It was one of the magnificent autumn days which make amends for a short
summer; the clouds which M. de Villefort had perceived at sunrise
had all disappeared as if by magic, and one of the softest and most
brilliant days of September shone forth in all its splendor.

Beauchamp, one of the kings of the press, and therefore claiming the
right of a throne everywhere, was eying everybody through his monocle.
He perceived Chateau-Renaud and Debray, who had just gained the good
graces of a sergeant-at-arms, and who had persuaded the latter to let
them stand before, instead of behind him, as they ought to have done.
The worthy sergeant had recognized the minister's secretary and the
millionnaire, and, by way of paying extra attention to his noble
neighbors, promised to keep their places while they paid a visit to
Beauchamp.

"Well," said Beauchamp, "we shall see our friend!"

"Yes, indeed!" replied Debray. "That worthy prince. Deuce take those
Italian princes!"

"A man, too, who could boast of Dante for a genealogist, and could
reckon back to the 'Divine Comedy.'"

"A nobility of the rope!" said Chateau-Renaud phlegmatically.

"He will be condemned, will he not?" asked Debray of Beauchamp.

"My dear fellow, I think we should ask you that question; you know such
news much better than we do. Did you see the president at the minister's
last night?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"Something which will surprise you."

"Oh, make haste and tell me, then; it is a long time since that has
happened."

"Well, he told me that Benedetto, who is considered a serpent of
subtlety and a giant of cunning, is really but a very commonplace, silly
rascal, and altogether unworthy of the experiments that will be made on
his phrenological organs after his death."

"Bah," said Beauchamp, "he played the prince very well."

"Yes, for you who detest those unhappy princes, Beauchamp, and are
always delighted to find fault with them; but not for me, who discover
a gentleman by instinct, and who scent out an aristocratic family like a
very bloodhound of heraldry."

"Then you never believed in the principality?"

"Yes.--in the principality, but not in the prince."

"Not so bad," said Beauchamp; "still, I assure you, he passed very well
with many people; I saw him at the ministers' houses."

"Ah, yes," said Chateau-Renaud. "The idea of thinking ministers
understand anything about princes!"

"There is something in what you have just said," said Beauchamp,
laughing.

"But," said Debray to Beauchamp, "if I spoke to the president, you must
have been with the procureur."

"It was an impossibility; for the last week M. de Villefort has
secluded himself. It is natural enough; this strange chain of domestic
afflictions, followed by the no less strange death of his daughter"--

"Strange? What do you mean, Beauchamp?"

"Oh, yes; do you pretend that all this has been unobserved at the
minister's?" said Beauchamp, placing his eye-glass in his eye, where he
tried to make it remain.

"My dear sir," said Chateau-Renaud, "allow me to tell you that you do
not understand that manoeuvre with the eye-glass half so well as Debray.
Give him a lesson, Debray."

"Stay," said Beauchamp, "surely I am not deceived."

"What is it?"

"It is she!"

"Whom do you mean?"

"They said she had left."

"Mademoiselle Eugenie?" said Chateau-Renaud; "has she returned?"

"No, but her mother."

"Madame Danglars? Nonsense! Impossible!" said Chateau-Renaud; "only
ten days after the flight of her daughter, and three days from the
bankruptcy of her husband?"

Debray colored slightly, and followed with his eyes the direction of
Beauchamp's glance. "Come," he said, "it is only a veiled lady, some
foreign princess, perhaps the mother of Cavalcanti. But you were just
speaking on a very interesting topic, Beauchamp."

"I?"

"Yes; you were telling us about the extraordinary death of Valentine."

"Ah, yes, so I was. But how is it that Madame de Villefort is not here?"

"Poor, dear woman," said Debray, "she is no doubt occupied in distilling
balm for the hospitals, or in making cosmetics for herself or friends.
Do you know she spends two or three thousand crowns a year in this
amusement? But I wonder she is not here. I should have been pleased to
see her, for I like her very much."

"And I hate her," said Chateau-Renaud.

"Why?"

"I do not know. Why do we love? Why do we hate? I detest her, from
antipathy."

"Or, rather, by instinct."

"Perhaps so. But to return to what you were saying, Beauchamp."

"Well, do you know why they die so multitudinously at M. de
Villefort's?"

"'Multitudinously' [drv] is good," said Chateau-Renaud.

"My good fellow, you'll find the word in Saint-Simon."

"But the thing itself is at M. de Villefort's; but let's get back to the
subject."

"Talking of that," said Debray, "Madame was making inquiries about that
house, which for the last three months has been hung with black."

"Who is Madame?" asked Chateau-Renaud.

"The minister's wife, pardieu!"

"Oh, your pardon! I never visit ministers; I leave that to the princes."

"Really, You were only before sparkling, but now you are brilliant; take
compassion on us, or, like Jupiter, you will wither us up."

"I will not speak again," said Chateau-Renaud; "pray have compassion
upon me, and do not take up every word I say."

"Come, let us endeavor to get to the end of our story, Beauchamp; I
told you that yesterday Madame made inquiries of me upon the subject;
enlighten me, and I will then communicate my information to her."

"Well, gentlemen, the reason people die so multitudinously (I like the
word) at M. de Villefort's is that there is an assassin in the house!"
The two young men shuddered, for the same idea had more than once
occurred to them. "And who is the assassin;" they asked together.

"Young Edward!" A burst of laughter from the auditors did not in the
least disconcert the speaker, who continued,--"Yes, gentlemen; Edward,
the infant phenomenon, who is quite an adept in the art of killing."

"You are jesting."

"Not at all. I yesterday engaged a servant, who had just left M.
de Villefort--I intend sending him away to-morrow, for he eats so
enormously, to make up for the fast imposed upon him by his terror in
that house. Well, now listen."

"We are listening."

"It appears the dear child has obtained possession of a bottle
containing some drug, which he every now and then uses against those who
have displeased him. First, M. and Madame de Saint-Meran incurred his
displeasure, so he poured out three drops of his elixir--three drops
were sufficient; then followed Barrois, the old servant of M. Noirtier,
who sometimes rebuffed this little wretch--he therefore received the
same quantity of the elixir; the same happened to Valentine, of whom he
was jealous; he gave her the same dose as the others, and all was over
for her as well as the rest."

"Why, what nonsense are you telling us?" said Chateau-Renaud.

"Yes, it is an extraordinary story," said Beauchamp; "is it not?"

"It is absurd," said Debray.

"Ah," said Beauchamp, "you doubt me? Well, you can ask my servant, or
rather him who will no longer be my servant to-morrow, it was the talk
of the house."

"And this elixir, where is it? what is it?"

"The child conceals it."

"But where did he find it?"

"In his mother's laboratory."

"Does his mother then, keep poisons in her laboratory?"

"How can I tell? You are questioning me like a king's attorney. I only
repeat what I have been told, and like my informant I can do no more.
The poor devil would eat nothing, from fear."

"It is incredible!"

"No, my dear fellow, it is not at all incredible. You saw the child pass
through the Rue Richelieu last year, who amused himself with killing his
brothers and sisters by sticking pins in their ears while they slept.
The generation who follow us are very precocious."

"Come, Beauchamp," said Chateau-Renaud, "I will bet anything you do not
believe a word of all you have been telling us."

"I do not see the Count of Monte Cristo here."

"He is worn out," said Debray; "besides, he could not well appear in
public, since he has been the dupe of the Cavalcanti, who, it appears,
presented themselves to him with false letters of credit, and cheated
him out of 100,000. francs upon the hypothesis of this principality."

"By the way, M. de Chateau-Renaud," asked Beauchamp, "how is Morrel?"

"Ma foi, I have called three times without once seeing him. Still, his
sister did not seem uneasy, and told me that though she had not seen him
for two or three days, she was sure he was well."

"Ah, now I think of it, the Count of Monte Cristo cannot appear in the
hall," said Beauchamp.

"Why not?"

"Because he is an actor in the drama."

"Has he assassinated any one, then?"

"No, on the contrary, they wished to assassinate him. You know that
it was in leaving his house that M. de Caderousse was murdered by his
friend Benedetto. You know that the famous waistcoat was found in
his house, containing the letter which stopped the signature of
the marriage-contract. Do you see the waistcoat? There it is, all
blood-stained, on the desk, as a testimony of the crime."

"Ah, very good."

"Hush, gentlemen, here is the court; let us go back to our places." A
noise was heard in the hall; the sergeant called his two patrons with
an energetic "hem!" and the door-keeper appearing, called out with that
shrill voice peculiar to his order, ever since the days of Beaumarchais,
"The court, gentlemen!"

They gave Prince Andrew some tea. He drank it eagerly, looking
with feverish eyes at the door in front of him as if trying to
understand and remember something.

"I don't want any more. Is Timokhin here?" he asked.

Timokhin crept along the bench to him.

"I am here, your excellency."

"How's your wound?"

"Mine, sir? All right. But how about you?"

Prince Andrew again pondered as if trying to remember something.

"Couldn't one get a book?" he asked.

"What book?"

"The Gospels. I haven't one."

The doctor promised to procure it for him and began to ask how he
was feeling. Prince Andrew answered all his questions reluctantly
but reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him
as he was uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted
the cloak with which he was covered and, making wry faces at the
noisome smell of mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began
examining that dreadful place. The doctor was very much displeased
about something and made a change in the dressings, turning the
wounded man over so that he groaned again and grew unconscious and
delirious from the agony. He kept asking them to get him the book
and put it under him.

"What trouble would it be to you?" he said. "I have not got one.
Please get it for me and put it under for a moment," he pleaded in a
piteous voice.

The doctor went into the passage to wash his hands.

"You fellows have no conscience," said he to the valet who was
pouring water over his hands. "For just one moment I didn't look after
you... It's such pain, you know, that I wonder how he can bear it."

"By the Lord Jesus Christ, I thought we had put something under
him!" said the valet.

The first time Prince Andrew understood where he was and what was
the matter with him and remembered being wounded and how was when he
asked to be carried into the hut after his caleche had stopped at
Mytishchi. After growing confused from pain while being carried into
the hut he again regained consciousness, and while drinking tea once
more recalled all that had happened to him, and above all vividly
remembered the moment at the ambulance station when, at the sight of
the sufferings of a man he disliked, those new thoughts had come to
him which promised him happiness. And those thoughts, though now vague
and indefinite, again possessed his soul. He remembered that he had
now a new source of happiness and that this happiness had something to
do with the Gospels. That was why he asked for a copy of them. The
uncomfortable position in which they had put him and turned him over
again confused his thoughts, and when he came to himself a third
time it was in the complete stillness of the night. Everybody near him
was sleeping. A cricket chirped from across the passage; someone was
shouting and singing in the street; cockroaches rustled on the
table, on the icons, and on the walls, and a big fly flopped at the
head of the bed and around the candle beside him, the wick of which
was charred and had shaped itself like a mushroom.

His mind was not in a normal state. A healthy man usually thinks of,
feels, and remembers innumerable things simultaneously, but has the
power and will to select one sequence of thoughts or events on which
to fix his whole attention. A healthy man can tear himself away from
the deepest reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in
and can then return again to his own thoughts. But Prince Andrew's
mind was not in a normal state in that respect. All the powers of
his mind were more active and clearer than ever, but they acted
apart from his will. Most diverse thoughts and images occupied him
simultaneously. At times his brain suddenly began to work with a
vigor, clearness, and depth it had never reached when he was in
health, but suddenly in the midst of its work it would turn to some
unexpected idea and he had not the strength to turn it back again.

"Yes, a new happiness was revealed to me of which man cannot be
deprived," he thought as he lay in the semidarkness of the quiet hut,
gazing fixedly before him with feverish wide open eyes. "A happiness
lying beyond material forces, outside the material influences that act
on man--a happiness of the soul alone, the happiness of loving.
Every man can understand it, but to conceive it and enjoin it was
possible only for God. But how did God enjoin that law? And why was
the Son...?"

And suddenly the sequence of these thoughts broke off, and Prince
Andrew heard (without knowing whether it was a delusion or reality)
a soft whispering voice incessantly and rhythmically repeating
"piti-piti-piti," and then "titi," and then again "piti-piti-piti,"
and "ti-ti" once more. At the same time he felt that above his face,
above the very middle of it, some strange airy structure was being
erected out of slender needles or splinters, to the sound of this
whispered music. He felt that he had to balance carefully (though it
was difficult) so that this airy structure should not collapse; but
nevertheless it kept collapsing and again slowly rising to the sound
of whispered rhythmic music--"it stretches, stretches, spreading out
and stretching," said Prince Andrew to himself. While listening to
this whispering and feeling the sensation of this drawing out and
the construction of this edifice of needles, he also saw by glimpses a
red halo round the candle, and heard the rustle of the cockroaches and
the buzzing of the fly that flopped against his pillow and his face.
Each time the fly touched his face it gave him a burning sensation and
yet to his surprise it did not destroy the structure, though it
knocked against the very region of his face where it was rising. But
besides this there was something else of importance. It was
something white by the door--the statue of a sphinx, which also
oppressed him.

"But perhaps that's my shirt on the table," he thought, "and
that's my legs, and that is the door, but why is it always
stretching and drawing itself out, and 'piti-piti-piti' and 'ti-ti'
and 'piti-piti-piti'...? That's enough, please leave off!" Prince
Andrew painfully entreated someone. And suddenly thoughts and feelings
again swam to the surface of his mind with peculiar clearness and
force.

"Yes--love," he thought again quite clearly. "But not love which
loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some
reason, but the love which I--while dying--first experienced when I
saw my enemy and yet loved him. I experienced that feeling of love
which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an
object. Now again I feel that bliss. To love one's neighbors, to
love one's enemies, to love everything, to love God in all His
manifestations. It is possible to love someone dear to you with
human love, but an enemy can only be loved by divine love. That is why
I experienced such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What has
become of him? Is he alive?...

"When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but
divine love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can
destroy it. It is the very essence of the soul. Yet how many people
have I hated in my life? And of them all, I loved and hated none as
I did her." And he vividly pictured to himself Natasha, not as he
had done in the past with nothing but her charms which gave him
delight, but for the first time picturing to himself her soul. And
he understood her feelings, her sufferings, shame, and remorse. He now
understood for the first time all the cruelty of his rejection of her,
the cruelty of his rupture with her. "If only it were possible for
me to see her once more! Just once, looking into those eyes to say..."

"Piti-piti-piti and ti-ti and piti-piti-piti boom!" flopped the
fly... And his attention was suddenly carried into another world, a
world of reality and delirium in which something particular was
happening. In that world some structure was still being erected and
did not fall, something was still stretching out, and the candle
with its red halo was still burning, and the same shirtlike sphinx lay
near the door; but besides all this something creaked, there was a
whiff of fresh air, and a new white sphinx appeared, standing at the
door. And that sphinx had the pale face and shining eyes of the very
Natasha of whom he had just been thinking.

"Oh, how oppressive this continual delirium is," thought Prince
Andrew, trying to drive that face from his imagination. But the face
remained before him with the force of reality and drew nearer.
Prince Andrew wished to return to that former world of pure thought,
but he could not, and delirium drew him back into its domain. The soft
whispering voice continued its rhythmic murmur, something oppressed
him and stretched out, and the strange face was before him. Prince
Andrew collected all his strength in an effort to recover his
senses, he moved a little, and suddenly there was a ringing in his
ears, a dimness in his eyes, and like a man plunged into water he lost
consciousness. When he came to himself, Natasha, that same living
Natasha whom of all people he most longed to love with this new pure
divine love that had been revealed to him, was kneeling before him. He
realized that it was the real living Natasha, and he was not surprised
but quietly happy. Natasha, motionless on her knees (she was unable to
stir), with frightened eyes riveted on him, was restraining her
sobs. Her face was pale and rigid. Only in the lower part of it
something quivered.

Prince Andrew sighed with relief, smiled, and held out his hand.

"You?" he said. "How fortunate!"

With a rapid but careful movement Natasha drew nearer to him on
her knees and, taking his hand carefully, bent her face over it and
began kissing it, just touching it lightly with her lips.

"Forgive me!" she whispered, raising her head and glancing at him.
"Forgive me!"

"I love you," said Prince Andrew.

"Forgive...!"

"Forgive what?" he asked.

"Forgive me for what I ha-ve do-ne!" faltered Natasha in a
scarcely audible, broken whisper, and began kissing his hand more
rapidly, just touching it with her lips.

"I love you more, better than before," said Prince Andrew, lifting
her face with his hand so as to look into her eyes.

Those eyes, filled with happy tears, gazed at him timidly,
compassionately, and with joyous love. Natasha's thin pale face,
with its swollen lips, was more than plain--it was dreadful. But
Prince Andrew did not see that, he saw her shining eyes which were
beautiful. They heard the sound of voices behind them.

Peter the valet, who was now wide awake, had roused the doctor.
Timokhin, who had not slept at all because of the pain in his leg, had
long been watching all that was going on, carefully covering his
bare body with the sheet as he huddled up on his bench.

"What's this?" said the doctor, rising from his bed. "Please go
away, madam!"

At that moment a maid sent by the countess, who had noticed her
daughter's absence, knocked at the door.

Like a somnambulist aroused from her sleep Natasha went out of the
room and, returning to her hut, fell sobbing on her bed.

From that time, during all the rest of the Rostovs' journey, at
every halting place and wherever they spent a night, Natasha never
left the wounded Bolkonski, and the doctor had to admit that he had
not expected from a young girl either such firmness or such skill in
nursing a wounded man.

Dreadful as the countess imagined it would be should Prince Andrew
die in her daughter's arms during the journey--as, judging by what the
doctor said, it seemed might easily happen--she could not oppose
Natasha. Though with the intimacy now established between the
wounded man and Natasha the thought occurred that should he recover
their former engagement would be renewed, no one--least of all Natasha
and Prince Andrew--spoke of this: the unsettled question of life and
death, which hung not only over Bolkonski but over all Russia, shut
out all other considerations.

It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible catastrophe,
instituted a kind of mysterious census.

All were present at a secret meeting at the Cafe Musain.

Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical
but significant metaphors:--

"It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we
may count. If combatants are required, they must be provided.
It can do no harm to have something with which to strike.
Passers-by always have more chance of being gored when there are
bulls on the road than when there are none. Let us, therefore,
reckon a little on the herd. How many of us are there?
There is no question of postponing this task until to-morrow.
Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has no time to lose.
Let us mistrust the unexpected. Let us not be caught unprepared.
We must go over all the seams that we have made and see whether they
hold fast. This business ought to be concluded to-day. Courfeyrac,
you will see the polytechnic students. It is their day to go out.
To-day is Wednesday. Feuilly, you will see those of the Glaciere,
will you not? Combeferre has promised me to go to Picpus.
There is a perfect swarm and an excellent one there. Bahorel will
visit the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the masons are growing lukewarm;
you will bring us news from the lodge of the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honore.
Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical lecture, and feel the pulse
of the medical school. Bossuet will take a little turn in the court
and talk with the young law licentiates. I will take charge of the
Cougourde myself."

"That arranges everything," said Courfeyrac.

"No."

"What else is there?"

"A very important thing."

"What is that?" asked Courfeyrac.

"The Barriere du Maine," replied Enjolras.

Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection,
then he resumed:--

"At the Barriere du Maine there are marble-workers, painters,
and journeymen in the studios of sculptors. They are an enthusiastic
family, but liable to cool off. I don't know what has been the matter
with them for some time past. They are thinking of something else.
They are becoming extinguished. They pass their time playing dominoes.
There is urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little,
but with firmness. They meet at Richefeu's. They are to be found
there between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into
a glow. For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius,
who is a good fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us.
I need some one for the Barriere du Maine. I have no one."

"What about me?" said Grantaire. "Here am I."

"You?"

"I."

"You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown
cold in the name of principle!"

"Why not?"

"Are you good for anything?"

"I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire.

"You do not believe in everything."

"I believe in you."

