Literary Love

by Gabrielle Vigot

  “No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other’s private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.—I say, Dad,” Dallas broke off, “you’re not angry with me? If you are, let’s make it up and go and lunch at Henri’s. I’ve got to rush out to Versailles afterward.”

  Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

  After a little while he did not regret Dallas’s indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, some one had guessed and pitied… . And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionate insight, would not have understood that. To the boy, no doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces. But was it really no more? For a long time Archer sat on a bench in the Champs Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life rolled by… .

  A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited. She had never gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some years before, she had made no change in her way of living. There was nothing now to keep her and Archer apart—and that afternoon he was to see her.

  He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre. She had once told him that she often went there, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For an hour or more he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle of afternoon light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty. After all, his life had been too starved… .

  Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself saying: “But I’m only fifty-seven—” and then he turned away. For such summer dreams it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.

  He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were to meet; and together they walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over the bridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies.

  Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father’s mind, was talking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles. He had had but one previous glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he had tried to pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go with the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure criticism tripped each other up on his lips.

  As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness increased. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal. “That’s it: they feel equal to things—they know their way about,” he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

  Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father’s arm. “Oh, by Jove,” he exclaimed.

  They had come out into the great tree-planted space before the Invalides. The dome of Mansart floated ethereally above the budding trees and the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itself all the rays of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol of the race’s glory.

  Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the avenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarter as quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit it up. Now, by some queer process of association, that golden light became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived. For nearly thirty years, her life—of which he knew so strangely little—had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of the theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young Frenchman who had once said to him: “Ah, good conversation—there is nothing like it, is there?”

  Archer had not seen M. Riviere, or heard of him, for nearly thirty years; and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of Madame Olenska’s existence. More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand. During that time he had been living with his youthful memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship. Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day… .

  They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were walking down one of the thoroughfares flanking the building. It was a quiet quarter, after all, in spite of its splendour and its history; and the fact gave one an idea of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as this were left to the few and the indifferent.

  The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square into which they had turned. Dallas stopped again, and looked up.

  “It must be here,” he said, slipping his arm through his father’s with a movement from which Archer’s shyness did not shrink; and they stood together looking up at the house.

  It was a modern building, without distinctive character, but many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured front. On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the rounded tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were still lowered, as though the sun had just left it.

  “I wonder which floor—?” Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the porte-cochere he put his head into the porter’s lodge, and came back to say: “The fifth. It must be the one with the awnings.”

  Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end of their pilgrimage had been attained.

  “I say, you know, it’s nearly six,” his son at length reminded him.

  The father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.

  “I believe I’ll sit there a moment,” he said.

  “Why—aren’t you well?” his son exclaimed.

  “Oh, perfectly. But I should like you, please, to go up without me.”

  Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. “But, I say, Dad: do you mean you won’t come up at all?”

  “I don’t know,” said Archer slowly.

  “If you don’t she won’t understand.”

  “Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you.”

  Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.

  “But what on earth shall I say?”

  “My dear fellow, don’t you always know what to say?” his father rejoined with a smile.

  “Very well. I shall say you’re old-fashioned, and prefer walking up the five flights because you don’t like lifts.”

  His father smiled again. “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s enough.”

  Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture, passed out of sight under the vaulted doorway.

  Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged balcony. He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall, and then ushered into the drawing-room. He pictured Dallas entering that room with his quick assured step and his delightful smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy “took after him.”

  Then he tried to see the persons already in the ro
om—for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one—and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it… . He thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.

  “It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

  He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.

  At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel. And then strangely, improbably, his thoughts turned, not to memories of his time with the Countess, but to memories of May. May had been real, present, ever constant. And yet, all this time, Newland had allowed himself to be ensnared in an illusion of love, a dream from which he chose never to wake. He had clung to the words of a woman who had said she could never love him unless she gave him up. He had devoted his life to a shadow, a specter. And only now, at this moment, did he understand that for all these years, Ellen had deprived him of real love. The consequence was that he had unfairly withheld his love from May. His stubborn obsession for the Countess had robbed him of his very soul. Now, he would finally take it back.

  At this moment, Newland had never felt closer to May, had never loved her more. Too late.

  The last time Newland made love to May was on a Sunday morning in the gardens. It was a spring day filled with promise. The morning was fresh, and they had forgone church and slipped into a side entrance to the gardens. No one would object, not with all the generous contributions they had made over the years. The garden was to them a second home. They had spent many pleasant days wandering through the grand flowerbeds and extraordinary greens.

  That day, Newland had lingered behind, studying the blooms of the peonies, an exceptional species with its interesting folds and center, while May had gone ahead of him on the path. Some minutes later, she called to him, and so he hurried along through the lilies to find her.

  “I’m here, Newland,” she cried, her voice like a song.

  She had escaped down a narrow path surrounded by trees and lush ground vegetation. It was a place they knew well; a place to steal away for a romantic interlude. When he discovered her lying on a bench, her hair freed, her dress draped over the back of the bench, one of her legs hanging down to the grass with her foot rubbing against its soft blanket, there was no doubt what she wanted.

  “There you are,” she said, smiling up at him enticingly.

  Newland began undressing. “Do you think we shall be discovered?” He smiled, knowing that only a few gardeners were about the grounds, none of them near.

  But just as he was slipping out of his trousers, May rose and began to run.

  He threw his pants over the bench and ran after her. She laughed wildly, her hair swaying with each step.

  “Catch me, Newland,” she shouted and glanced back at him over her shoulder.

  “Come back before we’re discovered,” he cried, hurrying after her.

