely to her, to accuse myself before her, to tell her everything…’

He approached the door and reached out for the glass handle. The door opened.

‘Not locked! Oh, good, very good,’ he muttered, entering the little drawing-room where in the evenings they would put up Edouard’s bed. Though he was at a boarding school, the child returned home every evening: his mother did not want to be separated from him.

In a single glance, he took in the little drawing-room.

‘No one,’ he said. ‘She must be in her bedroom.’

He rushed to the door, but this one was locked. He stopped, trembling.

‘Héloïse!’ he shouted, and thought he heard a piece of furniture move.

‘Héloïse!’ he said, a second time.

‘Who is there?’ said the voice of the woman he was calling. It seemed to him that this voice was weaker than usual.

‘Open up! Open up!’ Villefort cried. ‘It is I.’

Despite the anguished tone in which this order was given, the door did not open. Villefort broke the lock with a kick.

Mme de Villefort was standing in the doorway to her boudoir, pale, drawn, looking at him with a terrifying stare.

‘Héloïse, Héloïse!’ he said. ‘What is it? Speak to me!’

She held out a rigid, ghastly white hand towards him. ‘It is done, Monsieur,’ she said, with a croaking sound that seemed to tear her throat. ‘What more do you want?’ And she fell full length on the carpet.

Villefort ran to her and grasped her hand. The hand was convulsively clasping a crystal flask with a gold stopper.

Mme de Villefort was dead.

Senseless with horror, Villefort shrank back to the door of the room and looked at the body. Then suddenly he cried: ‘My son! Where is my son? Edouard, Edouard!’ And he rushed from the room, shouting the boy’s name in such anguished tones that the servants came running.

‘My son! Where is my son?’ Villefort asked. ‘Someone must take him away… Don’t let him see…’

‘But Monsieur Edouard is not downstairs, Monsieur,’ the valet replied.

‘He must be playing in the garden. Go and find him!’

‘No, Monsieur. Madame called her son about half an hour ago. Monsieur Edouard went into Madame’s room and has not come down since then.’

An icy sweat poured across Villefort’s brow, his feet stumbled on the floor and his thoughts began to whirl in his head like the disordered works of a broken watch. ‘To Madame’s room!’ he muttered. ‘To Madame’s…’ And he slowly retraced his steps, wiping his forehead with one hand and supporting himself with the other against the wall.

Going back into the room meant once more seeing the unhappy woman’s body. Calling Edouard meant reawakening the echo of this room which had become a coffin: to speak was to violate the silence of a tomb. Villefort’s tongue seemed to be paralysed in his throat.

‘Edouard,’ he stammered. ‘Edouard…’

The child did not reply. So where was he if, as the servants said, he had gone into his mother’s room and not come out?

Villefort stepped forward.

Mme de Villefort’s body was lying across the doorway to the boudoir in which Edouard must be: the body seemed to be keeping watch on the threshold with staring, open eyes and with a frightful and mysterious look of irony on the mouth.