‘What does this mean?’ Monte Cristo’s implacable voice demanded.
‘But, Monsieur, surely you can understand,’ cried the steward. ‘It isn’t natural! It’s not natural that, when you are to buy a house in Paris, you should choose to buy one in Auteuil, and that the one you buy in Auteuil should be number twenty-eight, Rue de la Fontaine! Oh, why didn’t I tell you everything before we set out, Sire. You would surely not have insisted that I come. I hoped that Monsieur le Comte’s house would be any house other than this one. As if there was no house in Auteuil, except the house of the murder!’
‘Ah, now!’ Monte Cristo said, stopping short. ‘That is an ugly word you have just spoken. By all the devils! Irredeemable Corsican – full of mystery and superstition! Come now, take the lantern and let’s have a look at the garden. You will not be afraid while you are with me, I hope.’
Bertuccio obediently picked up the lantern.
When they opened the door, it was to reveal a wan sky in which the moon struggled in vain to hold its own against a sea of clouds which poured dark waves across it, waves which it lit for a moment before they raced on, still darker than before, to lose themselves in the depths of infinity.
The steward tried to make off towards the left.
‘No, no, Monsieur,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘What is the point of following the paths? We have a fine lawn here: let’s go straight ahead.’
Bertuccio wiped the sweat from his brow, but he obeyed, while still veering towards the left. Monte Cristo, on the contrary, made for the right. Reaching a group of trees, he stopped. The steward could contain himself no longer.
‘Come away, Monsieur,’ he cried. ‘Come away, I beg you. You are on the very spot!’
‘What spot is that?’
‘The spot where he fell.’
‘My dear Monsieur Bertuccio,’ said Monte Cristo, laughing, ‘take a hold of yourself, I pray you. We are not in Sartène or Corte. This is not your Corsican bush, but a garden, in the English fashion, poorly enough kept, I grant you, but not to be insulted for all that.’
‘Monsieur, don’t stay there! I beg you, don’t stay there!’
‘I think you are going mad, Monsieur Bertuccio,’ the count said coldly. ‘If that is the case, please inform me and I shall have you confined to some lunatic asylum before any harm is done.’
‘Alas, Excellency,’ said Bertuccio, shaking his head and clasping his hands in an attitude that would have made the count laugh if he had not been seized by more urgent thoughts at that moment, which made him acutely responsive to the slightest movement of that timorous soul. ‘Alas, Excellency! The harm is already done.’
‘Monsieur Bertuccio,’ the count said. ‘I am pleased to tell you that, amid your gesticulations, you are twisting your arms and rolling your eyes like a man possessed of a devil which is unwilling to depart from his body. Now I have always observed that the devil which is least inclined to leave its post is a secret. I knew you to be a Corsican, I knew you to be sombre and I knew that you were always mulling over some old tale of a vendetta; and in Italy I forgave you that, because in Italy such things are acceptable. However, in France people usually consider murder to be in very poor taste: there are gendarmes to look after it, judges to condemn it and scaffolds to avenge it.’
Bertuccio clasped his hands – and since, while he was performing these various movements, he kept hold of the lantern, the light fell on his stricken face. Monte Cristo examined it with the same eye as he had turned, in Rome, on the execution of Andrea. Then, in a voice that sent a new shudder through the whole of the steward’s frame, he said: ‘So Abbé Busoni lied to me, then, after his journey to France in 1829, when he sent you to me with a letter of recommendation in which he assured me of your exceptional qualities. Well, I must write to the abbé. I hold him responsible for his protégé and he will no doubt tell me what all this business of murder is about. One thing, however, Monsieur Bertuccio: I warn you that when I visit a country, I am accustomed to conform with its laws and I have no wish to become embroiled with French justice for your sake.’
‘Oh, don’t do that, Excellency. I have served you well, have I not?’ Bertuccio cried out in despair. ‘I have always been a good man and I have even, as far as I was able, done good deeds.’
‘I don’t deny it,’ said the count. ‘So why the devil are you so agitated? It is a bad sign: a clear conscience does not put so much pallor on a man’s cheeks or so much fever in his hands.’