"Grantaire will you do me a service?"

"Anything. I'll black your boots."

"Well, don't meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from
your absinthe."

"You are an ingrate, Enjolras."

"You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine! You capable of it!"

"I am capable of descending the Rue de Gres, of crossing the Place
Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking
the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the
Rue d'Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind
me the Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vielles Tuileries,
of striding across the boulevard, of following the Chaussee du Maine,
of passing the barrier, and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of that.
My shoes are capable of that."

"Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu's?"

"Not much. We only address each other as thou."

"What will you say to them?"

"I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton.
Of principles."

"You?"

"I. But I don't receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible.
I have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my
constitution of the year Two by heart. `The liberty of one citizen
ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.' Do you take me
for a brute? I have an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer.
The Rights of Man, the sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am
even a bit of a Hebertist. I can talk the most superb twaddle
for six hours by the clock, watch in hand."

"Be serious," said Enjolras.

"I am wild," replied Grantaire.

Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man
who has taken a resolution.

"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you. You shall go
to the Barriere du Maine."

Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain.
He went out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home
to put on a Robespierre waistcoat.

"Red," said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras.
Then, with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet
points of the waistcoat across his breast.

And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:--

"Be easy."

He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.

A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Cafe Musain
was deserted. All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his
own direction, each to his own task. Enjolras, who had reserved
the Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.

Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met
on the plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are
so numerous in that side of Paris.

As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation
in review in his own mind. The gravity of events was self-evident.
When facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady,
move heavily, the slightest complication stops and entangles them.
A phenomenon whence arises ruin and new births. Enjolras descried
a luminous uplifting beneath the gloomy skirts of the future.
Who knows? Perhaps the moment was at hand. The people were
again taking possession of right, and what a fine spectacle!
The revolution was again majestically taking possession of France and
saying to the world: "The sequel to-morrow!" Enjolras was content.
The furnace was being heated. He had at that moment a powder train
of friends scattered all over Paris. He composed, in his own mind,
with Combeferre's philosophical and penetrating eloquence,
Feuilly's cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's dash, Bahorel's smile,
Jean Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's science, Bossuet's sarcasms,
a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at once.
All hands to work. Surely, the result would answer to the effort.
This was well. This made him think of Grantaire.

"Hold," said he to himself, "the Barriere du Maine will not take me
far out of my way. What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu's?
Let us have a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he
is getting on."

One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras
reached the Richefeu smoking-room.

He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door
fall to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled
with tables, men, and smoke.

A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another voice.
It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.

Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne
table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was
hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:--

"Double-six."

"Fours."

"The pig! I have no more."

"You are dead. A two."

"Six."

"Three."

"One."

"It's my move."

"Four points."

"Not much."

"It's your turn."

"I have made an enormous mistake."

"You are doing well."

"Fifteen."

"Seven more."

"That makes me twenty-two." [Thoughtfully, "Twenty-two!"]

"You weren't expecting that double-six. If I had placed it
at the beginning, the whole play would have been changed."

"A two again."

"One."

"One! Well, five."

"I haven't any."

"It was your play, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Blank."

"What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! [Long revery.] Two."

"One."

"Neither five nor one. That's bad for you."

"Domino."

"Plague take it!"

BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE

The assizes, also, were about to begin, and Villefort, shut up in his
room, exerted himself with feverish anxiety in drawing up the case
against the murderer of Caderousse. This affair, like all those in which
the Count of Monte Cristo had interfered, caused a great sensation in
Paris. The proofs were certainly not convincing, since they rested upon
a few words written by an escaped galley-slave on his death-bed, and who
might have been actuated by hatred or revenge in accusing his companion.
But the mind of the procureur was made up; he felt assured that
Benedetto was guilty, and he hoped by his skill in conducting this
aggravated case to flatter his self-love, which was about the only
vulnerable point left in his frozen heart.

The case was therefore prepared owing to the incessant labor of
Villefort, who wished it to be the first on the list in the coming
assizes. He had been obliged to seclude himself more than ever, to evade
the enormous number of applications presented to him for the purpose
of obtaining tickets of admission to the court on the day of trial. And
then so short a time had elapsed since the death of poor Valentine,
and the gloom which overshadowed the house was so recent, that no one
wondered to see the father so absorbed in his professional duties, which
were the only means he had of dissipating his grief.

Once only had Villefort seen his father; it was the day after that upon
which Bertuccio had paid his second visit to Benedetto, when the latter
was to learn his father's name. The magistrate, harassed and fatigued,
had descended to the garden of his house, and in a gloomy mood, similar
to that in which Tarquin lopped off the tallest poppies, he began
knocking off with his cane the long and dying branches of the
rose-trees, which, placed along the avenue, seemed like the spectres of
the brilliant flowers which had bloomed in the past season. More than
once he had reached that part of the garden where the famous boarded
gate stood overlooking the deserted enclosure, always returning by the
same path, to begin his walk again, at the same pace and with the same
gesture, when he accidentally turned his eyes towards the house, whence
he heard the noisy play of his son, who had returned from school to
spend the Sunday and Monday with his mother. While doing so, he observed
M. Noirtier at one of the open windows, where the old man had been
placed that he might enjoy the last rays of the sun which yet yielded
some heat, and was now shining upon the dying flowers and red leaves of
the creeper which twined around the balcony.

The eye of the old man was riveted upon a spot which Villefort could
scarcely distinguish. His glance was so full of hate, of ferocity, and
savage impatience, that Villefort turned out of the path he had been
pursuing, to see upon what person this dark look was directed. Then he
saw beneath a thick clump of linden-trees, which were nearly divested
of foliage, Madame de Villefort sitting with a book in her hand, the
perusal of which she frequently interrupted to smile upon her son, or
to throw back his elastic ball, which he obstinately threw from the
drawing-room into the garden. Villefort became pale; he understood the
old man's meaning. Noirtier continued to look at the same object, but
suddenly his glance was transferred from the wife to the husband, and
Villefort himself had to submit to the searching investigation of eyes,
which, while changing their direction and even their language, had lost
none of their menacing expression. Madame de Villefort, unconscious of
the passions that exhausted their fire over her head, at that moment
held her son's ball, and was making signs to him to reclaim it with a
kiss. Edward begged for a long while, the maternal kiss probably not
offering sufficient recompense for the trouble he must take to obtain
it; however at length he decided, leaped out of the window into a
cluster of heliotropes and daisies, and ran to his mother, his forehead
streaming with perspiration. Madame de Villefort wiped his forehead,
pressed her lips upon it, and sent him back with the ball in one hand
and some bonbons in the other.

Villefort, drawn by an irresistible attraction, like that of the bird to
the serpent, walked towards the house. As he approached it, Noirtier's
gaze followed him, and his eyes appeared of such a fiery brightness that
Villefort felt them pierce to the depths of his heart. In that earnest
look might be read a deep reproach, as well as a terrible menace. Then
Noirtier raised his eyes to heaven, as though to remind his son of a
forgotten oath. "It is well, sir," replied Villefort from below,--"it
is well; have patience but one day longer; what I have said I will do."
Noirtier seemed to be calmed by these words, and turned his eyes with
indifference to the other side. Villefort violently unbuttoned his
great-coat, which seemed to strangle him, and passing his livid hand
across his forehead, entered his study.

The night was cold and still; the family had all retired to rest but
Villefort, who alone remained up, and worked till five o'clock in the
morning, reviewing the last interrogatories made the night before by the
examining magistrates, compiling the depositions of the witnesses, and
putting the finishing stroke to the deed of accusation, which was one of
the most energetic and best conceived of any he had yet delivered.

The next day, Monday, was the first sitting of the assizes. The morning
dawned dull and gloomy, and Villefort saw the dim gray light shine upon
the lines he had traced in red ink. The magistrate had slept for a short
time while the lamp sent forth its final struggles; its flickerings
awoke him, and he found his fingers as damp and purple as though they
had been dipped in blood. He opened the window; a bright yellow streak
crossed the sky, and seemed to divide in half the poplars, which stood
out in black relief on the horizon. In the clover-fields beyond the
chestnut-trees, a lark was mounting up to heaven, while pouring out her
clear morning song. The damps of the dew bathed the head of Villefort,
and refreshed his memory. "To-day," he said with an effort,--"to-day the
man who holds the blade of justice must strike wherever there is guilt."
Involuntarily his eyes wandered towards the window of Noirtier's room,
where he had seen him the preceding night. The curtain was drawn, and
yet the image of his father was so vivid to his mind that he addressed
the closed window as though it had been open, and as if through the
opening he had beheld the menacing old man. "Yes," he murmured,--"yes,
be satisfied."

His head dropped upon his chest, and in this position he paced his
study; then he threw himself, dressed as he was, upon a sofa, less to
sleep than to rest his limbs, cramped with cold and study. By degrees
every one awoke. Villefort, from his study, heard the successive noises
which accompany the life of a house,--the opening and shutting of doors,
the ringing of Madame de Villefort's bell, to summon the waiting-maid,
mingled with the first shouts of the child, who rose full of the
enjoyment of his age. Villefort also rang; his new valet brought him the
papers, and with them a cup of chocolate.

"What are you bringing me?" said he.

"A cup of chocolate."

"I did not ask for it. Who has paid me this attention?"

"My mistress, sir. She said you would have to speak a great deal in
the murder case, and that you should take something to keep up your
strength;" and the valet placed the cup on the table nearest to the
sofa, which was, like all the rest, covered with papers. The valet then
left the room. Villefort looked for an instant with a gloomy expression,
then, suddenly, taking it up with a nervous motion, he swallowed its
contents at one draught. It might have been thought that he hoped the
beverage would be mortal, and that he sought for death to deliver him
from a duty which he would rather die than fulfil. He then rose, and
paced his room with a smile it would have been terrible to witness.
The chocolate was inoffensive, for M. de Villefort felt no effects. The
breakfast-hour arrived, but M. de Villefort was not at table. The valet
re-entered.

"Madame de Villefort wishes to remind you, sir," he said, "that eleven
o'clock has just struck, and that the trial commences at twelve."

"Well," said Villefort, "what then?"

"Madame de Villefort is dressed; she is quite ready, and wishes to know
if she is to accompany you, sir?"

"Where to?"

"To the Palais."

"What to do?"

"My mistress wishes much to be present at the trial."

"Ah," said Villefort, with a startling accent; "does she wish
that?"--The man drew back and said, "If you wish to go alone, sir, I
will go and tell my mistress." Villefort remained silent for a moment,
and dented his pale cheeks with his nails. "Tell your mistress," he at
length answered, "that I wish to speak to her, and I beg she will wait
for me in her own room."

"Yes, sir."

"Then come to dress and shave me."

"Directly, sir." The valet re-appeared almost instantly, and, having
shaved his master, assisted him to dress entirely in black. When he had
finished, he said,--

"My mistress said she should expect you, sir, as soon as you had
finished dressing."

"I am going to her." And Villefort, with his papers under his arm and
hat in hand, directed his steps toward the apartment of his wife. At the
door he paused for a moment to wipe his damp, pale brow. He then entered
the room. Madame de Villefort was sitting on an ottoman and impatiently
turning over the leaves of some newspapers and pamphlets which young
Edward, by way of amusing himself, was tearing to pieces before his
mother could finish reading them. She was dressed to go out, her bonnet
was placed beside her on a chair, and her gloves were on her hands.

"Ah, here you are, monsieur," she said in her naturally calm voice; "but
how pale you are! Have you been working all night? Why did you not come
down to breakfast? Well, will you take me, or shall I take Edward?"
Madame de Villefort had multiplied her questions in order to gain one
answer, but to all her inquiries M. de Villefort remained mute and cold
as a statue. "Edward," said Villefort, fixing an imperious glance on
the child, "go and play in the drawing-room, my dear; I wish to speak
to your mamma." Madame de Villefort shuddered at the sight of that cold
countenance, that resolute tone, and the awfully strange preliminaries.
Edward raised his head, looked at his mother, and then, finding that
she did not confirm the order, began cutting off the heads of his leaden
soldiers.

"Edward," cried M. de Villefort, so harshly that the child started up
from the floor, "do you hear me?--Go!" The child, unaccustomed to such
treatment, arose, pale and trembling; it would be difficult to say
whether his emotion were caused by fear or passion. His father went up
to him, took him in his arms, and kissed his forehead. "Go," he said:
"go, my child." Edward ran out. M. de Villefort went to the door, which
he closed behind the child, and bolted. "Dear me!" said the young woman,
endeavoring to read her husband's inmost thoughts, while a smile passed
over her countenance which froze the impassibility of Villefort; "what
is the matter?"

"Madame, where do you keep the poison you generally use?" said the
magistrate, without any introduction, placing himself between his wife
and the door.

Madame de Villefort must have experienced something of the sensation of
a bird which, looking up, sees the murderous trap closing over its head.
A hoarse, broken tone, which was neither a cry nor a sigh, escaped from
her, while she became deadly pale. "Monsieur," she said, "I--I do not
understand you." And, in her first paroxysm of terror, she had raised
herself from the sofa, in the next, stronger very likely than the other,
she fell down again on the cushions. "I asked you," continued Villefort,
in a perfectly calm tone, "where you conceal the poison by the aid
of which you have killed my father-in-law, M. de Saint-Meran, my
mother-in-law, Madame de Saint-Meran, Barrois, and my daughter
Valentine."

"Ah, sir," exclaimed Madame de Villefort, clasping her hands, "what do
you say?"

"It is not for you to interrogate, but to answer."

"Is it to the judge or to the husband?" stammered Madame de Villefort.
"To the judge--to the judge, madame!" It was terrible to behold the
frightful pallor of that woman, the anguish of her look, the trembling
of her whole frame. "Ah, sir," she muttered, "ah, sir," and this was
all.

"You do not answer, madame!" exclaimed the terrible interrogator. Then
he added, with a smile yet more terrible than his anger, "It is true,
then; you do not deny it!" She moved forward. "And you cannot deny it!"
added Villefort, extending his hand toward her, as though to seize her
in the name of justice. "You have accomplished these different crimes
with impudent address, but which could only deceive those whose
affections for you blinded them. Since the death of Madame de
Saint-Meran, I have known that a poisoner lived in my house. M.
d'Avrigny warned me of it. After the death of Barrois my suspicions were
directed towards an angel,--those suspicions which, even when there
is no crime, are always alive in my heart; but after the death of
Valentine, there has been no doubt in my mind, madame, and not only in
mine, but in those of others; thus your crime, known by two persons,
suspected by many, will soon become public, and, as I told you just now,
you no longer speak to the husband, but to the judge."

The young woman hid her face in her hands. "Oh, sir," she stammered, "I
beseech you, do not believe appearances."

"Are you, then, a coward?" cried Villefort, in a contemptuous voice.
"But I have always observed that poisoners were cowards. Can you be a
coward,--you who have had the courage to witness the death of two old
men and a young girl murdered by you?"

"Sir! sir!"

"Can you be a coward?" continued Villefort, with increasing excitement,
"you, who could count, one by one, the minutes of four death agonies?
You, who have arranged your infernal plans, and removed the beverages
with a talent and precision almost miraculous? Have you, then, who have
calculated everything with such nicety, have you forgotten to calculate
one thing--I mean where the revelation of your crimes will lead you to?
Oh, it is impossible--you must have saved some surer, more subtle and
deadly poison than any other, that you might escape the punishment
that you deserve. You have done this--I hope so, at least." Madame de
Villefort stretched out her hands, and fell on her knees.

"I understand," he said, "you confess; but a confession made to the
judges, a confession made at the last moment, extorted when the crime
cannot be denied, diminishes not the punishment inflicted on the
guilty!"

"The punishment?" exclaimed Madame de Villefort, "the punishment,
monsieur? Twice you have pronounced that word!"

"Certainly. Did you hope to escape it because you were four times
guilty? Did you think the punishment would be withheld because you are
the wife of him who pronounces it?--No, madame, no; the scaffold awaits
the poisoner, whoever she may be, unless, as I just said, the poisoner
has taken the precaution of keeping for herself a few drops of her
deadliest potion." Madame de Villefort uttered a wild cry, and a hideous
and uncontrollable terror spread over her distorted features. "Oh,
do not fear the scaffold, madame," said the magistrate; "I will not
dishonor you, since that would be dishonor to myself; no, if you have
heard me distinctly, you will understand that you are not to die on the
scaffold."

"No, I do not understand; what do you mean?" stammered the unhappy
woman, completely overwhelmed. "I mean that the wife of the first
magistrate in the capital shall not, by her infamy, soil an unblemished
name; that she shall not, with one blow, dishonor her husband and her
child."

"No, no--oh, no!"

"Well, madame, it will be a laudable action on your part, and I will
thank you for it!"

"You will thank me--for what?"

"For what you have just said."

"What did I say? Oh, my brain whirls; I no longer understand anything.
Oh, my God, my God!" And she rose, with her hair dishevelled, and her
lips foaming.

"Have you answered the question I put to you on entering the
room?--where do you keep the poison you generally use, madame?" Madame
de Villefort raised her arms to heaven, and convulsively struck one
hand against the other. "No, no," she vociferated, "no, you cannot wish
that!"

"What I do not wish, madame, is that you should perish on the scaffold.
Do you understand?" asked Villefort.

"Oh, mercy, mercy, monsieur!"

"What I require is, that justice be done. I am on the earth to punish,
madame," he added, with a flaming glance; "any other woman, were it the
queen herself, I would send to the executioner; but to you I shall be
merciful. To you I will say, 'Have you not, madame, put aside some of
the surest, deadliest, most speedy poison?'"

"Oh, pardon me, sir; let me live!"

"She is cowardly," said Villefort.

"Reflect that I am your wife!"

"You are a poisoner."

"In the name of heaven!"

"No!"

"In the name of the love you once bore me!"

"No, no!"

"In the name of our child! Ah, for the sake of our child, let me live!"

"No, no, no, I tell you; one day, if I allow you to live, you will
perhaps kill him, as you have the others!"

"I?--I kill my boy?" cried the distracted mother, rushing toward
Villefort; "I kill my son? Ha, ha, ha!" and a frightful, demoniac laugh
finished the sentence, which was lost in a hoarse rattle. Madame de
Villefort fell at her husband's feet. He approached her. "Think of it,
madame," he said; "if, on my return, justice his not been satisfied, I
will denounce you with my own mouth, and arrest you with my own hands!"
She listened, panting, overwhelmed, crushed; her eye alone lived, and
glared horribly. "Do you understand me?" he said. "I am going down there
to pronounce the sentence of death against a murderer. If I find you
alive on my return, you shall sleep to-night in the conciergerie."
Madame de Villefort sighed; her nerves gave way, and she sunk on the
carpet. The king's attorney seemed to experience a sensation of pity;
he looked upon her less severely, and, bowing to her, said slowly,
"Farewell, madame, farewell!" That farewell struck Madame de Villefort
like the executioner's knife. She fainted. The procureur went out, after
having double-locked the door.

The countess, on hearing that Moscow was on fire, began to cry.
Natasha, pale, with a fixed look, was sitting on the bench under the
icons just where she had sat down on arriving and paid no attention to
her father's words. She was listening to the ceaseless moaning of
the adjutant, three houses off.

"Oh, how terrible," said Sonya returning from the yard chilled and
frightened. "I believe the whole of Moscow will burn, there's an awful
glow! Natasha, do look! You can see it from the window," she said to
her cousin, evidently wishing to distract her mind.

But Natasha looked at her as if not understanding what was said to
her and again fixed her eyes on the corner of the stove. She had
been in this condition of stupor since the morning, when Sonya, to the
surprise and annoyance of the countess, had for some unaccountable
reason found it necessary to tell Natasha of Prince Andrew's wound and
of his being with their party. The countess had seldom been so angry
with anyone as she was with Sonya. Sonya had cried and begged to be
forgiven and now, as if trying to atone for her fault, paid
unceasing attention to her cousin.

