The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (43 page)

The island was deserted. No one appeared to have landed there since Dantès was last there. He went to his treasure. Everything was just as he had left it.

By the next day his huge fortune had been transported on to the yacht and shut up in the three secret compartments of the hidden cupboard.

He waited another week. During this time, he sailed his yacht around the island, studying it as a horseman studies his mount; by
the end he knew all its qualities and its defects and had promised himself to enhance the former and remedy the latter.

On the eighth day he saw a little ship sailing at full speed towards the island, and recognized Jacopo’s vessel. He made a signal, Jacopo replied, and two hours later the ship had drawn alongside the yacht.

There was bad news in reply to both Edmond’s questions. Old Dantès was dead; Mercédès had vanished.

Edmond’s face remained impassive as he listened to this information, but he immediately disembarked, not allowing anyone to follow him.

Two hours later he returned. Two men from Jacopo’s vessel joined him on his yacht to help him sail it and he gave orders to make for Marseille. He was not surprised at the death of his father; but what had become of Mercédès?

Edmond had not been able to give detailed enough instructions to another party without divulging his secret; in any event, there was further information that he wanted to obtain and for which he could rely only on himself. His mirror had informed him in Leghorn that he ran no danger of being recognized and, moreover, he now had at his disposal every means to disguise himself. So one morning the yacht, followed by the little ship, sailed proudly into the port of Marseille and stopped directly in front of the place from which, on that fatal evening, they had set sail for the Château d’If.

Dantès shuddered a little at the sight of a gendarme being rowed out towards him. But, with the perfect self-assurance that he had acquired, he handed over an English passport which he had bought in Leghorn. With this foreign document, far more highly respected in France than our own, he had no difficulty in landing.

The first person he saw when he set foot on the Canebière was a sailor who had served under him on the
Pharaon
, as if placed there to reassure Dantès as to the changes which had taken place in him. He went straight up to the man and asked him a number of questions, to which he replied without the slightest hint in his words or his expression that he recalled ever having seen the man who was talking to him.

Dantès gave the sailor a coin to thank him for the information, only to hear the man running after him a moment later. He turned around.

‘Excuse me, Monsieur,’ the sailor said. ‘You must have made a
mistake. You doubtless thought you were giving me forty sous, but in reality this is a double
napoléon
.’
¹

‘Yes, indeed, my friend,’ said Dantès, ‘I was mistaken; but as your honesty deserves a reward, here is a second coin which I beg you to accept, and drink to my health with your friends.’

The sailor looked at Edmond in such astonishment that he did not even consider thanking him, but watched him walk away, saying: ‘Here’s some nabob straight off the boat from India.’

Dantès carried on, but every step he took brought some new emotion to his heart. All his childhood memories, those memories that are never effaced, but remain ever-present in one’s thoughts, lay here, rising up from each street corner, in every square and at every crossroads. When he reached the end of the Rue de Noailles and saw the Allées de Meilhan, he felt his knees give way and nearly fell under the wheels of a carriage. At last he reached the house in which he had lived with his father. The aristoloches and the nasturtiums had vanished from the attic roof where the old man’s hands used once to trellis them so carefully.

He leant against a tree and stayed for a while, thinking and looking up at the top floor of the mean little house. Finally he went across to the door, stepped inside and asked if there was no lodging vacant. Even though it was occupied, he insisted on going to visit the one on the fifth floor, until finally the concierge agreed to go up and ask the people living in it whether a stranger could take a look at their two rooms. The little lodging was inhabited by a young man and woman who had been married only a week. When he saw this young couple, Dantès gave a deep sigh.

As it happened, there was nothing to remind Dantès of his father’s apartment. The wallpaper had changed and all the old furniture, Edmond’s childhood friends, which he recalled in every detail, had disappeared. Only the walls were the same.

He turned towards the bed, which the new tenants had kept in the same place. Involuntarily his eyes filled with tears: this was where the old man must have expired with his son’s name on his lips.

The young couple looked in astonishment at this stern-faced man down whose otherwise impassive cheeks two large tears were falling. But as every sorrow inspires some awe, they did not question the stranger, but stepped back to let him weep at his ease. When he left, they went with him to the door and told him that he could
come back whenever he wished: there would always be a welcome in their humble abode.

Reaching the floor below, Edmond paused in front of another door and asked if the tailor, Caderousse, lived there. But the concierge told him that the person he mentioned had failed in business and now kept a little inn on the Bellegarde road in Beaucaire.

Dantès went down to the street, asked for the address of the owner of the house in the Allées de Meilhan, went to visit him and was announced as Lord Wilmore – which was the name and title on his passport. He bought the house for twenty-five thousand francs, which was at least ten thousand more than it was worth; but if it had stood at half a million, Dantès would have bought it for that.

The same day, the young couple on the fifth floor were informed by the notary who had drawn up the contract that the new owner was offering them any apartment in the house, at no additional rent, provided they would let him have the two rooms that they then occupied.

These strange events preoccupied all the regulars in the Allées de Meilhan for more than a week and were the subject of a thousand conjectures, none of which proved correct. But what muddled everyone and confused every mind was that, on the same evening, this same man who had been seen going into the house in the Allées de Meilhan was observed walking in the little Catalan village and going into a poor fisherman’s house, where he stayed for more than an hour asking for news of several people who were either dead or who had vanished more than fifteen or sixteen years earlier.

Next day, the people among whom he had made these enquiries received a present of a brand-new Catalan boat, with two seine nets and a trawl net. The good people would have liked to thank the generous enquirer, but he had been seen, after leaving them, giving orders to a sailor, mounting a horse and leaving Marseille through the Porte d’Aix.