‘But, Monsieur le Comte,’ Bertuccio said, hesitantly, ‘did you not tell me yourself that Abbé Busoni, who heard my confession in prison at Nîmes, warned you, when he sent me to you, that I had a grave sin on my conscience?’
‘Yes, but since he sent you to me, telling me that you would make an excellent steward, I just supposed that you must have stolen something!’
‘Monsieur le Comte!’ said Bertuccio, with contempt.
‘Or that, being a Corsican, you had been unable to resist the temptation to “make your bones”, as they say there – by antiphrasis, when, on the contrary, they unmake some.’
‘Yes, Monseigneur! Yes, my good master, that’s it!’ Bertuccio cried, throwing himself at the count’s knees. ‘Yes, it was a vendetta, I swear it, a simple act of revenge.’
‘I understand. What I do not understand, however, is why this house in particular should have such an effect on you.’
‘But, Sire, it’s natural,’ Bertuccio went on, ‘since it was in this house that the revenge was carried out.’
‘What! In my house!’
‘Well, Sire, it was not yet yours at the time,’ Bertuccio replied naïvely.
‘Whose was it then? I believe the concierge said it belonged to Monsieur le Marquis de Saint-Méran; so what on earth grudge could you have against the Marquis de Saint-Méran?’
‘Not against him, Sire – against someone else.’
‘This is an odd coincidence,’ Monte Cristo said, as if giving way to his own thoughts, ‘that you should find yourself like this, by chance, with no prior knowledge, in a house which was the scene of an event that causes you such terrible remorse.’
‘Sire,’ said the steward, ‘I am sure that Fate is responsible for all this. First of all, you buy a house in Auteuil, and nowhere else, and this house is the one where I committed a murder; then you entered the garden by the very staircase that he came down; you paused at the very spot where he fell. Two steps away, under that plane-tree, was the hole where he had just buried the child. All this is not chance because, if it were, then chance would be too much like Providence.’
‘Come now, come now, my Corsican friend, just imagine it was Providence – I always imagine what people ask me to; and in any case, one must make some allowance for a sick mind. So gather your wits and tell me all about it.’
‘I have only told the story once, and that was to Abbé Busoni,’ Bertuccio said, adding: ‘Such things can only be told under the seal of the confessional.’
‘In which case, my dear Bertuccio,’ said the count, ‘you won’t mind if I send you back to your confessor. You will become a Carthusian or a Benedictine, and chat about your secrets. However, it makes me anxious, having a guest who is terrified by such ghosts. I don’t like it when my people dare not walk around my garden at night. Then, I must admit to you, I should not be delighted by a visit from some police commissioner, because – mark this well, Monsieur Bertuccio – in Italy one only pays justice to keep quiet, while in France, on the contrary, one pays it when it speaks. Damn! I did think you a bit of a Corsican, a good deal of a smuggler and a very able steward, but I see that you have other strings to your bow. You are no longer one of my men, Monsieur Bertuccio.’
‘Oh, Monseigneur! Monseigneur!’ the steward cried, stricken with terror at this threat. ‘If that is the only thing that prevents me from remaining in your service, I shall speak. I shall tell all. Then, if I leave you, it will be to walk to the scaffold.’
‘That’s a different matter,’ said Monte C
risto. ‘But if you are thinking of lying to me, consider this: it would be better for you to say nothing at all.’
‘No, Monsieur, I swear on my immortal soul, I shall tell you everything! Even Abbé Busoni only knew part of my secret. But first, I pray you, let us come away from this place. Why, the moon is about to come out from behind that cloud – and there, standing as you are, wrapped in that cloak which hides your figure from me and looks like Monsieur de Villefort’s… !’
‘What!’ Monte Cristo exclaimed. ‘Is it Monsieur de Villefort… ?’
‘Does Your Excellency know him?’
‘The former royal prosecutor in Nîmes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who married the daughter of the Marquis de Saint-Méran?’
‘Yes.’
‘And whose reputation at the Bar was that of the most honest, the strictest and the most inflexible judge?’