"Look, Natasha, how dreadfully it is burning!" said she.

"What's burning?" asked Natasha. "Oh, yes, Moscow."

And as if in order not to offend Sonya and to get rid of her, she
turned her face to the window, looked out in such a way that it was
evident that she could not see anything, and again settled down in her
former attitude.

"But you didn't see it!"

"Yes, really I did," Natasha replied in a voice that pleaded to be
left in peace.

Both the countess and Sonya understood that, naturally, neither
Moscow nor the burning of Moscow nor anything else could seem of
importance to Natasha.

The count returned and lay down behind the partition. The countess
went up to her daughter and touched her head with the back of her hand
as she was wont to do when Natasha was ill, then touched her
forehead with her lips as if to feel whether she was feverish, and
finally kissed her.

"You are cold. You are trembling all over. You'd better lie down,"
said the countess.

"Lie down? All right, I will. I'll lie down at once," said Natasha.

When Natasha had been told that morning that Prince Andrew was
seriously wounded and was traveling with their party, she had at first
asked many questions: Where was he going? How was he wounded? Was it
serious? And could she see him? But after she had been told that she
could not see him, that he was seriously wounded but that his life was
not in danger, she ceased to ask questions or to speak at all,
evidently disbelieving what they told her, and convinced that say what
she might she would still be told the same. All the way she had sat
motionless in a corner of the coach with wide open eyes, and the
expression in them which the countess knew so well and feared so much,
and now she sat in the same way on the bench where she had seated
herself on arriving. She was planning something and either deciding or
had already decided something in her mind. The countess knew this, but
what it might be she did not know, and this alarmed and tormented her.

"Natasha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed."

A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only. Madame
Schoss and the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor.

"No, Mamma, I will lie down here on the floor," Natasha replied
irritably and she went to the window and opened it. Through the open
window the moans of the adjutant could be heard more distinctly. She
put her head out into the damp night air, and the countess saw her
slim neck shaking with sobs and throbbing against the window frame.
Natasha knew it was not Prince Andrew who was moaning. She knew Prince
Andrew was in the same yard as themselves and in a part of the hut
across the passage; but this dreadful incessant moaning made her
sob. The countess exchanged a look with Sonya.

"Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet," said the countess, softly
touching Natasha's shoulders. "Come, lie down."

"Oh, yes... I'll lie down at once," said Natasha, and began
hurriedly undressing, tugging at the tapes of her petticoat.

When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing jacket,
she sat down with her foot under her on the bed that had been made
up on the floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the
front, and began replaiting it. Her long, thin, practiced fingers
rapidly unplaited, replaited, and tied up her plait. Her head moved
from side to side from habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked
fixedly before her. When her toilet for the night was finished she
sank gently onto the sheet spread over the hay on the side nearest the
door.

"Natasha, you'd better lie in the middle," said Sonya.

"I'll stay here," muttered Natasha. "Do lie down," she added
crossly, and buried her face in the pillow.

The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sonya undressed hastily and lay
down. The small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left
in the room. But in the yard there was a light from the fire at Little
Mytishchi a mile and a half away, and through the night came the noise
of people shouting at a tavern Mamonov's Cossacks had set up across
the street, and the adjutant's unceasing moans could still be heard.

For a long time Natasha listened attentively to the sounds that
reached her from inside and outside the room and did not move. First
she heard her mother praying and sighing and the creaking of her bed
under her, then Madame Schoss' familiar whistling snore and Sonya's
gentle breathing. Then the countess called to Natasha. Natasha did not
answer.

"I think she's asleep, Mamma," said Sonya softly.

After a short silence the countess spoke again but this time no one
replied.

Soon after that Natasha heard her mother's even breathing. Natasha
did not move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the
quilt, was growing cold on the bare floor.

As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in
a crack in the wall. A cock crowed far off and another replied near
by. The shouting in the tavern had died down; only the moaning of
the adjutant was heard. Natasha sat up.

"Sonya, are you asleep? Mamma?" she whispered.

No one replied. Natasha rose slowly and carefully, crossed
herself, and stepped cautiously on the cold and dirty floor with her
slim, supple, bare feet. The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping
cautiously from one foot to the other she ran like a kitten the few
steps to the door and grasped the cold door handle.

It seemed to her that something heavy was beating rhythmically
against all the walls of the room: it was her own heart, sinking
with alarm and terror and overflowing with love.

She opened the door and stepped across the threshold and onto the
cold, damp earthen floor of the passage. The cold she felt refreshed
her. With her bare feet she touched a sleeping man, stepped over
him, and opened the door into the part of the hut where Prince
Andrew lay. It was dark in there. In the farthest corner, on a bench
beside a bed on which something was lying, stood a tallow candle
with a long, thick, and smoldering wick.

From the moment she had been told that morning of Prince Andrew's
wound and his presence there, Natasha had resolved to see him. She did
not know why she had to, she knew the meeting would be painful, but
felt the more convinced that it was necessary.

All day she had lived only in hope of seeing him that night. But now
that the moment had come she was filled with dread of what she might
see. How was he maimed? What was left of him? Was he like that
incessant moaning of the adjutant's? Yes, he was altogether like that.
In her imagination he was that terrible moaning personified. When she
saw an indistinct shape in the corner, and mistook his knees raised
under the quilt for his shoulders, she imagined a horrible body there,
and stood still in terror. But an irresistible impulse drew her
forward. She cautiously took one step and then another, and found
herself in the middle of a small room containing baggage. Another
man--Timokhin--was lying in a corner on the benches beneath the icons,
and two others--the doctor and a valet--lay on the floor.

The valet sat up and whispered something. Timokhin, kept awake by
the pain in his wounded leg, gazed with wide-open eyes at this strange
apparition of a girl in a white chemise, dressing jacket, and
nightcap. The valet's sleepy, frightened exclamation, "What do you
want? What's the matter?" made Natasha approach more swiftly to what
was lying in the corner. Horribly unlike a man as that body looked,
she must see him. She passed the valet, the snuff fell from the candle
wick, and she saw Prince Andrew clearly with his arms outside the
quilt, and such as she had always seen him.

He was the same as ever, but the feverish color of his face, his
glittering eyes rapturously turned toward her, and especially his
neck, delicate as a child's, revealed by the turn-down collar of his
shirt, gave him a peculiarly innocent, childlike look, such as she had
never seen on him before. She went up to him and with a swift,
flexible, youthful movement dropped on her knees.

He smiled and held out his hand to her.

Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated.
The fermentation entered the boiling state. Ever since 1830,
petty partial revolts had been going on here and there,
which were quickly suppressed, but ever bursting forth afresh,
the sign of a vast underlying conflagration. Something terrible
was in preparation. Glimpses could be caught of the features still
indistinct and imperfectly lighted, of a possible revolution.
France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning
its ebullition.

The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union
of the two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops,
grave and stormy.

The government was there purely and simply called in question.
There people publicly discussed the question of fighting or of
keeping quiet. There were back shops where workingmen were made to
swear that they would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm,
and "that they would fight without counting the number of the enemy."
This engagement once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the
wine-shop "assumed a sonorous tone," and said, "You understand!
You have sworn!"

Sometimes they went up stairs, to a private room on the first floor,
and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted. They made
the initiated take oaths to render service to himself as well as
to the fathers of families. That was the formula.

In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read. They treated
the government with contempt, says a secret report of that time.

Words like the following could be heard there:--

"I don't know the names of the leaders. We folks shall not
know the day until two hours beforehand." One workman said:
"There are three hundred of us, let each contribute ten sous,
that will make one hundred and fifty francs with which to procure
powder and shot."

Another said: "I don't ask for six months, I don't ask for even two.
In less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government.
With twenty-five thousand men we can face them." Another said:
"I don't sleep at night, because I make cartridges all night."
From time to time, men "of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats"
came and "caused embarrassment," and with the air of "command,"
shook hands with the most important, and then went away. They never
stayed more than ten minutes. Significant remarks were exchanged
in a low tone: "The plot is ripe, the matter is arranged." "It was
murmured by all who were there," to borrow the very expression of one
of those who were present. The exaltation was such that one day,
a workingman exclaimed, before the whole wine-shop: "We have no arms!"
One of his comrades replied: "The soldiers have!" thus parodying
without being aware of the fact, Bonaparte's proclamation to the army
in Italy: "When they had anything of a more secret nature on hand,"
adds one report, "they did not communicate it to each other."
It is not easy to understand what they could conceal after what they
said.

These reunions were sometimes periodical. At certain ones of them,
there were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they
were always the same. In others, any one entered who wished,
and the room was so full that they were forced to stand.
Some went thither through enthusiasm and passion; others because
it was on their way to their work. As during the Revolution,
there were patriotic women in some of these wine-shops who embraced
new-comers.

Other expressive facts came to light.

A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark:
"Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you."

Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue
de Charonne. The balloting was carried on in their caps.

Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons
in the Rue de Cotte. There there was a trophy of arms formed of
wooden broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils. One day, the buttons
were removed from the foils.

A workman said: "There are twenty-five of us, but they don't
count on me, because I am looked upon as a machine." Later on,
that machine became Quenisset.

The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange
and indescribable notoriety. A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said
to another woman: "For a long time, there has been a strong force
busy making cartridges." In the open street, proclamation could
be seen addressed to the National Guard in the departments.
One of these proclamations was signed: Burtot, wine-merchant.

One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian
accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the
Marche Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed
to emanate from an occult power. Groups formed around him,
and applauded.

The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and
noted down. "--Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn,
our bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison."--"The
breakdown which has recently taken place in cottons has converted
to us many mediums."--"The future of nations is being worked out in
our obscure ranks."--" Here are the fixed terms: action or reaction,
revolution or counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer
believe either in inertia or in immobility. For the people
against the people, that is the question. There is no other."--"On
the day when we cease to suit you, break us, but up to that day,
help us to march on." All this in broad daylight.

Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the
people by reason of their very audacity. On the 4th of April, 1832,
a passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle
of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: "I am a Babouvist!"
But beneath Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.

Among other things, this man said:--

"Down with property! The opposition of the left is cowardly
and treacherous. When it wants to be on the right side,
it preaches revolution, it is democratic in order to escape
being beaten, and royalist so that it may not have to fight.
The republicans are beasts with feathers. Distrust the republicans,
citizens of the laboring classes."

"Silence, citizen spy!" cried an artisan.

This shout put an end to the discourse.

Mysterious incidents occurred.

At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a "very
well dressed man," who said to him: "Whither are you bound,
citizen?" "Sir," replied the workingman, "I have not the honor
of your acquaintance." "I know you very well, however." And the
man added: "Don't be alarmed, I am an agent of the committee.
You are suspected of not being quite faithful. You know that if you
reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on you." Then he shook hands
with the workingman and went away, saying: "We shall meet again soon."

The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues,
not only in the wine-shops, but in the street.

"Get yourself received very soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.

"Why?"

"There is going to be a shot to fire."

Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies,
fraught with evident Jacquerie:--

"Who governs us?"

"M. Philippe."

"No, it is the bourgeoisie."

The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie
in a bad sense. The Jacques were the poor.

On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they
passed by: "We have a good plan of attack."

Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four
men who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barriere
du Trone:--

"Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris
any more."

Who was the he? Menacing obscurity.

"The principal leaders," as they said in the faubourg, held themselves
apart. It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop
near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society
aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving
as intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about
these leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular
arrogance of this reply made later on by a man accused before
the Court of Peers:--

"Who was your leader?"

"I knew of none and I recognized none."

There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes
idle reports, rumors, hearsay. Other indications cropped up.

A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around
the ground on which a house was in process of construction,
in the Rue de Reuilly found on that plot the torn fragment
of a letter on which were still legible the following lines:--

The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the
sections for the different societies.

And, as a postscript:--

We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere,
No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house
of a gunsmith in that court. The section owns no arms.

What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his
neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up
another paper, torn like the first, and still more significant,
of which we reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest
attaching to these strange documents:--

+------------------------------------------------------------+ | Q
| C | D | E | Learn this list by heart. After so doing | | | | |
| you will tear it up. The men admitted | | | | | | will do the
same when you have transmitted | | | | | | their orders to them.
| | | | | | Health and Fraternity, | | | | | | u og a fe L. |
+------------------------------------------------------------+

It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret
of this find at the time, learned the significance of those four
capital letters: quinturions, centurions, decurions, eclaireurs
[scouts], and the sense of the letters: u og a fe, which was a date,
and meant April 15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed
names followed by very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. Bannerel.
8 guns, 83 cartridges. A safe man.--C. Boubiere. 1 pistol,
40 cartridges.--D. Rollet. 1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.--
E. Tessier. 1 sword, 1 cartridge-box. Exact.--Terreur. 8 guns.
Brave, etc.

Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure,
a third paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly,
this sort of enigmatical list:--

Unite: Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.
Barra. Soize. Salle-au-Comte.
Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
J. J. R.
Caius Gracchus.
Right of revision. Dufond. Four.
Fall of the Girondists. Derbac. Maubuee.
Washington. Pinson. 1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
Marseillaise.
Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
Hoche.
Marceau. Plato. Arbre-Sec.
Warsaw. Tilly, crier of the Populaire.

The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew
its significance. It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature
of the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights
of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections.
To-day, when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than
history, we may publish them. It should be added, that the foundation
of the Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to
the date when this paper was found. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.

Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to
written notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.

In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-abrac, there
were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise
and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this
same gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card,
on which was written the following:--

Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . . 12 ounces.
Sulphur . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.
Charcoal . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces and a half.
Water . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ounces.

The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong
smell of powder.

A mason returning from his day's work, left behind him a little
package on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. This package
was taken to the police station. It was opened, and in it were
found two printed dialogues, signed Lahautiere, a song entitled:
"Workmen, band together," and a tin box full of cartridges.

One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see
how warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.

In a ditch on the boulevard, between Pere-Lachaise and the Barriere
du Trone, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,
discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood,
a bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation
of cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of
hunting-powder, and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented
evident traces of melted lead.

Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five
o'clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon,
who was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got
himself killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing
near his bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he
was in the act of preparing.

Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet
between the Barriere Picpus and the Barriere Charenton in a little
lane between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there
was a "Jeu de Siam."[33] One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse
and handed it to the other. As he was handing it to him, he noticed
that the perspiration of his chest had made the powder damp.
He primed the pistol and added more powder to what was already
in the pan. Then the two men parted.

[33] A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is smaller
than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes
a curve on the ground.

A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the
affair of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred
cartridges and twenty-four flints.

The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred
thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg.
On the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed.
The remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to
seize a single one.

An intercepted letter read: "The day is not far distant when,
within four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be
under arms."

All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil.
The approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the
face of the government. No singularity was lacking to this still
subterranean crisis, which was already perceptible. The bourgeois
talked peaceably to the working-classes of what was in preparation.
They said: "How is the rising coming along?" in the same tone in
which they would have said: "How is your wife?"

A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired: "Well, when are
you going to make the attack?"

Another shop-keeper said:--

"The attack will be made soon."

"I know it. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you,
now there are twenty-five thousand." He offered his gun,
and a neighbor offered a small pistol which he was willing to sell
for seven francs.

Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing. Not a point in Paris
nor in France was exempt from it. The artery was beating everywhere.
Like those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form
in the human body, the network of secret societies began to spread
all over the country. From the associations of the Friends
of the People, which was at the same time public and secret,
sprang the Society of the Rights of Man, which also dated from one
of the orders of the day: Pluviose, Year 40 of the republican era,
which was destined to survive even the mandate of the Court of
Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which did not hesitate
to bestow on its sections significant names like the following:--

Pikes.
Tocsin.
Signal cannon.
Phrygian cap.
January 21.
The beggars.
The vagabonds.
Forward march.
Robespierre.
Level.
Ca Ira.

The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action.
These were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead.
Other associations sought to recruit themselves from the great
mother societies. The members of sections complained that they
were torn asunder. Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee
of organization of the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the
liberty of the press, for individual liberty, for the instruction
of the people against indirect taxes. Then the Society of Equal
Workingmen which was divided into three fractions, the levellers,
the communists, the reformers. Then the Army of the Bastilles,
a sort of cohort organized on a military footing, four men commanded
by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by a sub-lieutenant, forty by
a lieutenant; there were never more than five men who knew each other.
Creation where precaution is combined with audacity and which seemed
stamped with the genius of Venice.

The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms,
the Society of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.

A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about
among these the republican affiliations. It was denounced
and repudiated there.

The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities,
Lyons, Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society
of the Rights of Man, the Charbonniere, and The Free Men.
All had a revolutionary society which was called the Cougourde.
We have already mentioned this word.

In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than
the faubourgs. A cafe in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop
of the Seven Billiards, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served
as rallying points for the students. The Society of the Friends
of the A B C affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the
Cougourde of Aix, met, as we have seen, in the Cafe Musain.
These same young men assembled also, as we have stated already, in a
restaurant wine-shop of the Rue Mondetour which was called Corinthe.
These meetings were secret. Others were as public as possible,
and the reader can judge of their boldness from these fragments
of an interrogatory undergone in one of the ulterior prosecutions:
"Where was this meeting held?" "In the Rue de la Paix."
"At whose house?" "In the street." "What sections were there?"
"Only one." "Which?" "The Manuel section." "Who was its leader?"
"I." "You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold course
of attacking the government. Where did your instructions come from?"
"From the central committee."

The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved
subsequently by the operations of Beford, Luneville, and Epinard.
They counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth,
on the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry.
In Burgundy and in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree;
that is to say, a pole surmounted by a red cap.

Such was the situation.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the population,
as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation and made
it felt. That was the sore point. This old faubourg, peopled like
an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees,
was quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult.
Everything was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption,
however, of the regular work. It is impossible to convey an idea
of this lively yet sombre physiognomy. In this faubourg exists
poignant distress hidden under attic roofs; there also exist rare
and ardent minds. It is particularly in the matter of distress
and intelligence that it is dangerous to have extremes meet.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble;
for it received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures,
strikes, slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances.
In times of revolution misery is both cause and effect. The blow
which it deals rebounds upon it. This population full of proud virtue,
capable to the highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly
to arms, prompt to explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to
be only awaiting the fall of a spark. Whenever certain sparks
float on the horizon chased by the wind of events, it is impossible
not to think of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and of the formidable
chance which has placed at the very gates of Paris that powder-house
of suffering and ideas.

The wine-shops of the Faubourg Antoine, which have been more than
once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused,
possess historical notoriety. In troublous times people grow
intoxicated there more on words than on wine. A sort of prophetic
spirit and an afflatus of the future circulates there, swelling hearts
and enlarging souls. The cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine
resemble those taverns of Mont Aventine erected on the cave of
the Sibyl and communicating with the profound and sacred breath;
taverns where the tables were almost tripods, and where was drunk
what Ennius calls the sibylline wine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people.
Revolutionary agitations create fissures there, through which
trickles the popular sovereignty. This sovereignty may do evil;
it can be mistaken like any other; but, even when led astray,
it remains great. We may say of it as of the blind cyclops, Ingens.

In '93, according as the idea which was floating about was good
or evil, according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm,
there leaped forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions,
now heroic bands.

Savage. Let us explain this word. When these bristling men,
who in the early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling,
wild, with uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves
upon ancient Paris in an uproar, what did they want? They wanted
an end to oppression, an end to tyranny, an end to the sword,
work for men, instruction for the child, social sweetness for
the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity, bread for all, the idea
for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress; and that holy,
sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible wise,
driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist, a roar
in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilization.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only
with fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise.
They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded
light with the mask of night.

Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying,
but ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men,
smiling, embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings,
in white plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their
elbows on a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently
on demeanor and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages,
of divine right, of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the
death penalty, of war, glorifying in low tones and with politeness,
the sword, the stake, and the scaffold. For our part, if we were
forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization
and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible. No perpendicular
fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.