Those who have walked across the south of France, as I have done, may have noticed an inn, situated between Bellegarde and Beaucaire, roughly half-way between the village and the town (though rather closer to Beaucaire than to Bellegarde), outside which hangs a crude painting of the Pont du Gard on a metal plate which creaks at the slightest breath of wind. This little inn, lying parallel to the course of the Rhône, is situated on the left side of the road with its back to the river. It has what in Languedoc is described as a garden: that is to say that the side opposite the one through which travellers enter overlooks an enclosure in which a few stunted olive-trees lurk beside some wild figs, their leaves silvered with dust. Between them, the only vegetables that grow here are some heads of garlic, some peppers and some shallots. Finally, in one corner, like a forgotten sentry, a tall umbrella pine rises in melancholy fashion on its pliable trunk, while its crest, fanned out, blisters under thirty degrees of sunshine.

All these trees, large or small, are naturally bent in the direction of the mistral, one of the three scourges of Provence, the two others, as you may or may not know, being the River Durance and Parliament.

Here and there in the surrounding plain, which is like a great lake of dust, stand a few stalks of wheat that the farmers hereabouts must surely grow out of mere curiosity. There is a cicada perched on every one of these stalks which pursues any traveller who has strayed into this wilderness with its high-pitched, monotonous call.

For perhaps the last seven or eight years this little inn had been kept by a man and woman whose only staff were a chambermaid called Trinette and a stableboy answering to the name of Pacaud. In fact, these two assistants had amply sufficed for the task, since a canal between Beaucaire and Aigues-Mortes had ensured the victory of water over road haulage, and barges had taken the place of the stagecoach.

As if to torment still further the unfortunate innkeeper, who was ruined by it, the canal ran between the Rhône – which supplied it
with water – and the road – which it drained of traffic – only some hundred yards from the inn which we have just briefly (but accurately) described.

The innkeeper was a man of forty to forty-five, tall, dry, nervous, a typical Southerner with his deep-set, shining eyes, his hooked nose and his teeth as white as those of some beast of prey. Though his hair had felt the first breath of age, it could not make up its mind to go grey: like the beard that he wore following the line of his jaw, it was thick, curly and spattered with just a few strands of white. His complexion, naturally swarthy, was covered by yet a new layer of brown from the habit he had adopted of standing from morning to night on the threshold of his door to see if some customer might not arrive, either on foot or by carriage. His expectations were almost invariably disappointed; but he stood there still, with no protection against the burning heat of the sun other than a red handkerchief knotted about his head, like a Spanish mule-driver. This man was our old acquaintance, Gaspard Caderousse.

His wife, in contrast, whose maiden name had been Madeleine Radelle, was pale, thin and sickly. She came from the region around Arles and had preserved some traces of the traditional beauty of the women of that area, while seeing her features slowly deteriorate, ravaged by one of those persistent fevers which are so common among the peoples who live near the ponds of Aigues-Mortes and the swamps of the Camargue. In consequence she spent most of her time seated, shivering, in her room on the first floor, either stretched out in an armchair or leaning against her bed, while her husband kept his customary watch at the door. He was all the more happy to spend his time there, since whenever he found himself in the same room as his better – or certainly bitter – half, she would harass him with unending lamentations on her fate, to which her husband would normally only respond with these philosophical words: ‘Quiet, La Carconte! It’s God’s will.’

The nickname derived from the fact that Madeleine Radelle had been born in the village of La Carconte, between Sallon and Lambesc. So, in accordance with local custom, by which people are almost always given a nickname in place of their names, her husband had substituted this for Madeleine, which was probably too soft and pleasant sounding for his rough tongue.

However, it should not be thought that the innkeeper, despite
this pretence of resignation to the decrees of fate, was not acutely sensible of the poverty to which he had been reduced by the confounded Beaucaire canal, or that he was proof against the endless complaints that his wife heaped on him. Like all Southerners, he was moderate, needing little for himself, but vain when it came to external matters; so, in the days of his prosperity, he would not let a
ferrade
or a procession of the tarasque
¹
go past without appearing in it, La Carconte at his side: he would be dressed in the picturesque costume of a man from the Midi, somewhere between Catalan and Andalusian dress, while she would have on the delightful attire of the women of Arles, suggestive of Greece and Arabia. Little by little, however, watch-chains, necklaces, gaudy belts, embroidered blouses, velvet jackets, elegantly trimmed stockings, multicoloured gaiters and silver-buckled shoes had vanished, until Gaspard Caderousse could no longer appear in his former splendour; so, on his own behalf and that of his wife, he gave up all these worldly exhibitions, though he felt a bitter pang when the happy sounds of some celebration would reach this miserable inn, which he kept much more to have a roof over his head than as a business proposition.

As was his custom, Caderousse had spent part of the morning standing at the door, turning his sad eyes from a little bare patch of grass where some hens were pecking, to each end of the empty road which extended southwards in one direction, northwards in the other. Suddenly his wife’s sour voice called him away from his post. He went inside, grumbling, and up to the first floor, while leaving the door wide open as if to persuade travellers not to forget him as they went by.

When Caderousse turned back into the house, the main road down which, as we said, he had been looking, was as empty and lonely as a desert under the midday sun. White and endless, it ran between two lines of slender trees and it was quite reasonable to suppose that no traveller who was free to choose any other hour of the day would wish to venture into this awful Sahara.

However, if he had remained at his post, Caderousse would have seen, defying probability, a horse and rider approaching from Bellegarde with that frank and friendly manner which suggests the best possible understanding between the horseman and his mount. The horse was a gelding which ambled pleasantly along; on its back was a priest, dressed in black and wearing a three-cornered hat,
despite the blistering heat of the sun which was now at its zenith. The pair proceeded at a very sensible trot.