‘Well, Monsieur!’ Bertuccio cried. ‘That man, with his unblemished reputation…’
‘Yes?’
‘He is a villain!’
‘Pah!’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Impossible.’
‘Yet it is true.’
‘Really?’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Do you have proof of this?’
‘I did have it.’
‘And you have lost it, you oaf?’
‘Yes; but if we look carefully, we can find it.’
‘Can we indeed?’ said the count. ‘Well then, tell me about it, Monsieur Bertuccio, because I am starting to become seriously interested in what you say.’ And the count, humming a little tune from Lucia, went and sat on a bench, while Bertuccio followed, collecting his memories and his thoughts. He remained standing in front of the count.
XLIV
THE VENDETTA
‘Where would Monsieur le Comte like me to begin?’ Bertuccio asked.
‘Wherever you wish,’ Monte Cristo replied, ‘because I know nothing.’
‘But I thought that Abbé Busoni had told Your Excellency…’
‘Yes, a few facts, perhaps, but that was seven or eight years ago and I have forgotten.’
‘So, not wishing to bore Your Excellency, I can safely…’
‘Come on, Monsieur Bertuccio, come: you will be my evening newspaper.’
‘It all goes back to 1815.’
‘Ah!’ Monte Cristo exclaimed. ‘A long time ago, 1815!’
‘Indeed, Monsieur. However, the smallest detail has remained in my memory as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I had a brother, an elder brother, who served the emperor. He had risen to the rank of lieutenant in a regiment entirely composed of Corsicans. My brother was my only friend; we had been left orphans when I was five and he was eighteen, and he brought me up as though I were his son. In 1814, under the Bourbons, he got married. Then the emperor came back from Elba, my brother immediately returned to the army and, after sustaining a slight wound at Waterloo, he retreated with the army beyond the Loire.’
‘You are telling me the whole history of the Hundred Days,1 Monsieur Bertuccio,’ the count said. ‘It’s all over and done with, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘Excellency, pray forgive me, but these preliminary details are essential. You promised to be patient.’
‘Very well. I did agree.’
‘One day we received a letter. I have to tell you that we lived in the little village of Rogliano, at the far end of Cap Corse. The letter was from my brother and informed us that the army had been disbanded and he was returning home, via Châteauroux, Clermont-Ferrand, Le Puy and Nîmes. If I had any money, he begged me to leave it for him in Nîmes, with an innkeeper who was an acquaintance of ours and with whom I had had some dealings…’
‘By way of contraband…’
‘For heaven’s sake, Monsieur le Comte, one must live.’
‘Undoubtedly. Carry on.’
‘As I told you, Excellency, I loved my brother dearly, so I decided not to send him the money but to take it myself. I had a thousand francs, so I left five hundred for Assunta – that is, my sister-in-law – and, with the other five hundred, I set off for Nîmes. It was easy. I had a boat and a cargo to pick up on the way, so everything favoured my design. But once I had taken on the cargo, the wind changed and we had to wait for four or five days before we could pass the mouth of the Rhône. Finally, we succeeded in entering the river, and sailed up as far as Arles. I left the boat between Bellegarde and Beaucaire, and set off on the road for Nîmes.’
‘We shall get there eventually, I suppose?’
‘Yes, sir. Forgive me, but as Your Excellency will appreciate, I am only telling him what is absolutely essential. This was the moment when the celebrated massacres took place in the south. There were two or three brigands called Trestaillon, Truphemy and Graffan who went around cutting the throats of anyone suspected of Bonapartism. Monsieur le Comte has doubtless heard about these killings?’
‘Vaguely. I was a long way from France at the time. Go on.’
‘When you entered Nîmes, you literally walked in blood; there were bodies lying everywhere. The murderers were organized in gangs to kill, loot and burn.
‘When I saw the carnage, I was filled with fear, not for myself: being a simple Corsican fisherman, I had little to fear. On the contrary, that was a fine time for us smugglers; but I was concerned for my brother, a soldier of the empire, returning from the Army of the Loire with his uniform and his epaulettes. He had every reason to feel afraid.