Neither despotism nor terrorism. We desire progress with a gentle slope.

God takes care of that. God's whole policy consists in rendering
slopes less steep.

The court of Saint-Bernard has its own particular apartment for the
reception of guests; it is a long rectangle, divided by two upright
gratings placed at a distance of three feet from one another to prevent
a visitor from shaking hands with or passing anything to the prisoners.
It is a wretched, damp, nay, even horrible spot, more especially when we
consider the agonizing conferences which have taken place between those
iron bars. And yet, frightful though this spot may be, it is looked upon
as a kind of paradise by the men whose days are numbered; it is so rare
for them to leave the Lions' Den for any other place than the barrier
Saint-Jacques or the galleys!

In the court which we have attempted to describe, and from which a damp
vapor was rising, a young man with his hands in his pockets, who had
excited much curiosity among the inhabitants of the "Den," might be seen
walking. The cut of his clothes would have made him pass for an elegant
man, if those clothes had not been torn to shreds; still they did not
show signs of wear, and the fine cloth, beneath the careful hands of
the prisoner, soon recovered its gloss in the parts which were still
perfect, for the wearer tried his best to make it assume the appearance
of a new coat. He bestowed the same attention upon the cambric front of
a shirt, which had considerably changed in color since his entrance into
the prison, and he polished his varnished boots with the corner of a
handkerchief embroidered with initials surmounted by a coronet. Some
of the inmates of the "Lions' Den" were watching the operations of
the prisoner's toilet with considerable interest. "See, the prince is
pluming himself," said one of the thieves. "He's a fine looking fellow,"
said another; "if he had only a comb and hair-grease, he'd take the
shine off the gentlemen in white kids."

"His coat looks almost new, and his boots shine like a nigger's face.
It's pleasant to have such well-dressed comrades; but didn't those
gendarmes behave shameful?--must 'a been jealous, to tear such clothes!"

"He looks like a big-bug," said another; "dresses in fine style. And,
then, to be here so young! Oh, what larks!" Meanwhile the object of
this hideous admiration approached the wicket, against which one of the
keepers was leaning. "Come, sir," he said, "lend me twenty francs; you
will soon be paid; you run no risks with me. Remember, I have relations
who possess more millions than you have deniers. Come, I beseech
you, lend me twenty francs, so that I may buy a dressing-gown; it is
intolerable always to be in a coat and boots! And what a coat, sir, for
a prince of the Cavalcanti!" The keeper turned his back, and shrugged
his shoulders; he did not even laugh at what would have caused any one
else to do so; he had heard so many utter the same things,--indeed, he
heard nothing else.

"Come," said Andrea, "you are a man void of compassion; I'll have you
turned out." This made the keeper turn around, and he burst into a loud
laugh. The prisoners then approached and formed a circle. "I tell you
that with that wretched sum," continued Andrea, "I could obtain a
coat, and a room in which to receive the illustrious visitor I am daily
expecting."

"Of course--of course," said the prisoners;--"any one can see he's a
gentleman!"

"Well, then, lend him the twenty francs," said the keeper, leaning on
the other shoulder; "surely you will not refuse a comrade!"

"I am no comrade of these people," said the young man, proudly, "you
have no right to insult me thus."

The thieves looked at one another with low murmurs, and a storm gathered
over the head of the aristocratic prisoner, raised less by his own
words than by the manner of the keeper. The latter, sure of quelling
the tempest when the waves became too violent, allowed them to rise to
a certain pitch that he might be revenged on the importunate Andrea,
and besides it would afford him some recreation during the long day. The
thieves had already approached Andrea, some screaming, "La savate--La
savate!" [*] a cruel operation, which consists in cuffing a comrade who
may have fallen into disgrace, not with an old shoe, but with an
iron-heeled one. Others proposed the "anguille," another kind of
recreation, in which a handkerchief is filled with sand, pebbles, and
two-sous pieces, when they have them, which the wretches beat like a
flail over the head and shoulders of the unhappy sufferer. "Let us
horsewhip the fine gentleman!" said others.

* Savate: an old shoe.

But Andrea, turning towards them, winked his eyes, rolled his tongue
around his cheeks, and smacked his lips in a manner equivalent to a
hundred words among the bandits when forced to be silent. It was a
Masonic sign Caderousse had taught him. He was immediately recognized as
one of them; the handkerchief was thrown down, and the iron-heeled shoe
replaced on the foot of the wretch to whom it belonged. Some voices were
heard to say that the gentleman was right; that he intended to be
civil, in his way, and that they would set the example of liberty of
conscience,--and the mob retired. The keeper was so stupefied at this
scene that he took Andrea by the hands and began examining his person,
attributing the sudden submission of the inmates of the Lions' Den
to something more substantial than mere fascination. Andrea made no
resistance, although he protested against it. Suddenly a voice was heard
at the wicket. "Benedetto!" exclaimed an inspector. The keeper relaxed
his hold. "I am called," said Andrea. "To the visitors' room!" said the
same voice.

"You see some one pays me a visit. Ah, my dear sir, you will see whether
a Cavalcanti is to be treated like a common person!" And Andrea, gliding
through the court like a black shadow, rushed out through the wicket,
leaving his comrades, and even the keeper, lost in wonder. Certainly
a call to the visitors' room had scarcely astonished Andrea less than
themselves, for the wily youth, instead of making use of his privilege
of waiting to be claimed on his entry into La Force, had maintained
a rigid silence. "Everything," he said, "proves me to be under the
protection of some powerful person,--this sudden fortune, the facility
with which I have overcome all obstacles, an unexpected family and an
illustrious name awarded to me, gold showered down upon me, and the most
splendid alliances about to be entered into. An unhappy lapse of fortune
and the absence of my protector have cast me down, certainly, but
not forever. The hand which has retreated for a while will be again
stretched forth to save me at the very moment when I shall think myself
sinking into the abyss. Why should I risk an imprudent step? It might
alienate my protector. He has two means of extricating me from this
dilemma,--the one by a mysterious escape, managed through bribery; the
other by buying off my judges with gold. I will say and do nothing until
I am convinced that he has quite abandoned me, and then"--

Andrea had formed a plan which was tolerably clever. The unfortunate
youth was intrepid in the attack, and rude in the defence. He had borne
with the public prison, and with privations of all sorts; still, by
degrees nature, or rather custom, had prevailed, and he suffered from
being naked, dirty, and hungry. It was at this moment of discomfort that
the inspector's voice called him to the visiting-room. Andrea felt his
heart leap with joy. It was too soon for a visit from the examining
magistrate, and too late for one from the director of the prison, or the
doctor; it must, then, be the visitor he hoped for. Behind the grating
of the room into which Andrea had been led, he saw, while his eyes
dilated with surprise, the dark and intelligent face of M. Bertuccio,
who was also gazing with sad astonishment upon the iron bars, the bolted
doors, and the shadow which moved behind the other grating.

"Ah," said Andrea, deeply affected.

"Good morning, Benedetto," said Bertuccio, with his deep, hollow voice.

"You--you?" said the young man, looking fearfully around him.

"Do you not recognize me, unhappy child?"

"Silence,--be silent!" said Andrea, who knew the delicate sense of
hearing possessed by the walls; "for heaven's sake, do not speak so
loud!"

"You wish to speak with me alone, do you not?" said Bertuccio.

"Oh, yes."

"That is well." And Bertuccio, feeling in his pocket, signed to a keeper
whom he saw through the window of the wicket.

"Read?" he said.

"What is that?" asked Andrea.

"An order to conduct you to a room, and to leave you there to talk to
me."

"Oh," cried Andrea, leaping with joy. Then he mentally added,--"Still my
unknown protector! I am not forgotten. They wish for secrecy, since we
are to converse in a private room. I understand, Bertuccio has been sent
by my protector."

The keeper spoke for a moment with an official, then opened the iron
gates and conducted Andrea to a room on the first floor. The room was
whitewashed, as is the custom in prisons, but it looked quite brilliant
to a prisoner, though a stove, a bed, a chair, and a table formed the
whole of its sumptuous furniture. Bertuccio sat down upon the chair,
Andrea threw himself upon the bed; the keeper retired.

"Now," said the steward, "what have you to tell me?"

"And you?" said Andrea.

"You speak first."

"Oh, no. You must have much to tell me, since you have come to seek me."

"Well, be it so. You have continued your course of villany; you have
robbed--you have assassinated."

"Well, I should say! If you had me taken to a private room only to tell
me this, you might have saved yourself the trouble. I know all these
things. But there are some with which, on the contrary, I am not
acquainted. Let us talk of those, if you please. Who sent you?"

"Come, come, you are going on quickly, M. Benedetto!"

"Yes, and to the point. Let us dispense with useless words. Who sends
you?"

"No one."

"How did you know I was in prison?"

"I recognized you, some time since, as the insolent dandy who so
gracefully mounted his horse in the Champs Elysees."

"Oh, the Champs Elysees? Ah, yes; we burn, as they say at the game
of pincette. The Champs Elysees? Come, let us talk a little about my
father."

"Who, then, am I?"

"You, sir?--you are my adopted father. But it was not you, I presume,
who placed at my disposal 100,000 francs, which I spent in four or five
months; it was not you who manufactured an Italian gentleman for my
father; it was not you who introduced me into the world, and had me
invited to a certain dinner at Auteuil, which I fancy I am eating
at this moment, in company with the most distinguished people in
Paris--amongst the rest with a certain procureur, whose acquaintance I
did very wrong not to cultivate, for he would have been very useful
to me just now;--it was not you, in fact, who bailed me for one or two
millions, when the fatal discovery of my little secret took place. Come,
speak, my worthy Corsican, speak!"

"What do you wish me to say?"

"I will help you. You were speaking of the Champs Elysees just now,
worthy foster-father."

"Well?"

"Well, in the Champs Elysees there resides a very rich gentleman."

"At whose house you robbed and murdered, did you not?"

"I believe I did."

"The Count of Monte Cristo?"

"'Tis you who have named him, as M. Racine says. Well, am I to rush into
his arms, and strain him to my heart, crying, 'My father, my father!'
like Monsieur Pixerecourt." [*]

"Do not let us jest," gravely replied Bertuccio, "and dare not to utter
that name again as you have pronounced it."

* Guilbert de Pixerecourt, French dramatist
(1775-1844).

"Bah," said Andrea, a little overcome, by the solemnity of Bertuccio's
manner, "why not?"

"Because the person who bears it is too highly favored by heaven to be
the father of such a wretch as you."

"Oh, these are fine words."

"And there will be fine doings, if you do not take care."

"Menaces--I do not fear them. I will say"--

"Do you think you are engaged with a pygmy like yourself?" said
Bertuccio, in so calm a tone, and with so steadfast a look, that
Andrea was moved to the very soul. "Do you think you have to do with
galley-slaves, or novices in the world? Benedetto, you are fallen into
terrible hands; they are ready to open for you--make use of them. Do not
play with the thunderbolt they have laid aside for a moment, but which
they can take up again instantly, if you attempt to intercept their
movements."

"My father--I will know who my father is," said the obstinate youth; "I
will perish if I must, but I will know it. What does scandal signify
to me? What possessions, what reputation, what 'pull,' as Beauchamp
says,--have I? You great people always lose something by scandal,
notwithstanding your millions. Come, who is my father?"

"I came to tell you."

"Ah," cried Benedetto, his eyes sparkling with joy. Just then the door
opened, and the jailer, addressing himself to Bertuccio, said,--"Excuse
me, sir, but the examining magistrate is waiting for the prisoner."

"And so closes our interview," said Andrea to the worthy steward; "I
wish the troublesome fellow were at the devil!"

"I will return to-morrow," said Bertuccio.

"Good! Gendarmes, I am at your service. Ah, sir, do leave a few crowns
for me at the gate that I may have some things I am in need of!"

"It shall be done," replied Bertuccio. Andrea extended his hand;
Bertuccio kept his own in his pocket, and merely jingled a few pieces
of money. "That's what I mean," said Andrea, endeavoring to smile, quite
overcome by the strange tranquillity of Bertuccio. "Can I be deceived?"
he murmured, as he stepped into the oblong and grated vehicle which they
call "the salad basket." "Never mind, we shall see! To-morrow, then!" he
added, turning towards Bertuccio.

"To-morrow!" replied the steward.

The Rostov party spent the night at Mytishchi, fourteen miles from
Moscow. They had started so late on the first of September, the road
had been so blocked by vehicles and troops, so many things had been
forgotten for which servants were sent back, that they had decided
to spend that night at a place three miles out of Moscow. The next
morning they woke late and were again delayed so often that they
only got as far as Great Mytishchi. At ten o'clock that evening the
Rostov family and the wounded traveling with them were all distributed
in the yards and huts of that large village. The Rostovs' servants and
coachmen and the orderlies of the wounded officers, after attending to
their masters, had supper, fed the horses, and came out into the
porches.

In a neighboring hut lay Raevski's adjutant with a fractured
wrist. The awful pain he suffered made him moan incessantly and
piteously, and his moaning sounded terrible in the darkness of the
autumn night. He had spent the first night in the same yard as the
Rostovs. The countess said she had been unable to close her eyes on
account of his moaning, and at Mytishchi she moved into a worse hut
simply to be farther away from the wounded man.

In the darkness of the night one of the servants noticed, above
the high body of a coach standing before the porch, the small glow
of another fire. One glow had long been visible and everybody knew
that it was Little Mytishchi burning--set on fire by Mamonov's
Cossacks.

"But look here, brothers, there's another fire!" remarked an
orderly.

All turned their attention to the glow.

"But they told us Little Mytishchi had been set on fire by Mamonov's
Cossacks."

"But that's not Mytishchi, it's farther away."

"Look, it must be in Moscow!"

Two of the gazers went round to the other side of the coach and
sat down on its steps.

"It's more to the left, why, Little Mytishchi is over there, and
this is right on the other side."

Several men joined the first two.

"See how it's flaring," said one. "That's a fire in Moscow: either
in the Sushchevski or the Rogozhski quarter."

No one replied to this remark and for some time they all gazed
silently at the spreading flames of the second fire in the distance.

Old Daniel Terentich, the count's valet (as he was called), came
up to the group and shouted at Mishka.

"What are you staring at, you good-for-nothing?... The count will be
calling and there's nobody there; go and gather the clothes together."

"I only ran out to get some water," said Mishka.

"But what do you think, Daniel Terentich? Doesn't it look as if that
glow were in Moscow?" remarked one of the footmen.

Daniel Terentich made no reply, and again for a long time they
were all silent. The glow spread, rising and falling, farther and
farther still.

"God have mercy.... It's windy and dry..." said another voice.

"Just look! See what it's doing now. O Lord! You can even see the
crows flying. Lord have mercy on us sinners!"

"They'll put it out, no fear!"

"Who's to put it out?" Daniel Terentich, who had hitherto been
silent, was heard to say. His voice was calm and deliberate. "Moscow
it is, brothers," said he. "Mother Moscow, the white..." his voice
faltered, and he gave way to an old man's sob.

And it was as if they had all only waited for this to realize the
significance for them of the glow they were watching. Sighs were
heard, words of prayer, and the sobbing of the count's old valet.

At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point
of penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which
envelop the beginning of Louis Philippe's reign, it was necessary
that there should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that
this book should offer some explanation with regard to this king.

Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority
without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue
of a revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real
aim of the Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orleans,
exercised no personal initiative. He had been born a Prince,
and he believed himself to have been elected King. He had not served
this mandate on himself; he had not taken it; it had been offered
to him, and he had accepted it; convinced, wrongly, to be sure,
but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in accordance with
right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance with duty.
Hence his possession was in good faith. Now, we say it in
good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in perfect
good faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its attack,
the amount of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs neither
on the King nor on the democracy. A clash of principles resembles
a clash of elements. The ocean defends the water, the hurricane
defends the air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy defends
the people; the relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute,
which is the republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but that
which constitutes its suffering to-day will constitute its safety
later on; and, in any case, those who combat are not to be blamed;
one of the two parties is evidently mistaken; the right is not,
like the Colossus of Rhodes, on two shores at once, with one
foot on the republic, and one in Royalty; it is indivisible,
and all on one side; but those who are in error are so sincerely;
a blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a ruffian.
Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these
formidable collisions. Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,
human irresponsibility is mingled with them.

Let us complete this exposition.

The government of 1840 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday,
it was obliged to fight to-day.

Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague
movements of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid,
and so lacking in solidity.

Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on
the preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased,
and from being concealed it became patent.

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside
of France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France,
as we have said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations
of it; translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps,
and of nonsense. Very few minds comprehend the divine language.
The most sagacious, the calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly,
and when they arrive with their text, the task has long been completed;
there are already twenty translations on the public place.
From each remaining springs a party, and from each misinterpretation
a faction; and each party thinks that it alone has the true text,
and each faction thinks that it possesses the light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current;
they are the old parties.

For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God,
think that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt,
one has the right to revolt against them. Error. For in these
revolutions, the one who revolts is not the people; it is the king.
Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt. Every revolution,
being a normal outcome, contains within itself its legitimacy,
which false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which remains even
when soiled, which survives even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity.
A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is
because it must be that it is.

None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution
of 1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning.
Errors make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its
vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic;
they attacked this revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it:
"Revolution, why this king?" Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from them,
this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was
clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people.
The enraged democracy reproached it with this.

Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future,
the establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute
at loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries,
on the other hand with eternal right.

In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had
become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe.
To keep the peace, was an increase of complication. A harmony
established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war.
From this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling,
was born armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which
in the harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself.
The Royalty of July reared up, in spite of the fact that it caught
it in the harness of European cabinets. Metternich would gladly
have put it in kicking-straps. Pushed on in France by progress,
it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers in Europe. After having
been towed, it undertook to tow.

Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary,
education, penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman,
wealth, misery, production, consumption, division, exchange,
coin, credit, the rights of capital, the rights of labor,--
all these questions were multiplied above society, a terrible slope.

Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement
became manifest. Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic
fermentation. The elect felt troubled as well as the masses;
in another manner, but quite as much.

Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,
traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with
indescribably vague epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated,
others united in families and almost in communion, turned over
social questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners,
who tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano,
hardly disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they
caught glimpses.

This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this
agitated epoch.

These men left to political parties the question of rights,
they occupied themselves with the question of happiness.

The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract
from society.

They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,
of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization,
such as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great
deal by the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a
manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,
patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics.
These men who grouped themselves under different appellations,
but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists,
endeavored to pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the
living waters of human felicity.

From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works
embraced everything. To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French
Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.

The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do
not here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point
of view, the questions raised by socialism. We confine ourselves
to indicating them.

All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves,
cosmogonic visions, revery and mysticism being cast aside, can be
reduced to two principal problems.

First problem: To produce wealth.

Second problem: To share it.

The first problem contains the question of work.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution
must be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without,
individual happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems. She creates
wealth admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is
complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes:
monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some,
all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people;
privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself.
A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or
private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings
of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined
all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.
They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition
abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition
made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is
therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions.
Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved.
The two problems must be combined and made but one.

Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice,
you will be England. You will have, like Venice, an artificial
power, or, like England, a material power; you will be the wicked
rich man. You will die by an act of violence, as Venice died,
or by bankruptcy, as England will fall. And the world will allow
to die and fall all that is merely selfishness, all that does
not represent for the human race either a virtue or an idea.

It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England,
we designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies
superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations
always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people,
will live again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England,
the nation, is immortal. That said, we continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,
suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the
feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy
of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached
the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor,
mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood,
and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping
arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family
of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it,
but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception,
may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed;
in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it,
and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will
be worthy to call yourself France.

This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects
which have gone astray; that is what it sought in facts,
that is what it sketched out in minds.

Efforts worthy of admiration! Sacred attempts!