  She skipped down a dirt path, bordered by lush vegetation, and ran into the opening of a private garden. A small pond filled with koi fish and lily pads lay behind her. Trellises interlaced with blooming roses lined the edges of private garden, around which lilac bushes grew. Inside the garden, she stopped, lifted her arms, and began to twirl. The sunlight shone down on her long, lustrous hair and the creamy flesh of her shoulders. Her slip flowed in the breeze, showing off her lithe form.

  Then she came to a stop. “Isn’t it lovely?” she said and raced to him. She threw her arms around his neck and lifted her legs up behind her.

  Her laugh was contagious, and Newland soon found himself lost in the moment, laughing and spinning her around, until he became lightheaded. He eased them down to the grass and then found her lips, and before they made love, they shared a passionate kiss, one that would remain etched in Newland’s mind forever.

  When the kiss broke, he moved between her legs and held her tightly in his arms. She wrapped her legs around his waist and he slid easily into her velvety sheath, rich with cream, and together they began making love. She opened her eyes and smiled lovingly at him. The vision of her beneath him as they made love was celestial; her expression was rapturous.

  How could he not have realized that their bodies had melded into one flesh? How could he have not seen that they shared a single spirit? That the lines and curves of their bodies meshed perfectly, that each breath they took seemed to emanate from a single being. In the throes of passion, Newland and May seemed to understand each other perfectly. Their lovemaking transported them to paradise. So how could Newland not have recognized that he was deeply in love with his wife, not the Countess?

  When May crested that day, Newland remembered her singing out with joy. “Oh Newland, I do love you so.” He would replay those words in his mind forever.

  As Newland walked along, finally able to dismiss the Countess from his mind, he returned to that day with May in the gardens. It was the most perfect day of his life. There was nothing he could not remember about it now. There was a light breeze, warmed by the bright morning sun. The air itself was intoxicating, as it was filled with the fragrance of the roses blending with the lilacs and gardenia. And as he made sweet, heavenly love to May, he recalled that a mourning dove had roosted above them. It was only feet away and he remembered how the bird called for his lover, his plea insistent and everlasting. When his mate finally returned a coo from across the pond, the bird swiftly alighted and glided through the open space to find his mate’s branch.

  How had Newland forgotten this perfect day until now? How had he failed to recognize the passion that he had found with May on that glorious day and on so many other days that he had diminished in favor of pure fantasy? Now, too late to tell May how he felt, that day in the garden would remain etched in his brain as the most romantic day of his life. Newland thought of the mourning doves again. He marveled at how two creatures could mate for life, could remain loyal to one another, even after death claimed the first of them. No matter that it was some inexplicable force of nature that caused the bond—it was wondrous.

  About The Authors

  Coco Rousseau

  After successfully adapting E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View to explore that novel’s erotic potential, Coco decided she would continue her passion for retelling classic love stories on a more intimate level by adapting an American classic.

  Edith Wharton

  In 1921, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her twelfth book, The Age of Innocence. A remarkable chronicle of an important period in American history, the story portrays the public and private lives of the upper class in nineteenth-century New York. Wharton creates a tragic, poignant love story among Newland Archer, an idealistic young lawyer, May, his society-conscious wife, and the Countess Olenska, a beautiful, mysterious woman with a scandalous past. In Coco’s adaptation of the timeless classic, the plot takes on a new twist, while also more explicitly exploring human passion and sexuality in ways that Wharton could not.

  The Count of Monte Cristo

  The Wild and Wanton Edition, Vol. 1

  Monica Corwin and Alexandre Dumas

  Avon, Massachusetts

  This edition published by

  Crimson Romance

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

  Blue Ash, Ohio 45242

  www.crimsonromance.com

  Copyright © 2013 by Monica Corwin and Alexandre Dumas

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-6883-9

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6883-1

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-6884-7

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6884
-8

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art © istockphoto.com/Jacob Wackerhausen and Steven Allan

  Contents

  Dearest Readers

  Chapter 1. Marseilles — The Arrival.

  Chapter 2. Father and Son.

  Chapter 3. The Catalans.

  Chapter 4. Conspiracy.

  Chapter 5. The Marriage-Feast.

  Chapter 6. The Deputy Procureur du Roi.

  Chapter 7. The Examination.

  Chapter 8. The Chateau D’If.

  Chapter 9. The Evening of the Betrothal.

  Chapter 10. The King’s Closet at the Tuileries.

  Chapter 11. The Corsican Ogre.

  Chapter 12. Father and Son.

  Chapter 13. The Hundred Days.

  Chapter 14. The Two Prisoners.

  Chapter 15. Number 34 and Number 27.

  Chapter 16. A Learned Italian.

  Chapter 17. The Abbe’s Chamber.

  Chapter 18. The Treasure.

  Chapter 19. The Third Attack

  Chapter 20. The Cemetery of the Chateau D’If.

  Chapter 21. The Island of Tiboulen.

  Chapter 22. The Smugglers.

  Chapter 23. The Island of Monte Cristo.

  Chapter 24. The Secret Cave.

  Chapter 25. The Unknown.

  Chapter 26. The Pont du Gard Inn.

  Dearest Readers

  There are tales of adventure and then there are stories of love and devotion and occasionally, in a very rare set of circumstances, the two become one, and an adventure can feature the truth and meaning of love in all its forms. Occasionally, on the way to love a character might have to experience loss, pain, and an acute reckoning with himself to achieve it. This is the story of Edmond Dantes and his journey to love through betrayal, redemption, and revenge. A journey as unique as the man himself.