‘I hastened to the inn. My foreboding was correct: my brother had arrived in Nîmes the day before and, at the very door of the man from whom he had come to beg hospitality, he had been murdered.
‘I made every effort to identify his assassins, but they inspired such fear that no one dared tell me their names. Then I remembered French justice, which I had heard so much about and which was reputed to fear nothing, so I went to the king’s prosecutor.’
‘Whose name was Villefort?’ Monte Cristo asked casually.
‘Yes, Excellency. He came from Marseille, where he had been a deputy prosecutor and was promoted as a reward for his dedication. It was said that he had been among the first to warn the government of Napoleon’s landing on his return from Elba.’
‘So you went to see him,’ said Monte Cristo.
‘ “Monsieur,” I told him, “my brother was murdered yesterday in the streets of Nîmes, I don’t know by whom, but it is your responsibility to find out. You administer a law that should avenge those it has been unable to protect.”
‘ “Who was your brother?” the prosecutor asked me.
‘ “A lieutenant in the Corsican battalion.”
‘ “So he was a soldier in the usurper’s army, was he?”
‘ “He was a soldier in the French army.”
‘ “Very well,” he replied. “He lived by the sword and he died by the sword.”
‘ “You are wrong, Monsieur. He lived by the sword, but he died by the dagger.”
‘ “And what do you expect me to do about it?” the magistrate asked.
‘ “I have told you: I want his revenge.”
‘ “On whom?”
‘ “On his murderers.”
‘ “How do I know who they are?”
‘ “Have them found.”
‘ “For what purpose? Your brother must have fallen out with someone and got into a fight. All those old soldiers are inclined to intemperance: it worked well enough for them in the days of the empire, but that kind of thing is not appropriate now. Our southerners don’t like soldiers and they don’t like unruly behaviour.”
‘ “Monsieur,” I said, “I am not asking this for myself. If it were just up to me, I should weep or I should take my revenge, nothing more. But my poor brother had a wife. If anything were to happen to me, the poor woman would die of starvation, because it was only my brother’s work that kept her. Let her have a small government pension.”
‘ “There are disasters in every revolution,” Monsieur de Villefort replied. “Your brother was a victim of this one.
It’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t mean that the government owes your family anything. If we were to try all the cases of reprisals that the supporters of the usurper carried out on those of the king when they were in power, then it could well be that your brother would be condemned to death. What happened was entirely natural, it’s the law of retaliation.”
‘ “What, Monsieur!” I exclaimed. “I cannot believe that you, a magistrate, are saying this!”
‘ “On my word, all these Corsicans are mad!” Monsieur de Villefort replied. “And they still think that their fellow-countryman is emperor. You have missed the boat, my dear fellow. You should have come to me about this two months ago. Now is too late, so be off with you. If you don’t leave, I’ll have you thrown out.”
‘I looked at him for a moment to see if there was anything to be gained by begging him further. The man was like granite. I went over to him, and said under my breath: “Well, then, since you know Corsicans, you must know that they keep their word. Because you are a Royalist, you think that it was a good thing to kill my brother, a Bonapartist. Well, I too am a Bonapartist, and let me tell you something: I shall kill you. From this moment on, I declare a vendetta against you, so look after and protect yourself as best you may, because the next time we are face to face, your last hour will have come.” And, with that, before he could recover from his surprise, I opened the door and fled.’
‘Well, I’ll be darned!’ said Monte Cristo. ‘You, Monsieur Bertuccio, with that honest face of yours! You, do something like that! And to the crown prosecutor, what’s more! Shame on you! I hope he at least understood the meaning of the word “vendetta”?’
‘He understood it well enough to avoid going out alone from that time onwards, and to hole up in his house, while getting his people to look everywhere for me. Luckily I was too well hidden for them to find me. So then he took fright. He was afraid to stay any longer in Nîmes and asked to be moved. Since he was a person with influence, he was appointed to Versailles. However, as you know, no distance is too great for a Corsican when he has sworn revenge on his enemy, and his carriage, swift as it was, could never keep more than half a day’s journey ahead of me, even though I was following on foot.
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