These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen
necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account,
confused evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system
of politics to be created, which shall be in accord with the old
world without too much disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal,
a situation in which it became necessary to use Lafayette to
defend Polignac, the intuition of progress transparent beneath
the revolt, the chambers and streets, the competitions to be
brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in the Revolution,
perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the vague
acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain
of his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people,
his own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully,
and there were moments when strong and courageous as he was,
he was overwhelmed by the difficulties of being a king.

He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,
nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.

Piles of shadows covered the horizon. A strange shade,
gradually drawing nearer, extended little by little over men,
over things, over ideas; a shade which came from wraths and systems.
Everything which had been hastily stifled was moving and fermenting.
At times the conscience of the honest man resumed its breathing,
so great was the discomfort of that air in which sophisms were
intermingled with truths. Spirits trembled in the social anxiety
like leaves at the approach of a storm. The electric tension
was such that at certain instants, the first comer, a stranger,
brought light. Then the twilight obscurity closed in again.
At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed
as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.

Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July,
the year 1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending
and threatening.

The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince
de Conde engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus
as Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French
Prince and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred
of Nicolas, behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain,
Miguel in Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending
his hand over Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona,
at the North no one knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up
Poland in her coffin, irritated glances watching France narrowly all
over Europe, England, a suspected ally, ready to give a push to that
which was tottering and to hurl herself on that which should fall,
the peerage sheltering itself behind Beccaria to refuse four heads
to the law, the fleurs-de-lys erased from the King's carriage,
the cross torn from Notre Dame, Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined,
Benjamin Constant dead in indigence, Casimir Perier dead in the
exhaustion of his power; political and social malady breaking
out simultaneously in the two capitals of the kingdom, the one
in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil; at Paris
civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same glare
of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people;
the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse
de Berry in la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera,
added the sombre roar of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.

His visits were tolerably regular, though occasionally he appeared
a little before or after his time, but generally, both in summer and
winter, he took possession of his apartment about four o'clock, though
he never spent the night there. At half-past three in the winter the
fire was lighted by the discreet servant, who had the superintendence of
the little apartment, and in the summer ices were placed on the table
at the same hour. At four o'clock, as we have already stated, the
mysterious personage arrived. Twenty minutes afterwards a carriage
stopped at the house, a lady alighted in a black or dark blue dress, and
always thickly veiled; she passed like a shadow through the lodge, and
ran up-stairs without a sound escaping under the touch of her light
foot. No one ever asked her where she was going. Her face, therefore,
like that of the gentleman, was perfectly unknown to the two concierges,
who were perhaps unequalled throughout the capital for discretion.
We need not say she stopped at the second floor. Then she tapped in a
peculiar manner at a door, which after being opened to admit her was
again fastened, and curiosity penetrated no farther. They used the same
precautions in leaving as in entering the house. The lady always left
first, and as soon as she had stepped into her carriage, it drove away,
sometimes towards the right hand, sometimes to the left; then about
twenty minutes afterwards the gentleman would also leave, buried in his
cravat or concealed by his handkerchief.

The day after Monte Cristo had called upon Danglars, the mysterious
lodger entered at ten o'clock in the morning instead of four in the
afternoon. Almost directly afterwards, without the usual interval of
time, a cab arrived, and the veiled lady ran hastily up-stairs. The
door opened, but before it could be closed, the lady exclaimed: "Oh,
Lucien--oh, my friend!" The concierge therefore heard for the first time
that the lodger's name was Lucien; still, as he was the very perfection
of a door-keeper, he made up his mind not to tell his wife. "Well,
what is the matter, my dear?" asked the gentleman whose name the lady's
agitation revealed; "tell me what is the matter."

"Oh, Lucien, can I confide in you?"

"Of course, you know you can do so. But what can be the matter?
Your note of this morning has completely bewildered me. This
precipitation--this unusual appointment. Come, ease me of my anxiety, or
else frighten me at once."

"Lucien, a great event has happened!" said the lady, glancing
inquiringly at Lucien,--"M. Danglars left last night!"

"Left?--M. Danglars left? Where has he gone?"

"I do not know."

"What do you mean? Has he gone intending not to return?"

"Undoubtedly;--at ten o'clock at night his horses took him to the
barrier of Charenton; there a post-chaise was waiting for him--he
entered it with his valet de chambre, saying that he was going to
Fontainebleau."

"Then what did you mean"--

"Stay--he left a letter for me."

"A letter?"

"Yes; read it." And the baroness took from her pocket a letter which she
gave to Debray. Debray paused a moment before reading, as if trying
to guess its contents, or perhaps while making up his mind how to act,
whatever it might contain. No doubt his ideas were arranged in a few
minutes, for he began reading the letter which caused so much uneasiness
in the heart of the baroness, and which ran as follows:--

"Madame and most faithful wife."

Debray mechanically stopped and looked at the baroness, whose face
became covered with blushes. "Read," she said.

Debray continued:--

"When you receive this, you will no longer have a husband. Oh, you
need not be alarmed, you will only have lost him as you have lost your
daughter; I mean that I shall be travelling on one of the thirty or
forty roads leading out of France. I owe you some explanations for my
conduct, and as you are a woman that can perfectly understand me, I will
give them. Listen, then. I received this morning five millions which I
paid away; almost directly afterwards another demand for the same sum
was presented to me; I put this creditor off till to-morrow and I intend
leaving to-day, to escape that to-morrow, which would be rather too
unpleasant for me to endure. You understand this, do you not, my most
precious wife? I say you understand this, because you are as conversant
with my affairs as I am; indeed, I think you understand them better,
since I am ignorant of what has become of a considerable portion of my
fortune, once very tolerable, while I am sure, madame, that you know
perfectly well. For women have infallible instincts; they can even
explain the marvellous by an algebraic calculation they have invented;
but I, who only understand my own figures, know nothing more than that
one day these figures deceived me. Have you admired the rapidity of my
fall? Have you been slightly dazzled at the sudden fusion of my ingots?
I confess I have seen nothing but the fire; let us hope you have found
some gold among the ashes. With this consoling idea, I leave you,
madame, and most prudent wife, without any conscientious reproach for
abandoning you; you have friends left, and the ashes I have already
mentioned, and above all the liberty I hasten to restore to you. And
here, madame, I must add another word of explanation. So long as I hoped
you were working for the good of our house and for the fortune of our
daughter, I philosophically closed my eyes; but as you have transformed
that house into a vast ruin I will not be the foundation of another
man's fortune. You were rich when I married you, but little respected.
Excuse me for speaking so very candidly, but as this is intended
only for ourselves, I do not see why I should weigh my words. I have
augmented our fortune, and it has continued to increase during the
last fifteen years, till extraordinary and unexpected catastrophes
have suddenly overturned it,--without any fault of mine, I can honestly
declare. You, madame, have only sought to increase your own, and I am
convinced that you have succeeded. I leave you, therefore, as I took
you,--rich, but little respected. Adieu! I also intend from this time
to work on my own account. Accept my acknowledgments for the example you
have set me, and which I intend following.

"Your very devoted husband,

"Baron Danglars."

The baroness had watched Debray while he read this long and painful
letter, and saw him, notwithstanding his self-control, change color
once or twice. When he had ended the perusal, he folded the letter and
resumed his pensive attitude. "Well?" asked Madame Danglars, with an
anxiety easy to be understood.

"Well, madame?" unhesitatingly repeated Debray.

"With what ideas does that letter inspire you?"

"Oh, it is simple enough, madame; it inspires me with the idea that M.
Danglars has left suspiciously."

"Certainly; but is this all you have to say to me?"

"I do not understand you," said Debray with freezing coldness.

"He is gone! Gone, never to return!"

"Oh, madame, do not think that!"

"I tell you he will never return. I know his character; he is inflexible
in any resolutions formed for his own interests. If he could have made
any use of me, he would have taken me with him; he leaves me in Paris,
as our separation will conduce to his benefit;--therefore he has gone,
and I am free forever," added Madame Danglars, in the same supplicating
tone. Debray, instead of answering, allowed her to remain in an attitude
of nervous inquiry. "Well?" she said at length, "do you not answer me?"

"I have but one question to ask you,--what do you intend to do?"

"I was going to ask you," replied the baroness with a beating heart.

"Ah, then, you wish to ask advice of me?"

"Yes; I do wish to ask your advice," said Madame Danglars with anxious
expectation.

"Then if you wish to take my advice," said the young man coldly, "I
would recommend you to travel."

"To travel!" she murmured.

"Certainly; as M. Danglars says, you are rich, and perfectly free. In
my opinion, a withdrawal from Paris is absolutely necessary after the
double catastrophe of Mademoiselle Danglars' broken contract and M.
Danglars' disappearance. The world will think you abandoned and poor,
for the wife of a bankrupt would never be forgiven, were she to keep up
an appearance of opulence. You have only to remain in Paris for about a
fortnight, telling the world you are abandoned, and relating the details
of this desertion to your best friends, who will soon spread the report.
Then you can quit your house, leaving your jewels and giving up your
jointure, and every one's mouth will be filled with praises of your
disinterestedness. They will know you are deserted, and think you also
poor, for I alone know your real financial position, and am quite ready
to give up my accounts as an honest partner." The dread with which the
pale and motionless baroness listened to this, was equalled by the calm
indifference with which Debray had spoken. "Deserted?" she repeated;
"ah, yes, I am, indeed, deserted! You are right, sir, and no one can
doubt my position." These were the only words that this proud and
violently enamoured woman could utter in response to Debray.

"But then you are rich,--very rich, indeed," continued Debray, taking
out some papers from his pocket-book, which he spread upon the table.
Madame Danglars did not see them; she was engaged in stilling the
beatings of her heart, and restraining the tears which were ready to
gush forth. At length a sense of dignity prevailed, and if she did not
entirely master her agitation, she at least succeeded in preventing the
fall of a single tear. "Madame," said Debray, "it is nearly six months
since we have been associated. You furnished a principal of 100,000
francs. Our partnership began in the month of April. In May we commenced
operations, and in the course of the month gained 450,000 francs.
In June the profit amounted to 900,000. In July we added 1,700,000
francs,--it was, you know, the month of the Spanish bonds. In August we
lost 300,000 francs at the beginning of the month, but on the 13th we
made up for it, and we now find that our accounts, reckoning from the
first day of partnership up to yesterday, when I closed them, showed
a capital of 2,400,000 francs, that is, 1,200,000 for each of us. Now,
madame," said Debray, delivering up his accounts in the methodical
manner of a stockbroker, "there are still 80,000 francs, the interest of
this money, in my hands."

"But," said the baroness, "I thought you never put the money out to
interest."

"Excuse me, madame," said Debray coldly, "I had your permission to do
so, and I have made use of it. There are, then, 40,000 francs for your
share, besides the 100,000 you furnished me to begin with, making in all
1,340,000 francs for your portion. Now, madame, I took the precaution of
drawing out your money the day before yesterday; it is not long ago, you
see, and I was in continual expectation of being called on to deliver up
my accounts. There is your money,--half in bank-notes, the other half
in checks payable to bearer. I say there, for as I did not consider
my house safe enough, or lawyers sufficiently discreet, and as landed
property carries evidence with it, and moreover since you have no right
to possess anything independent of your husband, I have kept this sum,
now your whole fortune, in a chest concealed under that closet, and for
greater security I myself concealed it there.

"Now, madame," continued Debray, first opening the closet, then
the chest;--"now, madame, here are 800 notes of 1,000. francs each,
resembling, as you see, a large book bound in iron; to this I add a
certificate in the funds of 25,000. francs; then, for the odd cash,
making I think about 110,000. francs, here is a check upon my banker,
who, not being M. Danglars, will pay you the amount, you may rest
assured." Madame Danglars mechanically took the check, the bond, and the
heap of bank-notes. This enormous fortune made no great appearance on
the table. Madame Danglars, with tearless eyes, but with her breast
heaving with concealed emotion, placed the bank-notes in her bag, put
the certificate and check into her pocket-book, and then, standing pale
and mute, awaited one kind word of consolation. But she waited in vain.

"Now, madame," said Debray, "you have a splendid fortune, an income of
about 60,000 livres a year, which is enormous for a woman who cannot
keep an establishment here for a year, at least. You will be able
to indulge all your fancies; besides, should you find your income
insufficient, you can, for the sake of the past, madame, make use of
mine; and I am ready to offer you all I possess, on loan."

"Thank you, sir--thank you," replied the baroness; "you forget that
what you have just paid me is much more than a poor woman requires, who
intends for some time, at least, to retire from the world."

Debray was, for a moment, surprised, but immediately recovering himself,
he bowed with an air which seemed to say, "As you please, madame."

Madame Danglars had until then, perhaps, hoped for something; but when
she saw the careless bow of Debray, and the glance by which it was
accompanied, together with his significant silence, she raised her head,
and without passion or violence or even hesitation, ran down-stairs,
disdaining to address a last farewell to one who could thus part from
her. "Bah," said Debray, when she had left, "these are fine projects!
She will remain at home, read novels, and speculate at cards, since she
can no longer do so on the Bourse." Then taking up his account book, he
cancelled with the greatest care all the entries of the amounts he had
just paid away. "I have 1,060,000 francs remaining," he said. "What a
pity Mademoiselle de Villefort is dead! She suited me in every respect,
and I would have married her." And he calmly waited until the twenty
minutes had elapsed after Madame Danglars' departure before he left the
house. During this time he occupied himself in making figures, with his
watch by his side.

Asmodeus--that diabolical personage, who would have been created by
every fertile imagination if Le Sage had not acquired the priority in
his great masterpiece--would have enjoyed a singular spectacle, if
he had lifted up the roof of the little house in the Rue
Saint-Germain-des-Pres, while Debray was casting up his figures. Above
the room in which Debray had been dividing two millions and a half with
Madame Danglars was another, inhabited by persons who have played too
prominent a part in the incidents we have related for their appearance
not to create some interest. Mercedes and Albert were in that room.
Mercedes was much changed within the last few days; not that even in her
days of fortune she had ever dressed with the magnificent display which
makes us no longer able to recognize a woman when she appears in a
plain and simple attire; nor indeed, had she fallen into that state of
depression where it is impossible to conceal the garb of misery; no,
the change in Mercedes was that her eye no longer sparkled, her lips
no longer smiled, and there was now a hesitation in uttering the words
which formerly sprang so fluently from her ready wit.

It was not poverty which had broken her spirit; it was not a want
of courage which rendered her poverty burdensome. Mercedes, although
deposed from the exalted position she had occupied, lost in the sphere
she had now chosen, like a person passing from a room splendidly lighted
into utter darkness, appeared like a queen, fallen from her palace to
a hovel, and who, reduced to strict necessity, could neither become
reconciled to the earthen vessels she was herself forced to place
upon the table, nor to the humble pallet which had become her bed. The
beautiful Catalane and noble countess had lost both her proud glance and
charming smile, because she saw nothing but misery around her; the walls
were hung with one of the gray papers which economical landlords choose
as not likely to show the dirt; the floor was uncarpeted; the furniture
attracted the attention to the poor attempt at luxury; indeed,
everything offended eyes accustomed to refinement and elegance.

Madame de Morcerf had lived there since leaving her house; the continual
silence of the spot oppressed her; still, seeing that Albert continually
watched her countenance to judge the state of her feelings, she
constrained herself to assume a monotonous smile of the lips alone,
which, contrasted with the sweet and beaming expression that usually
shone from her eyes, seemed like "moonlight on a statue,"--yielding
light without warmth. Albert, too, was ill at ease; the remains of
luxury prevented him from sinking into his actual position. If he wished
to go out without gloves, his hands appeared too white; if he wished to
walk through the town, his boots seemed too highly polished. Yet these
two noble and intelligent creatures, united by the indissoluble ties
of maternal and filial love, had succeeded in tacitly understanding one
another, and economizing their stores, and Albert had been able to tell
his mother without extorting a change of countenance,--"Mother, we have
no more money."

Mercedes had never known misery; she had often, in her youth, spoken of
poverty, but between want and necessity, those synonymous words, there
is a wide difference. Amongst the Catalans, Mercedes wished for a
thousand things, but still she never really wanted any. So long as the
nets were good, they caught fish; and so long as they sold their fish,
they were able to buy twine for new nets. And then, shut out from
friendship, having but one affection, which could not be mixed up with
her ordinary pursuits, she thought of herself--of no one but herself.
Upon the little she earned she lived as well as she could; now there
were two to be supported, and nothing to live upon.

Winter approached. Mercedes had no fire in that cold and naked
room--she, who was accustomed to stoves which heated the house from
the hall to the boudoir; she had not even one little flower--she whose
apartment had been a conservatory of costly exotics. But she had her
son. Hitherto the excitement of fulfilling a duty had sustained them.
Excitement, like enthusiasm, sometimes renders us unconscious to the
things of earth. But the excitement had calmed down, and they felt
themselves obliged to descend from dreams to reality; after having
exhausted the ideal, they found they must talk of the actual.

"Mother," exclaimed Albert, just as Madame Danglars was descending the
stairs, "let us reckon our riches, if you please; I want capital to
build my plans upon."

"Capital--nothing!" replied Mercedes with a mournful smile.

"No, mother,--capital 3,000 francs. And I have an idea of our leading a
delightful life upon this 3,000 francs."

"Child!" sighed Mercedes.

"Alas, dear mother," said the young man, "I have unhappily spent too
much of your money not to know the value of it. These 3,000 francs
are enormous, and I intend building upon this foundation a miraculous
certainty for the future."

"You say this, my dear boy; but do you think we ought to accept these
3,000 francs?" said Mercedes, coloring.

"I think so," answered Albert in a firm tone. "We will accept them the
more readily, since we have them not here; you know they are buried in
the garden of the little house in the Allees de Meillan, at Marseilles.
With 200 francs we can reach Marseilles."

"With 200 francs?--are you sure, Albert?"

"Oh, as for that, I have made inquiries respecting the diligences and
steamboats, and my calculations are made. You will take your place
in the coupe to Chalons. You see, mother, I treat you handsomely for
thirty-five francs." Albert then took a pen, and wrote:--

Frs.
Coupe, thirty-five francs.............................. 35.
From Chalons to Lyons you will go on by the steamboat.. 6.
From Lyons to Avignon (still by steamboat)............. 16.
From Avignon to Marseilles, seven franc................ 7.
Expenses on the road, about fifty francs............... 50.
Total................................................. 114 frs.

"Let us put down 120," added Albert, smiling. "You see I am generous, am
I not, mother?"

"But you, my poor child?"

"I? do you not see that I reserve eighty francs for myself? A young man
does not require luxuries; besides, I know what travelling is."

"With a post-chaise and valet de chambre?"

"Any way, mother."

"Well, be it so. But these 200 francs?"

"Here they are, and 200 more besides. See, I have sold my watch for
100 francs, and the guard and seals for 300. How fortunate that the
ornaments were worth more than the watch. Still the same story of
superfluities! Now I think we are rich, since instead of the 114 francs
we require for the journey we find ourselves in possession of 250."

"But we owe something in this house?"

"Thirty francs; but I pay that out of my 150 francs,--that is
understood,--and as I require only eighty francs for my journey, you see
I am overwhelmed with luxury. But that is not all. What do you say to
this, mother?"

And Albert took out of a little pocket-book with golden clasps, a
remnant of his old fancies, or perhaps a tender souvenir from one of
the mysterious and veiled ladies who used to knock at his little
door,--Albert took out of this pocket-book a note of 1,000 francs.

"What is this?" asked Mercedes.

"A thousand francs."

"But whence have you obtained them?"

"Listen to me, mother, and do not yield too much to agitation." And
Albert, rising, kissed his mother on both cheeks, then stood looking at
her. "You cannot imagine, mother, how beautiful I think you!" said the
young man, impressed with a profound feeling of filial love. "You are,
indeed, the most beautiful and most noble woman I ever saw!"

"Dear child!" said Mercedes, endeavoring in vain to restrain a tear
which glistened in the corner of her eye. "Indeed, you only wanted
misfortune to change my love for you to admiration. I am not unhappy
while I possess my son!"

"Ah, just so," said Albert; "here begins the trial. Do you know the
decision we have come to, mother?"

"Have we come to any?"

"Yes; it is decided that you are to live at Marseilles, and that I am to
leave for Africa, where I will earn for myself the right to use the name
I now bear, instead of the one I have thrown aside." Mercedes sighed.
"Well, mother, I yesterday engaged myself as substitute in the Spahis,"
[*] added the young man, lowering his eyes with a certain feeling of
shame, for even he was unconscious of the sublimity of his self-
abasement. "I thought my body was my own, and that I might sell it. I
yesterday took the place of another. I sold myself for more than I
thought I was worth," he added, attempting to smile; "I fetched 2,000
francs."

* The Spahis are French cavalry reserved for service in
Africa.

"Then these 1,000 francs"--said Mercedes, shuddering--

"Are the half of the sum, mother; the other will be paid in a year."

Mercedes raised her eyes to heaven with an expression it would be
impossible to describe, and tears, which had hitherto been restrained,
now yielded to her emotion, and ran down her cheeks.

"The price of his blood!" she murmured.

"Yes, if I am killed," said Albert, laughing. "But I assure you, mother,
I have a strong intention of defending my person, and I never felt half
so strong an inclination to live as I do now."

"Merciful heavens!"

"Besides, mother, why should you make up your mind that I am to be
killed? Has Lamoriciere, that Ney of the South, been killed? Has
Changarnier been killed? Has Bedeau been killed? Has Morrel, whom we
know, been killed? Think of your joy, mother, when you see me return
with an embroidered uniform! I declare, I expect to look magnificent
in it, and chose that regiment only from vanity." Mercedes sighed while
endeavoring to smile; the devoted mother felt that she ought not to
allow the whole weight of the sacrifice to fall upon her son. "Well,
now you understand, mother!" continued Albert; "here are more than 4,000
francs settled on you; upon these you can live at least two years."

"Do you think so?" said Mercedes. These words were uttered in so
mournful a tone that their real meaning did not escape Albert; he felt
his heart beat, and taking his mother's hand within his own he said,
tenderly,--

"Yes, you will live!"

"I shall live!--then you will not leave me, Albert?"

"Mother, I must go," said Albert in a firm, calm voice; "you love me
too well to wish me to remain useless and idle with you; besides, I have
signed."

"You will obey your own wish and the will of heaven!"

"Not my own wish, mother, but reason--necessity. Are we not two
despairing creatures? What is life to you?--Nothing. What is life to
me?--Very little without you, mother; for believe me, but for you I
should have ceased to live on the day I doubted my father and renounced
his name. Well, I will live, if you promise me still to hope; and if
you grant me the care of your future prospects, you will redouble my
strength. Then I will go to the governor of Algeria; he has a royal
heart, and is essentially a soldier; I will tell him my gloomy story.
I will beg him to turn his eyes now and then towards me, and if he
keep his word and interest himself for me, in six months I shall be an
officer, or dead. If I am an officer, your fortune is certain, for I
shall have money enough for both, and, moreover, a name we shall both
be proud of, since it will be our own. If I am killed--well then mother,
you can also die, and there will be an end of our misfortunes."

"It is well," replied Mercedes, with her eloquent glance; "you are
right, my love; let us prove to those who are watching our actions that
we are worthy of compassion."

"But let us not yield to gloomy apprehensions," said the young man; "I
assure you we are, or rather we shall be, very happy. You are a woman at
once full of spirit and resignation; I have become simple in my tastes,
and am without passion, I hope. Once in service, I shall be rich--once
in M. Dantes' house, you will be at rest. Let us strive, I beseech
you,--let us strive to be cheerful."

"Yes, let us strive, for you ought to live, and to be happy, Albert."

"And so our division is made, mother," said the young man, affecting
ease of mind. "We can now part; come, I shall engage your passage."

"And you, my dear boy?"

"I shall stay here for a few days longer; we must accustom ourselves to
parting. I want recommendations and some information relative to Africa.
I will join you again at Marseilles."

"Well, be it so--let us part," said Mercedes, folding around her
shoulders the only shawl she had taken away, and which accidentally
happened to be a valuable black cashmere. Albert gathered up his papers
hastily, rang the bell to pay the thirty francs he owed to the landlord,
and offering his arm to his mother, they descended the stairs. Some one
was walking down before them, and this person, hearing the rustling of a
silk dress, turned around. "Debray!" muttered Albert.

"You, Morcerf?" replied the secretary, resting on the stairs. Curiosity
had vanquished the desire of preserving his incognito, and he was
recognized. It was, indeed, strange in this unknown spot to find the
young man whose misfortunes had made so much noise in Paris.

"Morcerf!" repeated Debray. Then noticing in the dim light the still
youthful and veiled figure of Madame de Morcerf:--"Pardon me," he added
with a smile, "I leave you, Albert." Albert understood his thoughts.
"Mother," he said, turning towards Mercedes, "this is M. Debray,
secretary of the minister for the interior, once a friend of mine."

"How once?" stammered Debray; "what do you mean?"

"I say so, M. Debray, because I have no friends now, and I ought not
to have any. I thank you for having recognized me, sir." Debray stepped
forward, and cordially pressed the hand of his interlocutor. "Believe
me, dear Albert," he said, with all the emotion he was capable of
feeling,--"believe me, I feel deeply for your misfortunes, and if in any
way I can serve you, I am yours."

"Thank you, sir," said Albert, smiling. "In the midst of our
misfortunes, we are still rich enough not to require assistance from any
one. We are leaving Paris, and when our journey is paid, we shall have
5,000 francs left." The blood mounted to the temples of Debray, who held
a million in his pocket-book, and unimaginative as he was he could not
help reflecting that the same house had contained two women, one of
whom, justly dishonored, had left it poor with 1,500,000. francs under
her cloak, while the other, unjustly stricken, but sublime in her
misfortune, was yet rich with a few deniers. This parallel disturbed his
usual politeness, the philosophy he witnessed appalled him, he muttered
a few words of general civility and ran down-stairs.

That day the minister's clerks and the subordinates had a great deal to
put up with from his ill-humor. But that same night, he found himself
the possessor of a fine house, situated on the Boulevard de la
Madeleine, and an income of 50,000 livres. The next day, just as Debray
was signing the deed, that is about five o'clock in the afternoon,
Madame de Morcerf, after having affectionately embraced her son, entered
the coupe of the diligence, which closed upon her. A man was hidden in
Lafitte's banking-house, behind one of the little arched windows which
are placed above each desk; he saw Mercedes enter the diligence, and he
also saw Albert withdraw. Then he passed his hand across his forehead,
which was clouded with doubt. "Alas," he exclaimed, "how can I restore
the happiness I have taken away from these poor innocent creatures? God
help me!"

Had this man been endowed with the slightest capacity for perceiving
the feelings of others, and had he at all understood what Pierre's
feelings were, the latter would probably have left him, but the
man's animated obtuseness to everything other than himself disarmed
Pierre.

"A Frenchman or a Russian prince incognito," said the officer,
looking at Pierre's fine though dirty linen and at the ring on his
finger. "I owe my life to you and offer you my friendship. A Frenchman
never forgets either an insult or a service. I offer you my
friendship. That is all I can say."

There was so much good nature and nobility (in the French sense of
the word) in the officer's voice, in the expression of his face and in
his gestures, that Pierre, unconsciously smiling in response to the
Frenchman's smile, pressed the hand held out to him.

"Captain Ramballe, of the 13th Light Regiment, Chevalier of the
Legion of Honor for the affair on the seventh of September," he
introduced himself, a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his
lips under his mustache. "Will you now be so good as to tell me with
whom I have the honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in
the ambulance with that maniac's bullet in my body?"

Pierre replied that he could not tell him his name and, blushing,
began to try to invent a name and to say something about his reason
for concealing it, but the Frenchman hastily interrupted him.

"Oh, please!" said he. "I understand your reasons. You are an
officer... a superior officer perhaps. You have borne arms against us.
That's not my business. I owe you my life. That is enough for me. I am
quite at your service. You belong to the gentry?" he concluded with
a shade of inquiry in his tone. Pierre bent his head. "Your
baptismal name, if you please. That is all I ask. Monsieur Pierre, you
say.... That's all I want to know."

When the mutton and an omelet had been served and a samovar and
vodka brought, with some wine which the French had taken from a
Russian cellar and brought with them, Ramballe invited Pierre to share
his dinner, and himself began to eat greedily and quickly like a
healthy and hungry man, munching his food rapidly with his strong
teeth, continually smacking his lips, and repeating--"Excellent!
Delicious!" His face grew red and was covered with perspiration.
Pierre was hungry and shared the dinner with pleasure. Morel, the
orderly, brought some hot water in a saucepan and placed a bottle of
claret in it. He also brought a bottle of kvass, taken from the
kitchen for them to try. That beverage was already known to the French
and had been given a special name. They called it limonade de cochon
(pig's lemonade), and Morel spoke well of the limonade de cochon he
had found in the kitchen. But as the captain had the wine they had
taken while passing through Moscow, he left the kvass to Morel and
applied himself to the bottle of Bordeaux. He wrapped the bottle up to
its neck in a table napkin and poured out wine for himself and for
Pierre. The satisfaction of his hunger and the wine rendered the
captain still more lively and he chatted incessantly all through
dinner.

"Yes, my dear Monsieur Pierre, I owe you a fine votive candle for
saving me from that maniac.... You see, I have bullets enough in my
body already. Here is one I got at Wagram" (he touched his side)
"and a second at Smolensk"--he showed a scar on his cheek--"and this
leg which as you see does not want to march, I got that on the seventh
at the great battle of la Moskowa. Sacre Dieu! It was splendid! That
deluge of fire was worth seeing. It was a tough job you set us
there, my word! You may be proud of it! And on my honor, in spite of
the cough I caught there, I should be ready to begin again. I pity
those who did not see it."

"I was there," said Pierre.

"Bah, really? So much the better! You are certainly brave foes.
The great redoubt held out well, by my pipe!" continued the Frenchman.
"And you made us pay dear for it. I was at it three times--sure as I
sit here. Three times we reached the guns and three times we were
thrown back like cardboard figures. Oh, it was beautiful, Monsieur
Pierre! Your grenadiers were splendid, by heaven! I saw them close
up their ranks six times in succession and march as if on parade. Fine
fellows! Our King of Naples, who knows what's what, cried 'Bravo!' Ha,
ha! So you are one of us soldiers!" he added, smiling, after a
momentary pause. "So much the better, so much the better, Monsieur
Pierre! Terrible in battle... gallant... with the fair" (he winked and
smiled), "that's what the French are, Monsieur Pierre, aren't they?"

The captain was so naively and good-humoredly gay, so real, and so
pleased with himself that Pierre almost winked back as he looked
merrily at him. Probably the word "gallant" turned the captain's
thoughts to the state of Moscow.

"Apropos, tell me please, is it true that the women have all left
Moscow? What a queer idea! What had they to be afraid of?"

"Would not the French ladies leave Paris if the Russians entered
it?" asked Pierre.

"Ha, ha, ha!" The Frenchman emitted a merry, sanguine chuckle,
patting Pierre on the shoulder. "What a thing to say!" he exclaimed.
"Paris?... But Paris, Paris..."

"Paris--the capital of the world," Pierre finished his remark for
him.

The captain looked at Pierre. He had a habit of stopping short in
the middle of his talk and gazing intently with his laughing, kindly
eyes.

"Well, if you hadn't told me you were Russian, I should have wagered
that you were Parisian! You have that... I don't know what, that..."
and having uttered this compliment, he again gazed at him in silence.

"I have been in Paris. I spent years there," said Pierre.

"Oh yes, one sees that plainly. Paris!... A man who doesn't know
Paris is a savage. You can tell a Parisian two leagues off. Paris is
Talma, la Duchenois, Potier, the Sorbonne, the boulevards," and
noticing that his conclusion was weaker than what had gone before,
he added quickly: "There is only one Paris in the world. You have been
to Paris and have remained Russian. Well, I don't esteem you the
less for it."

Under the influence of the wine he had drunk, and after the days
he had spent alone with his depressing thoughts, Pierre
involuntarily enjoyed talking with this cheerful and good-natured man.

"To return to your ladies--I hear they are lovely. What a wretched
idea to go and bury themselves in the steppes when the French army
is in Moscow. What a chance those girls have missed! Your peasants,
now--that's another thing; but you civilized people, you ought to know
us better than that. We took Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Naples, Rome,
Warsaw, all the world's capitals.... We are feared, but we are
loved. We are nice to know. And then the Emperor..." he began, but
Pierre interrupted him.

"The Emperor," Pierre repeated, and his face suddenly became sad and
embarrassed, "is the Emperor...?"

"The Emperor? He is generosity, mercy, justice, order, genius--that's
what the Emperor is! It is I, Ramballe, who tell you so.... I assure
you I was his enemy eight years ago. My father was an emigrant
count.... But that man has vanquished me. He has taken hold of me. I
could not resist the sight of the grandeur and glory with which he has
covered France. When I understood what he wanted--when I saw that he
was preparing a bed of laurels for us, you know, I said to myself:
'That is a monarch,' and I devoted myself to him! So there! Oh yes,
mon cher, he is the greatest man of the ages past or future."

"Is he in Moscow?" Pierre stammered with a guilty look.

The Frenchman looked at his guilty face and smiled.

"No, he will make his entry tomorrow," he replied, and continued his
talk.

Their conversation was interrupted by the cries of several voices at
the gate and by Morel, who came to say that some Wurttemberg hussars
had come and wanted to put up their horses in the yard where the
captain's horses were. This difficulty had arisen chiefly because
the hussars did not understand what was said to them in French.

The captain had their senior sergeant called in, and in a stern
voice asked him to what regiment he belonged, who was his commanding
officer, and by what right he allowed himself to claim quarters that
were already occupied. The German who knew little French, answered the
two first questions by giving the names of his regiment and of his
commanding officer, but in reply to the third question which he did
not understand said, introducing broken French into his own German,
that he was the quartermaster of the regiment and his commander had
ordered him to occupy all the houses one after another. Pierre, who
knew German, translated what the German said to the captain and gave
the captain's reply to the Wurttemberg hussar in German. When he had
understood what was said to him, the German submitted and took his men
elsewhere. The captain went out into the porch and gave some orders in
a loud voice.

When he returned to the room Pierre was sitting in the same place as
before, with his head in his hands. His face expressed suffering. He
really was suffering at that moment. When the captain went out and
he was left alone, suddenly he came to himself and realized the
position he was in. It was not that Moscow had been taken or that
the happy conquerors were masters in it and were patronizing him.
Painful as that was it was not that which tormented Pierre at the
moment. He was tormented by the consciousness of his own weakness. The
few glasses of wine he had drunk and the conversation with this
good-natured man had destroyed the mood of concentrated gloom in which
he had spent the last few days and which was essential for the
execution of his design. The pistol, dagger, and peasant coat were
ready. Napoleon was to enter the town next day. Pierre still
considered that it would be a useful and worthy action to slay the
evildoer, but now he felt that he would not do it. He did not know
why, but he felt a foreboding that he would not carry out his
intention. He struggled against the confession of his weakness but
dimly felt that he could not overcome it and that his former gloomy
frame of mind, concerning vengeance, killing, and self-sacrifice,
had been dispersed like dust by contact with the first man he met.

The captain returned to the room, limping slightly and whistling a
tune.

The Frenchman's chatter which had previously amused Pierre now
repelled him. The tune he was whistling, his gait, and the gesture
with which he twirled his mustache, all now seemed offensive. "I
will go away immediately. I won't say another word to him," thought
Pierre. He thought this, but still sat in the same place. A strange
feeling of weakness tied him to the spot; he wished to get up and go
away, but could not do so.

The captain, on the other hand, seemed very cheerful. He paced up
and down the room twice. His eyes shone and his mustache twitched as
if he were smiling to himself at some amusing thought.

"The colonel of those Wurttembergers is delightful," he suddenly
said. "He's a German, but a nice fellow all the same.... But he's a
German." He sat down facing Pierre. "By the way, you know German,
then?"

Pierre looked at him in silence.

"What is the German for 'shelter'?"

"Shelter?" Pierre repeated. "The German for shelter is Unterkunft."

"How do you say it?" the captain asked quickly and doubtfully.

"Unterkunft," Pierre repeated.

"Onterkoff," said the captain and looked at Pierre for some
seconds with laughing eyes. "These Germans are first-rate fools, don't
you think so, Monsieur Pierre?" he concluded.

"Well, let's have another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux, shall
we? Morel will warm us up another little bottle. Morel!" he called out
gaily.

Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at
Pierre by the candlelight and was evidently struck by the troubled
expression on his companion's face. Ramballe, with genuine distress
and sympathy in his face, went up to Pierre and bent over him.

"There now, we're sad," said he, touching Pierre's hand. "Have I
upset you? No, really, have you anything against me?" he asked Pierre.
"Perhaps it's the state of affairs?"

Pierre did not answer, but looked cordially into the Frenchman's
eyes whose expression of sympathy was pleasing to him.

"Honestly, without speaking of what I owe you, I feel friendship for
you. Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me. It is for life and
death. I say it with my hand on my heart!" said he, striking his
chest.

"Thank you," said Pierre.

The captain gazed intently at him as he had done when he learned
that "shelter" was Unterkunft in German, and his face suddenly
brightened.

"Well, in that case, I drink to our friendship!" he cried gaily,
filling two glasses with wine.

Pierre took one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied
his too, again pressed Pierre's hand, and leaned his elbows on the
table in a pensive attitude.

"Yes, my dear friend," he began, "such is fortune's caprice. Who
would have said that I should be a soldier and a captain of dragoons
in the service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him? Yet here I am
in Moscow with him. I must tell you, mon cher," he continued in the
sad and measured tones of a man who intends to tell a long story,
"that our name is one of the most ancient in France."

And with a Frenchman's easy and naive frankness the captain told
Pierre the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth, and
manhood, and all about his relations and his financial and family
affairs, "ma pauvre mere" playing of course an important part in the
story.

"But all that is only life's setting, the real thing is love--love! Am
I not right, Monsieur Pierre?" said he, growing animated. "Another
glass?"

Pierre again emptied his glass and poured himself out a third.

"Oh, women, women!" and the captain, looking with glistening eyes at
Pierre, began talking of love and of his love affairs.

There were very many of these, as one could easily believe,
looking at the officer's handsome, self-satisfied face, and noting the
eager enthusiasm with which he spoke of women. Though all Ramballe's
love stories had the sensual character which Frenchmen regard as the
special charm and poetry of love, yet he told his story with such
sincere conviction that he alone had experienced and known all the
charm of love and he described women so alluringly that Pierre
listened to him with curiosity.

It was plain that l'amour which the Frenchman was so fond of was not
that low and simple kind that Pierre had once felt for his wife, nor
was it the romantic love stimulated by himself that he experienced for
Natasha. (Ramballe despised both these kinds of love equally: the
one he considered the "love of clodhoppers" and the other the "love of
simpletons.") L'amour which the Frenchman worshiped consisted
principally in the unnaturalness of his relation to the woman and in a
combination of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling.

Thus the captain touchingly recounted the story of his love for a
fascinating marquise of thirty-five and at the same time for a
charming, innocent child of seventeen, daughter of the bewitching
marquise. The conflict of magnanimity between the mother and the
daughter, ending in the mother's sacrificing herself and offering
her daughter in marriage to her lover, even now agitated the
captain, though it was the memory of a distant past. Then he recounted
an episode in which the husband played the part of the lover, and
he--the lover--assumed the role of the husband, as well as several
droll incidents from his recollections of Germany, where "shelter"
is called Unterkunft and where the husbands eat sauerkraut and the
young girls are "too blonde."

Finally, the latest episode in Poland still fresh in the captain's
memory, and which he narrated with rapid gestures and glowing face,
was of how he had saved the life of a Pole (in general, the saving
of life continually occurred in the captain's stories) and the Pole
had entrusted to him his enchanting wife (parisienne de coeur) while
himself entering the French service. The captain was happy, the
enchanting Polish lady wished to elope with him, but, prompted by
magnanimity, the captain restored the wife to the husband, saying as
he did so: "I have saved your life, and I save your honor!" Having
repeated these words the captain wiped his eyes and gave himself a
shake, as if driving away the weakness which assailed him at this
touching recollection.

Listening to the captain's tales, Pierre--as often happens late in
the evening and under the influence of wine--followed all that was
told him, understood it all, and at the same time followed a train
of personal memories which, he knew not why, suddenly arose in his
mind. While listening to these love stories his own love for Natasha
unexpectedly rose to his mind, and going over the pictures of that
love in his imagination he mentally compared them with Ramballe's
tales. Listening to the story of the struggle between love and duty,
Pierre saw before his eyes every minutest detail of his last meeting
with the object of his love at the Sukharev water tower. At the time
of that meeting it had not produced an effect upon him--he had not
even once recalled it. But now it seemed to him that that meeting
had had in it something very important and poetic.

"Peter Kirilovich, come here! We have recognized you," he now seemed
to hear the words she had uttered and to see before him her eyes,
her smile, her traveling hood, and a stray lock of her hair... and
there seemed to him something pathetic and touching in all this.

Having finished his tale about the enchanting Polish lady, the
captain asked Pierre if he had ever experienced a similar impulse to
sacrifice himself for love and a feeling of envy of the legitimate
husband.

Challenged by this question Pierre raised his head and felt a need
to express the thoughts that filled his mind. He began to explain that
he understood love for a women somewhat differently. He said that in
all his life he had loved and still loved only one woman, and that she
could never be his.

"Tiens!" said the captain.

Pierre then explained that he had loved this woman from his earliest
years, but that he had not dared to think of her because she was too
young, and because he had been an illegitimate son without a name.
Afterwards when he had received a name and wealth he dared not think
of her because he loved her too well, placing her far above everything
in the world, and especially therefore above himself.

When he had reached this point, Pierre asked the captain whether
he understood that.

The captain made a gesture signifying that even if he did not
understand it he begged Pierre to continue.

"Platonic love, clouds..." he muttered.

Whether it was the wine he had drunk, or an impulse of frankness, or
the thought that this man did not, and never would, know any of
those who played a part in his story, or whether it was all these
things together, something loosened Pierre's tongue. Speaking
thickly and with a faraway look in his shining eyes, he told the whole
story of his life: his marriage, Natasha's love for his best friend,
her betrayal of him, and all his own simple relations with her.
Urged on by Ramballe's questions he also told what he had at first
concealed--his own position and even his name.

More than anything else in Pierre's story the captain was
impressed by the fact that Pierre was very rich, had two mansions in
Moscow, and that he had abandoned everything and not left the city,
but remained there concealing his name and station.

When it was late at night they went out together into the street.
The night was warm and light. To the left of the house on the Pokrovka
a fire glowed--the first of those that were beginning in Moscow. To
the right and high up in the sky was the sickle of the waning moon and
opposite to it hung that bright comet which was connected in
Pierre's heart with his love. At the gate stood Gerasim, the cook, and
two Frenchmen. Their laughter and their mutually incomprehensible
remarks in two languages could be heard. They were looking at the glow
seen in the town.

There was nothing terrible in the one small, distant fire in the
immense city.

Gazing at the high starry sky, at the moon, at the comet, and at the
glow from the fire, Pierre experienced a joyful emotion. "There now,
how good it is, what more does one need?" thought he. And suddenly
remembering his intention he grew dizzy and felt so faint that he
leaned against the fence to save himself from falling.

Without taking leave of his new friend, Pierre left the gate with
unsteady steps and returning to his room lay down on the sofa and
immediately fell asleep.

Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly
and choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced
to the state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830,
they nearly always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent
them from falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may
be deceived, and grave errors have been seen.

Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck.
In the establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution
had been cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty.
Louis Philippe was a rare man.

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating
circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been
of blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues;
careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs,
knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year;
sober, serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince;
sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged
with the duty of showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois,
an ostentation of the regular sleeping-apartment which had become
useful after the former illegitimate displays of the elder branch;
knowing all the languages of Europe, and, what is more rare,
all the languages of all interests, and speaking them; an admirable
representative of the "middle class," but outstripping it, and in every
way greater than it; possessing excellent sense, while appreciating
the blood from which he had sprung, counting most of all on his
intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race, very particular,
declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly the first
Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene Highness,
but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in public,
concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser;
at bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their
own fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters;
a gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong;
adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker,
an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest,
always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and
of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity,
clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong
those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones;
unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with
marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients,
in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!
Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family;
assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity,
a disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns
everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely
repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it
preserves politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures,
and society from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive,
sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving
himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against
England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard;
singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to despondency,
to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal,
to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity,
to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general
at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides
and always smiling. Brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker;
uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking up,
and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk
his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order
that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king;
endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive
to minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order
to judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom,
easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory,
his only point of resemblance with Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon;
knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant
of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd,
the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls,
in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents
of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord
with France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact;
governing too much and not enough; his own first minister;
excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities an obstacle
to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative faculty
of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable spirit
of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a dynasty;
having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney; in short,
a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create
authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite
of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippe will be classed among
the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most
illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little,
and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree
as the feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained graceful;
not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the masses;
he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; he wore
no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;
his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new;
a mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830;
Louis Philippe was transition reigning; he had preserved the
ancient pronunciation and the ancient orthography which he placed
at the service of opinions modern; he loved Poland and Hungary,
but he wrote les Polonois, and he pronounced les Hongrais. He wore
the uniform of the national guard, like Charles X., and the ribbon
of the Legion of Honor, like Napoleon.

He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera.
Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers;
this made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart.
He went out with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella
long formed a part of his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit
of a gardener, something of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had
tumbled from his horse; Louis Philippe no more went about without
his lancet, than did Henri IV. without his poniard. The Royalists
jeered at this ridiculous king, the first who had ever shed blood
with the object of healing.

For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction
to be made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which
accuses the reign, that which accuses the King; three columns
which all give different totals. Democratic right confiscated,
progress becomes a matter of secondary interest, the protests of the
street violently repressed, military execution of insurrections,
the rising passed over by arms, the Rue Transnonain, the counsels
of war, the absorption of the real country by the legal country,
on half shares with three hundred thousand privileged persons,--
these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused, Algeria too
harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the English,
with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith,
to Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are
the doings of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than
national was the doing of the King.

As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King's
charge is decreased.

This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.

Whence arises this fault?

We will state it.

Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation
of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid
of everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive
timidity, which is displeasing to the people, who have the
14th of July in their civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled
first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his
family was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy
of admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents.
One of Louis Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name
of her race among artists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it
among poets. She made of her soul a marble which she named Jeanne
d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's daughters elicited from Metternich
this eulogium: "They are young people such as are rarely seen,
and princes such as are never seen."

This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration,
is the truth about Louis Philippe.

To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction
of the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting
side of the revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing
power, therein lay the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830;
never was there a more complete adaptation of a man to an event;
the one entered into the other, and the incarnation took place.
Louis Philippe is 1830 made man. Moreover, he had in his favor that
great recommendation to the throne, exile. He had been proscribed,
a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. In Switzerland,
this heir to the richest princely domains in France had sold an old
horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he gave lessons
in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and sewed.
These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie
enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage
of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI, and used by Louis XV.
He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette;
he had belonged to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped
him on the shoulder; Danton had said to him: "Young man!"
At the age of four and twenty, in '93, being then M. de Chartres,
he had witnessed, from the depth of a box, the trial of Louis
XVI., so well named that poor tyrant. The blind clairvoyance
of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and the King
with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fierce
crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal,
the public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply,
the alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that
sombre breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe,
of those who condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked
on those things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen
the centuries appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention;
he had beheld, behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by
who was made responsible, the terrible culprit, the monarchy,
rise through the shadows; and there had lingered in his soul
the respectful fear of these immense justices of the populace,
which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.

The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory
was like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute.
One day, in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted
to doubt, he rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the
alphabetical list of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he
reigned the press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and
speech were free. The laws of September are open to sight.
Although fully aware of the gnawing power of light on privileges,
he left his throne exposed to the light. History will do justice
to him for this loyalty.

Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is,
as yet, only in the lower court.

The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent,
has not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce
a definite judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious
historian Louis Blanc has himself recently softened his first verdict;
Louis Philippe was elected by those two almosts which are called
the 221 and 1830, that is to say, by a half-Parliament, and
a half-revolution; and in any case, from the superior point of view
where philosophy must place itself, we cannot judge him here, as the
reader has seen above, except with certain reservations in the name
of the absolute democratic principle; in the eyes of the absolute,
outside these two rights, the right of man in the first place,
the right of the people in the second, all is usurpation; but what we
can say, even at the present day, that after making these reserves is,
that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he is considered,
Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view
of human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language
of ancient history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.

What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe
the king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at
times even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his
gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy
of the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there,
exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do?
He took a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit,
considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it
was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner.
He obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals;
he disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the
crown attorneys, those chatterers of the law, as he called them.
Sometimes the pile of sentences covered his table; he examined them all;
it was anguish to him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads.
One day, he said to the same witness to whom we have recently referred:
"I won seven last night." During the early years of his reign,
the death penalty was as good as abolished, and the erection of a
scaffold was a violence committed against the King. The Greve having
disappeared with the elder branch, a bourgeois place of execution
was instituted under the name of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques;
"practical men" felt the necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine;
and this was one of the victories of Casimir Perier, who represented
the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe,
who represented its liberal sides. Louis Philippe annotated Beccaria
with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, he exclaimed:
"What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have pardoned!"
On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by his ministry,
he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is one of the most
generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; it only remains
for me to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis IX.
and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps,
by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at
the present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his
favor before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be,
is evidently and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph
penned by a dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade;
the sharing of the same shadows confers the right to praise it;
it is not greatly to be feared that it will ever be said of two
tombs in exile: "This one flattered the other."

These last consisted of all the young people whom Valentine's death had
struck like a thunderbolt, and who, notwithstanding the raw chilliness
of the season, could not refrain from paying a last tribute to the
memory of the beautiful, chaste, and adorable girl, thus cut off in the
flower of her youth. As they left Paris, an equipage with four horses,
at full speed, was seen to draw up suddenly; it contained Monte Cristo.
The count left the carriage and mingled in the crowd who followed on
foot. Chateau-Renaud perceived him and immediately alighting from his
coupe, joined him.

The count looked attentively through every opening in the crowd; he was
evidently watching for some one, but his search ended in disappointment.
"Where is Morrel?" he asked; "do either of these gentlemen know where he
is?"

"We have already asked that question," said Chateau-Renaud, "for none
of us has seen him." The count was silent, but continued to gaze around
him. At length they arrived at the cemetery. The piercing eye of Monte
Cristo glanced through clusters of bushes and trees, and was soon
relieved from all anxiety, for seeing a shadow glide between the
yew-trees, Monte Cristo recognized him whom he sought. One funeral is
generally very much like another in this magnificent metropolis. Black
figures are seen scattered over the long white avenues; the silence
of earth and heaven is alone broken by the noise made by the crackling
branches of hedges planted around the monuments; then follows the
melancholy chant of the priests, mingled now and then with a sob of
anguish, escaping from some woman concealed behind a mass of flowers.

The shadow Monte Cristo had noticed passed rapidly behind the tomb of
Abelard and Heloise, placed itself close to the heads of the horses
belonging to the hearse, and following the undertaker's men, arrived
with them at the spot appointed for the burial. Each person's attention
was occupied. Monte Cristo saw nothing but the shadow, which no one else
observed. Twice the count left the ranks to see whether the object of
his interest had any concealed weapon beneath his clothes. When the
procession stopped, this shadow was recognized as Morrel, who, with
his coat buttoned up to his throat, his face livid, and convulsively
crushing his hat between his fingers, leaned against a tree, situated
on an elevation commanding the mausoleum, so that none of the funeral
details could escape his observation. Everything was conducted in
the usual manner. A few men, the least impressed of all by the scene,
pronounced a discourse, some deploring this premature death, others
expatiating on the grief of the father, and one very ingenious person
quoting the fact that Valentine had solicited pardon of her father for
criminals on whom the arm of justice was ready to fall--until at length
they exhausted their stores of metaphor and mournful speeches.

Monte Cristo heard and saw nothing, or rather he only saw Morrel, whose
calmness had a frightful effect on those who knew what was passing in
his heart. "See," said Beauchamp, pointing out Morrel to Debray. "What
is he doing up there?" And they called Chateau-Renaud's attention to
him.

"How pale he is!" said Chateau-Renaud, shuddering.

"He is cold," said Debray.

"Not at all," said Chateau-Renaud, slowly; "I think he is violently
agitated. He is very susceptible."

"Bah," said Debray; "he scarcely knew Mademoiselle de Villefort; you
said so yourself."

"True. Still I remember he danced three times with her at Madame de
Morcerf's. Do you recollect that ball, count, where you produced such an
effect?"

"No, I do not," replied Monte Cristo, without even knowing of what or
to whom he was speaking, so much was he occupied in watching Morrel, who
was holding his breath with emotion. "The discourse is over; farewell,
gentlemen," said the count. And he disappeared without anyone seeing
whither he went. The funeral being over, the guests returned to Paris.
Chateau-Renaud looked for a moment for Morrel; but while they were
watching the departure of the count, Morrel had quitted his post, and
Chateau-Renaud, failing in his search, joined Debray and Beauchamp.

Monte Cristo concealed himself behind a large tomb and awaited the
arrival of Morrel, who by degrees approached the tomb now abandoned
by spectators and workmen. Morrel threw a glance around, but before it
reached the spot occupied by Monte Cristo the latter had advanced yet
nearer, still unperceived. The young man knelt down. The count, with
outstretched neck and glaring eyes, stood in an attitude ready to
pounce upon Morrel upon the first occasion. Morrel bent his head till
it touched the stone, then clutching the grating with both hands,
he murmured,--"Oh, Valentine!" The count's heart was pierced by the
utterance of these two words; he stepped forward, and touching the young
man's shoulder, said,--"I was looking for you, my friend." Monte Cristo
expected a burst of passion, but he was deceived, for Morrel turning
round, said calmly,--

"You see I was praying." The scrutinizing glance of the count searched
the young man from head to foot. He then seemed more easy.

"Shall I drive you back to Paris?" he asked.

"No, thank you."

"Do you wish anything?"

"Leave me to pray." The count withdrew without opposition, but it was
only to place himself in a situation where he could watch every movement
of Morrel, who at length arose, brushed the dust from his knees, and
turned towards Paris, without once looking back. He walked slowly down
the Rue de la Roquette. The count, dismissing his carriage, followed him
about a hundred paces behind. Maximilian crossed the canal and entered
the Rue Meslay by the boulevards. Five minutes after the door had been
closed on Morrel's entrance, it was again opened for the count. Julie
was at the entrance of the garden, where she was attentively watching
Penelon, who, entering with zeal into his profession of gardener, was
very busy grafting some Bengal roses. "Ah, count," she exclaimed, with
the delight manifested by every member of the family whenever he visited
the Rue Meslay.

"Maximilian has just returned, has he not, madame?" asked the count.

"Yes, I think I saw him pass; but pray, call Emmanuel."

"Excuse me, madame, but I must go up to Maximilian's room this instant,"
replied Monte Cristo, "I have something of the greatest importance to
tell him."

"Go, then," she said with a charming smile, which accompanied him until
he had disappeared. Monte Cristo soon ran up the staircase conducting
from the ground-floor to Maximilian's room; when he reached the landing
he listened attentively, but all was still. Like many old houses
occupied by a single family, the room door was panelled with glass; but
it was locked, Maximilian was shut in, and it was impossible to see
what was passing in the room, because a red curtain was drawn before the
glass. The count's anxiety was manifested by a bright color which seldom
appeared on the face of that imperturbable man.

"What shall I do!" he uttered, and reflected for a moment; "shall I
ring? No, the sound of a bell, announcing a visitor, will but accelerate
the resolution of one in Maximilian's situation, and then the bell would
be followed by a louder noise." Monte Cristo trembled from head to
foot and as if his determination had been taken with the rapidity of
lightning, he struck one of the panes of glass with his elbow; the glass
was shivered to atoms, then withdrawing the curtain he saw Morrel, who
had been writing at his desk, bound from his seat at the noise of the
broken window.

"I beg a thousand pardons," said the count, "there is nothing the
matter, but I slipped down and broke one of your panes of glass with
my elbow. Since it is opened, I will take advantage of it to enter your
room; do not disturb yourself--do not disturb yourself!" And passing
his hand through the broken glass, the count opened the door. Morrel,
evidently discomposed, came to meet Monte Cristo less with the intention
of receiving him than to exclude his entry. "Ma foi," said Monte Cristo,
rubbing his elbow, "it's all your servant's fault; your stairs are so
polished, it is like walking on glass."

"Are you hurt, sir?" coldly asked Morrel.

"I believe not. But what are you about there? You were writing."

"I?"

"Your fingers are stained with ink."

"Ah, true, I was writing. I do sometimes, soldier though I am."

Monte Cristo advanced into the room; Maximilian was obliged to let him
pass, but he followed him. "You were writing?" said Monte Cristo with a
searching look.

"I have already had the honor of telling you I was," said Morrel.

The count looked around him. "Your pistols are beside your desk," said
Monte Cristo, pointing with his finger to the pistols on the table.

"I am on the point of starting on a journey," replied Morrel
disdainfully.

"My friend," exclaimed Monte Cristo in a tone of exquisite sweetness.

"Sir?"

"My friend, my dear Maximilian, do not make a hasty resolution, I
entreat you."

"I make a hasty resolution?" said Morrel, shrugging his shoulders; "is
there anything extraordinary in a journey?"

"Maximilian," said the count, "let us both lay aside the mask we have
assumed. You no more deceive me with that false calmness than I impose
upon you with my frivolous solicitude. You can understand, can you not,
that to have acted as I have done, to have broken that glass, to have
intruded on the solitude of a friend--you can understand that, to have
done all this, I must have been actuated by real uneasiness, or rather
by a terrible conviction. Morrel, you are going to destroy yourself!"

"Indeed, count," said Morrel, shuddering; "what has put this into your
head?"

"I tell you that you are about to destroy yourself," continued the
count, "and here is proof of what I say;" and, approaching the desk, he
removed the sheet of paper which Morrel had placed over the letter he
had begun, and took the latter in his hands.

Morrel rushed forward to tear it from him, but Monte Cristo perceiving
his intention, seized his wrist with his iron grasp. "You wish to
destroy yourself," said the count; "you have written it."

"Well," said Morrel, changing his expression of calmness for one of
violence--"well, and if I do intend to turn this pistol against myself,
who shall prevent me--who will dare prevent me? All my hopes are
blighted, my heart is broken, my life a burden, everything around me is
sad and mournful; earth has become distasteful to me, and human voices
distract me. It is a mercy to let me die, for if I live I shall lose
my reason and become mad. When, sir, I tell you all this with tears of
heartfelt anguish, can you reply that I am wrong, can you prevent my
putting an end to my miserable existence? Tell me, sir, could you have
the courage to do so?"

"Yes, Morrel," said Monte Cristo, with a calmness which contrasted
strangely with the young man's excitement; "yes, I would do so."

"You?" exclaimed Morrel, with increasing anger and reproach--"you, who
have deceived me with false hopes, who have cheered and soothed me with
vain promises, when I might, if not have saved her, at least have seen
her die in my arms! You, who pretend to understand everything, even the
hidden sources of knowledge,--and who enact the part of a guardian angel
upon earth, and could not even find an antidote to a poison administered
to a young girl! Ah, sir, indeed you would inspire me with pity, were
you not hateful in my eyes."

"Morrel"--

"Yes; you tell me to lay aside the mask, and I will do so, be satisfied!
When you spoke to me at the cemetery, I answered you--my heart was
softened; when you arrived here, I allowed you to enter. But since
you abuse my confidence, since you have devised a new torture after
I thought I had exhausted them all, then, Count of Monte Cristo my
pretended benefactor--then, Count of Monte Cristo, the universal
guardian, be satisfied, you shall witness the death of your friend;" and
Morrel, with a maniacal laugh, again rushed towards the pistols.

"And I again repeat, you shall not commit suicide."

"Prevent me, then!" replied Morrel, with another struggle, which, like
the first, failed in releasing him from the count's iron grasp.

"I will prevent you."

"And who are you, then, that arrogate to yourself this tyrannical right
over free and rational beings?"

"Who am I?" repeated Monte Cristo. "Listen; I am the only man in the
world having the right to say to you, 'Morrel, your father's son shall
not die to-day;'" and Monte Cristo, with an expression of majesty
and sublimity, advanced with arms folded toward the young man, who,
involuntarily overcome by the commanding manner of this man, recoiled a
step.

"Why do you mention my father?" stammered he; "why do you mingle a
recollection of him with the affairs of today?"

"Because I am he who saved your father's life when he wished to destroy
himself, as you do to-day--because I am the man who sent the purse
to your young sister, and the Pharaon to old Morrel--because I am the
Edmond Dantes who nursed you, a child, on my knees." Morrel made another
step back, staggering, breathless, crushed; then all his strength
give way, and he fell prostrate at the feet of Monte Cristo. Then his
admirable nature underwent a complete and sudden revulsion; he arose,
rushed out of the room and to the stairs, exclaiming energetically,
"Julie, Julie--Emmanuel, Emmanuel!"

Monte Cristo endeavored also to leave, but Maximilian would have died
rather than relax his hold of the handle of the door, which he closed
upon the count. Julie, Emmanuel, and some of the servants, ran up in
alarm on hearing the cries of Maximilian. Morrel seized their hands,
and opening the door exclaimed in a voice choked with sobs, "On your
knees--on your knees--he is our benefactor--the saviour of our father!
He is"--

He would have added "Edmond Dantes," but the count seized his arm and
prevented him. Julie threw herself into the arms of the count; Emmanuel
embraced him as a guardian angel; Morrel again fell on his knees, and
struck the ground with his forehead. Then the iron-hearted man felt his
heart swell in his breast; a flame seemed to rush from his throat to his
eyes, he bent his head and wept. For a while nothing was heard in the
room but a succession of sobs, while the incense from their grateful
hearts mounted to heaven. Julie had scarcely recovered from her deep
emotion when she rushed out of the room, descended to the next floor,
ran into the drawing-room with childlike joy and raised the crystal
globe which covered the purse given by the unknown of the Allees de
Meillan. Meanwhile, Emmanuel in a broken voice said to the count,
"Oh, count, how could you, hearing us so often speak of our unknown
benefactor, seeing us pay such homage of gratitude and adoration to his
memory,--how could you continue so long without discovering yourself to
us? Oh, it was cruel to us, and--dare I say it?--to you also."

"Listen, my friends," said the count--"I may call you so since we have
really been friends for the last eleven years--the discovery of this
secret has been occasioned by a great event which you must never know.
I wish to bury it during my whole life in my own bosom, but your brother
Maximilian wrested it from me by a violence he repents of now, I am
sure." Then turning around, and seeing that Morrel, still on his knees,
had thrown himself into an arm-chair, he added in a low voice, pressing
Emmanuel's hand significantly, "Watch over him."

"Why so?" asked the young man, surprised.

"I cannot explain myself; but watch over him." Emmanuel looked around
the room and caught sight of the pistols; his eyes rested on the
weapons, and he pointed to them. Monte Cristo bent his head. Emmanuel
went towards the pistols. "Leave them," said Monte Cristo. Then walking
towards Morrel, he took his hand; the tumultuous agitation of the young
man was succeeded by a profound stupor. Julie returned, holding the
silken purse in her hands, while tears of joy rolled down her cheeks,
like dewdrops on the rose.

"Here is the relic," she said; "do not think it will be less dear to us
now we are acquainted with our benefactor!"

"My child," said Monte Cristo, coloring, "allow me to take back that
purse? Since you now know my face, I wish to be remembered alone through
the affection I hope you will grant me.

"Oh," said Julie, pressing the purse to her heart, "no, no, I beseech
you do not take it, for some unhappy day you will leave us, will you
not?"

"You have guessed rightly, madame," replied Monte Cristo, smiling; "in a
week I shall have left this country, where so many persons who merit the
vengeance of heaven lived happily, while my father perished of hunger
and grief." While announcing his departure, the count fixed his eyes on
Morrel, and remarked that the words, "I shall have left this country,"
had failed to rouse him from his lethargy. He then saw that he must make
another struggle against the grief of his friend, and taking the hands
of Emmanuel and Julie, which he pressed within his own, he said with
the mild authority of a father, "My kind friends, leave me alone with
Maximilian." Julie saw the means offered of carrying off her precious
relic, which Monte Cristo had forgotten. She drew her husband to the
door. "Let us leave them," she said. The count was alone with Morrel,
who remained motionless as a statue.

"Come," said Monte-Cristo, touching his shoulder with his finger, "are
you a man again, Maximilian?"

"Yes; for I begin to suffer again."

The count frowned, apparently in gloomy hesitation.

"Maximilian, Maximilian," he said, "the ideas you yield to are unworthy
of a Christian."

"Oh, do not fear, my friend," said Morrel, raising his head, and smiling
with a sweet expression on the count; "I shall no longer attempt my
life."

"Then we are to have no more pistols--no more despair?"

"No; I have found a better remedy for my grief than either a bullet or a
knife."

"Poor fellow, what is it?"

"My grief will kill me of itself."

"My friend," said Monte Cristo, with an expression of melancholy equal
to his own, "listen to me. One day, in a moment of despair like yours,
since it led to a similar resolution, I also wished to kill myself; one
day your father, equally desperate, wished to kill himself too. If any
one had said to your father, at the moment he raised the pistol to his
head--if any one had told me, when in my prison I pushed back the food I
had not tasted for three days--if anyone had said to either of us
then, 'Live--the day will come when you will be happy, and will bless
life!'--no matter whose voice had spoken, we should have heard him with
the smile of doubt, or the anguish of incredulity,--and yet how many
times has your father blessed life while embracing you--how often have I
myself"--

"Ah," exclaimed Morrel, interrupting the count, "you had only lost
your liberty, my father had only lost his fortune, but I have lost
Valentine."

"Look at me," said Monte Cristo, with that expression which sometimes
made him so eloquent and persuasive--"look at me. There are no tears
in my eyes, nor is there fever in my veins, yet I see you suffer--you,
Maximilian, whom I love as my own son. Well, does not this tell you
that in grief, as in life, there is always something to look forward to
beyond? Now, if I entreat, if I order you to live, Morrel, it is in
the conviction that one day you will thank me for having preserved your
life."

"Oh, heavens," said the young man, "oh, heavens--what are you saying,
count? Take care. But perhaps you have never loved!"

"Child!" replied the count.

"I mean, as I love. You see, I have been a soldier ever since I attained
manhood. I reached the age of twenty-nine without loving, for none of
the feelings I before then experienced merit the appellation of love.
Well, at twenty-nine I saw Valentine; for two years I have loved her,
for two years I have seen written in her heart, as in a book, all the
virtues of a daughter and wife. Count, to possess Valentine would have
been a happiness too infinite, too ecstatic, too complete, too divine
for this world, since it has been denied me; but without Valentine the
earth is desolate."

"I have told you to hope," said the count.

"Then have a care, I repeat, for you seek to persuade me, and if you
succeed I should lose my reason, for I should hope that I could again
behold Valentine." The count smiled. "My friend, my father," said Morrel
with excitement, "have a care, I again repeat, for the power you wield
over me alarms me. Weigh your words before you speak, for my eyes have
already become brighter, and my heart beats strongly; be cautious, or
you will make me believe in supernatural agencies. I must obey you,
though you bade me call forth the dead or walk upon the water."

"Hope, my friend," repeated the count.

"Ah," said Morrel, falling from the height of excitement to the abyss
of despair--"ah, you are playing with me, like those good, or rather
selfish mothers who soothe their children with honeyed words, because
their screams annoy them. No, my friend, I was wrong to caution you; do
not fear, I will bury my grief so deep in my heart, I will disguise
it so, that you shall not even care to sympathize with me. Adieu, my
friend, adieu!"

"On the contrary," said the count, "after this time you must live with
me--you must not leave me, and in a week we shall have left France
behind us."

"And you still bid me hope?"

"I tell you to hope, because I have a method of curing you."

"Count, you render me sadder than before, if it be possible. You think
the result of this blow has been to produce an ordinary grief, and
you would cure it by an ordinary remedy--change of scene." And Morrel
dropped his head with disdainful incredulity. "What can I say more?"
asked Monte Cristo. "I have confidence in the remedy I propose, and only
ask you to permit me to assure you of its efficacy."

"Count, you prolong my agony."

"Then," said the count, "your feeble spirit will not even grant me the
trial I request? Come--do you know of what the Count of Monte Cristo is
capable? do you know that he holds terrestrial beings under his control?
nay, that he can almost work a miracle? Well, wait for the miracle I
hope to accomplish, or"--

"Or?" repeated Morrel.

"Or, take care, Morrel, lest I call you ungrateful."

"Have pity on me, count!"

"I feel so much pity towards you, Maximilian, that--listen to me
attentively--if I do not cure you in a month, to the day, to the very
hour, mark my words, Morrel, I will place loaded pistols before you,
and a cup of the deadliest Italian poison--a poison more sure and prompt
than that which has killed Valentine."

"Will you promise me?"

"Yes; for I am a man, and have suffered like yourself, and also
contemplated suicide; indeed, often since misfortune has left me I have
longed for the delights of an eternal sleep."

"But you are sure you will promise me this?" said Morrel, intoxicated.
"I not only promise, but swear it!" said Monte Cristo extending his
hand.

"In a month, then, on your honor, if I am not consoled, you will let
me take my life into my own hands, and whatever may happen you will not
call me ungrateful?"

"In a month, to the day, the very hour and the date are sacred,
Maximilian. I do not know whether you remember that this is the 5th of
September; it is ten years to-day since I saved your father's life, who
wished to die." Morrel seized the count's hand and kissed it; the count
allowed him to pay the homage he felt due to him. "In a month you will
find on the table, at which we shall be then sitting, good pistols and
a delicious draught; but, on the other hand, you must promise me not to
attempt your life before that time."

"Oh, I also swear it!" Monte Cristo drew the young man towards him,
and pressed him for some time to his heart. "And now," he said,
"after to-day, you will come and live with me; you can occupy Haidee's
apartment, and my daughter will at least be replaced by my son."

"Haidee?" said Morrel, "what has become of her?"

"She departed last night."

"To leave you?"

"To wait for me. Hold yourself ready then to join me at the Champs
Elysees, and lead me out of this house without any one seeing my
departure." Maximilian hung his head, and obeyed with childlike
reverence.

There were two of them. One was an officer--a tall, soldierly,
handsome man--the other evidently a private or an orderly,
sunburned, short, and thin, with sunken cheeks and a dull
expression. The officer walked in front, leaning on a stick and
slightly limping. When he had advanced a few steps he stopped,
having apparently decided that these were good quarters, turned
round to the soldiers standing at the entrance, and in a loud voice of
command ordered them to put up the horses. Having done that, the
officer, lifting his elbow with a smart gesture, stroked his
mustache and lightly touched his hat.

"Bonjour, la compagnie!"* said he gaily, smiling and looking about
him.

*"Good day, everybody!"

No one gave any reply.

"Vous etes le bourgeois?"* the officer asked Gerasim.

*"Are you the master here?"

Gerasim gazed at the officer with an alarmed and inquiring look.

"Quartier, quartier, logement!" said the officer, looking down at
the little man with a condescending and good-natured smile. "Les
francais sont de bons enfants. Que diable! Voyons! Ne nous fachons
pas, mon vieux!"* added he, clapping the scared and silent Gerasim
on the shoulder. "Well, does no one speak French in this
establishment?" he asked again in French, looking around and meeting
Pierre's eyes. Pierre moved away from the door.

*"Quarters, quarters, lodgings! The French are good fellows. What
the devil! There, don't let us be cross, old fellow!"

Again the officer turned to Gerasim and asked him to show him the
rooms in the house.

"Master, not here--don't understand... me, you..." said Gerasim,
trying to render his words more comprehensible by contorting them.

Still smiling, the French officer spread out his hands before
Gerasim's nose, intimating that he did not understand him either,
and moved, limping, to the door at which Pierre was standing. Pierre
wished to go away and conceal himself, but at that moment he saw Makar
Alexeevich appearing at the open kitchen door with the pistol in his
hand. With a madman's cunning, Makar Alexeevich eyed the Frenchman,
raised his pistol, and took aim.

"Board them!" yelled the tipsy man, trying to press the trigger.
Hearing the yell the officer turned round, and at the same moment
Pierre threw himself on the drunkard. Just when Pierre snatched at and
struck up the pistol Makar Alexeevich at last got his fingers on the
trigger, there was a deafening report, and all were enveloped in a
cloud of smoke. The Frenchman turned pale and rushed to the door.

Forgetting his intention of concealing his knowledge of French,
Pierre, snatching away the pistol and throwing it down, ran up to
the officer and addressed him in French.

"You are not wounded?" he asked.

"I think not," answered the Frenchman, feeling himself over. "But
I have had a lucky escape this time," he added, pointing to the
damaged plaster of the wall. "Who is that man?" said he, looking
sternly at Pierre.

"Oh, I am really in despair at what has occurred," said Pierre
rapidly, quite forgetting the part he had intended to play. "He is
an unfortunate madman who did not know what he was doing."

The officer went up to Makar Alexeevich and took him by the collar.

Makar Alexeevich was standing with parted lips, swaying, as if about
to fall asleep, as he leaned against the wall.

"Brigand! You shall pay for this," said the Frenchman, letting go of
him. "We French are merciful after victory, but we do not pardon
traitors," he added, with a look of gloomy dignity and a fine
energetic gesture.

Pierre continued, in French, to persuade the officer not to hold
that drunken imbecile to account. The Frenchman listened in silence
with the same gloomy expression, but suddenly turned to Pierre with
a smile. For a few seconds he looked at him in silence. His handsome
face assumed a melodramatically gentle expression and he held out
his hand.

"You have saved my life. You are French," said he.

For a Frenchman that deduction was indubitable. Only a Frenchman
could perform a great deed, and to save his life--the life of M.
Ramballe, captain of the 13th Light Regiment--was undoubtedly a very
great deed.

But however indubitable that conclusion and the officer's conviction
based upon it, Pierre felt it necessary to disillusion him.

"I am Russian," he said quickly.

"Tut, tut, tut! Tell that to others," said the officer, waving his
finger before his nose and smiling. "You shall tell me all about
that presently. I am delighted to meet a compatriot. Well, and what
are we to do with this man?" he added, addressing himself to Pierre as
to a brother.

Even if Pierre were not a Frenchman, having once received that
loftiest of human appellations he could not renounce it, said the
officer's look and tone. In reply to his last question Pierre again
explained who Makar Alexeevich was and how just before their arrival
that drunken imbecile had seized the loaded pistol which they had
not had time to recover from him, and begged the officer to let the
deed go unpunished.

The Frenchman expanded his chest and made a majestic gesture with
his arm.

"You have saved my life! You are French. You ask his pardon? I grant
it you. Lead that man away!" said he quickly and energetically, and
taking the arm of Pierre whom he had promoted to be a Frenchman for
saving his life, he went with him into the room.

The soldiers in the yard, hearing the shot, came into the passage
asking what had happened, and expressed their readiness to punish
the culprits, but the officer sternly checked them.

"You will be called in when you are wanted," he said.

The soldiers went out again, and the orderly, who had meanwhile
had time to visit the kitchen, came up to his officer.

"Captain, there is soup and a leg of mutton in the kitchen," said
he. "Shall I serve them up?"

"Yes, and some wine," answered the captain.

But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.
The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.

As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste
to prepare the shipwreck.

The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title
of Statesmen; so that this word, statesmen, has ended by becoming
somewhat of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact,
that wherever there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness.
To say "the skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."

In the same way, to say "statesmen" is sometimes equivalent
to saying "traitors." If, then, we are to believe the skilful,
revolutions like the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt
ligature is indispensable. The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken.
Also, right once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened.
Liberty once assured, attention must be directed to power.

Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful,
but they begin to be distrustful. Power, very good. But, in the
first place, what is power? In the second, whence comes it?
The skilful do not seem to hear the murmured objection, and they
continue their manoeuvres.

According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the
mask of necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement
of a people after a revolution, when this people forms part
of a monarchical continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty.
In this way, say they, peace, that is to say, time to dress
our wounds, and to repair the house, can be had after a revolution.
The dynasty conceals the scaffolding and covers the ambulance.
Now, it is not always easy to procure a dynasty.

If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the first
man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing of
a king. You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second, Iturbide.

But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make
a dynasty. There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity
in a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.

If we place ourselves at the point of view of the "statesmen," after
making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the
qualities of the king which result from it? He may be and it is useful
for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his
own person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it,
that he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein,
that he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.

What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national; that is
to say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed,
but by reason of ideas accepted. It should be composed of past
and be historic; be composed of future and be sympathetic.

All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves
with finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second
absolutely insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick
or the House of Orleans.

Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,
bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself.
Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it shall
bend down to the people.

Such is the theory of the skilful.

Here, then, lies the great art: to make a little render to success
the sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may
tremble from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken,
to augment the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress,
to dull that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm,
to cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right,
to envelop the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed
very speedily, to impose a diet on that excess of health, to put
Hercules on the treatment of a convalescent, to dilute the event
with the expedient, to offer to spirits thirsting for the ideal
that nectar thinned out with a potion, to take one's precautions
against too much success, to garnish the revolution with a shade.

1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.

1830 is a revolution arrested midway. Half of progress, quasi-right. Now,
logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the candle.

Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?

Why?

Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction.
Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will
be satiety.

The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after
Charles X.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of
the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion
of the people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down.
A chair is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march
of the human race. This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.

One is not a class because one has committed a fault. Selfishness is
not one of the divisions of the social order.

Moreover, we must be just to selfishness. The state to which
that part of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired
after the shock of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated
with indifference and laziness, and which contains a little shame;
it was not the slumber which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness
accessible to dreams; it was the halt.

The halt is a word formed of a singular double
and almost contradictory sense: a troop
on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is to say, repose.

The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on
the alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels
and holds itself on its guard.

The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of to-morrow.

It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.

What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.

The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man
who should express this word Halt. An Although-Because.
A composite individuality, signifying revolution and
signifying stability, in other terms, strengthening
the present by the evident compatibility of the past with the future.

This man was "already found." His name was Louis Philippe d'Orleans.

The 221 made Louis Philippe King. Lafayette undertook the coronation.

He called it the best of republics. The town-hall of Paris took
the place of the Cathedral of Rheims.

This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was "the work
of 1830."

When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their
solution became apparent. All this had been accomplished
outside the bounds of absolute right. Absolute right cried:
"I protest!" then, terrible to say, it retired into the darkness.