‘But, in heaven’s name, Monsieur!’ the unfortunate young man cried. ‘If your doubts are on my score, if you suspect me, then question me, I am ready to answer you.’
Villefort made a violent effort to control himself and said, in a voice that he tried to keep firm: ‘Monsieur, your interrogation has brought up the most serious charges against you, so I am no longer able, as I had first hoped, to set you free immediately. Before I can take that step, I must consult the examining magistrates. Meanwhile, you have seen how I have treated you.’
‘Oh, yes, Monsieur,’ Dantès exclaimed, ‘and I thank you, because you have been more of a friend to me than a judge.’
‘Well, I must keep you prisoner a little while longer, but for as short a time as I can. The main charge against you is the existence of this letter, and you see…’
Villefort went over to the fireplace, threw the letter into the fire and waited until it was reduced to ashes.
‘… and you see, I have destroyed it.’
‘Monsieur!’ Dantès exclaimed. ‘You are more than justice, you are goodness itself!’
‘But listen to me,’ Villefort continued. ‘After seeing me do that, you realize that you can trust me, don’t you?’
‘Order me, Monsieur, and I shall obey you.’
‘No,’ Villefort said, coming across to the young man. ‘No, I shall not give you any orders, you understand: I shall give you some advice.’
‘Do so, and I shall follow it as though it were an order.’
‘I am going to keep you until evening, here, at the Palais de Justice. Someone else may come and question you: tell him everything you told me, but don’t say a word about the letter.’
‘I promise not to, Monsieur.’
It seemed as though it was Villefort who was begging and the prisoner who was reassuring his judge.
‘You understand,’ he went on, looking towards the ashes which still retained the shape of the paper. ‘Now that the letter has been destroyed, only you and I know that it ever existed. You will never see it again, so deny it if anyone mentions it to you; deny it boldly and you will be saved.’
‘Have no fear, Monsieur, I shall deny it,’ Dantès said.
‘Good, good!’ Villefort exclaimed, reaching for a bell-pull. Then he stopped as he was about to ring and said: ‘Was that the only letter that you had?’
‘The only one.’
‘Swear to me.’
Dantès held out his hand. ‘I swear.’
Villefort rang and the police commissioner came in. Villefort went up to the officer and whispered a few words in his ear. The commissioner answered with a nod.
‘Follow this gentleman,’ Villefort told Dantès.
Dantès bowed, gave Villefort a last look of gratitude and went out. No sooner had the door shut behind him than the strength drained out of Villefort’s body and he fell, almost unconscious, into a chair. Then, after a moment, he muttered: ‘Oh, my Lord! On what slender threads do life and fortune hang… ! If the crown prosecutor had been in Marseille or if the examining magistrate had been called in my place, I should have been lost: that paper, that accursed piece of paper would have plunged me into the abyss. Father! Will you always be an obstacle to my happiness in this world, and shall I always have to contend with your past!’
Then, suddenly, it seemed as though a light had unexpectedly passed through his mind and lit up his face. A smile rose to his still clenched lips, while his distraught look became a stare and his mind appeared to concentrate on a single idea.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘This letter, which should have destroyed me, might perhaps make my fortune. Come, Villefort, to work!’
After making sure that the prisoner was no longer in the antechamber, the deputy prosecutor also went out and began to make his way briskly towards his fiancée’s house.
VIII
THE CHTEAU D’IF
Crossing the antechamber, the commissioner of police gestured to two gendarmes, who took up their positions on either side of Dantès. A door leading from the chambers of the crown prosecutor to the law courts was opened, and they went along one of those long dark corridors that inspire a shudder in all who enter them, even when they have no cause to fear.
Just as Villefort’s chambers gave access to the Palais de Justice, so the Palais de Justice gave access to the prison, a sombre pile overlooked by the bell-tower of Les Accoules, which rises opposite and examines it with curiosity from every gaping aperture.
After several twists and turns in the corridor down which they went, Dantès saw a door with an iron wicket open before him. The police commissioner knocked on it with a little hammer, and the three blows sounded to Dantès as though they had been struck against his heart. The door opened and the two gendarmes gently pushed their prisoner forward, for he still hung back. Dantès crossed the awful threshold and the door closed noisily behind him. He now breathed a different atmosphere, where the air was heavy and sulphurous: he was in prison.
He was taken to a cell that was quite clean, despite the bars and locks; the appearance of his surroundings consequently did not arouse too much fear in him. In any case, the deputy prosecutor’s words, spoken in tones that seemed to Dantès to express such concern, still echoed in his ears like a sweet promise of hope.
It was already four o’clock when Dantès was led into his cell. As we have already mentioned, it was March the first, so the prisoner would soon be in darkness. His hearing became more acute as his sight dimmed and, at the slightest sound which reached him, convinced that they were coming to set him free, he leapt up and took a step towards the door; but the noise soon faded as it vanished in another direction, and Dantès slumped back on to his stool.
Finally, at around ten o’clock in the evening, just as he was starting to lose hope, he heard a new sound that, this time, really did seem to be coming towards his cell. And, indeed, there were steps in the corridor that halted in front of his door. A key turned in the lock, the bolts creaked and the huge mass of oak moved open, suddenly filling the room with the dazzling light of two torches, in which Dantès could see the shining sabres and muskets of four gendarmes.
He had taken two steps forward, but stopped in his tracks at the sight of this increased force.
‘Have you come for me?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ one of the gendarmes replied.
‘On behalf of Monsieur the deputy crown prosecutor?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Very well,’ Dantès replied. ‘I am ready to go with you.’
Certain that it was M. de Villefort who had sent for him, the unfortunate young man had no apprehension and went out calmly, with easy steps, to station himself between the soldiers who formed his escort.
A carriage was waiting at the street door, the driver was on his seat and there was a police officer sitting beside him.
‘Has this carriage come for me?’ Dantès asked.
‘It’s for you,’ one of the gendarmes replied. ‘Get in.’
Dantès wanted to say something, but the door opened and he felt a shove. He had neither the opportunity to resist nor any intention of doing so. At once he found himself seated inside the carriage between two gendarmes, while the two others took their place on the bench at the front and the heavy vehicle began to move forward with a sinister rumble.
The prisoner looked at the windows, which were barred: he had merely exchanged one prison for another, with the difference that this one was moving and taking him to some unknown destination. However, through the bars which were so closely set that a hand could barely pass between them, Dantès could observe that they were proceeding down the Rue Caisserie, then the Rue Saint-Laurent and the Rue Taramis, heading towards the port.
Soon, through his own bars and those of the monument beside which they had stopped, he saw the bright lights of the Detention Barracks.
The carriage stopped, the police officer got down and went across to the guardroom. A dozen soldiers emerged and formed ranks. Dan
tès could see their rifles shining in the reflection from the dockside lamps.
‘Can it be for me,’ he wondered, ‘that they are deploying all these men?’
The officer unlocked the door and, in doing so, answered his question without speaking a word, for Dantès could see that a path had been opened for him between the two lines of soldiers, leading down to the quayside.
The two gendarmes who were sitting on the front bench got out first; then he himself was taken out, followed by those who had been sitting beside him. They set off towards a dinghy that a boatman of the Customs was holding against the quay by a chain. The soldiers watched Dantès go past with a look of dumb curiosity. In an instant he was placed in the stern of the boat, still between the four gendarmes, while the officer stood in the bow. With a violent shudder, the boat was pushed away from the quay and four oarsmen began to row vigorously towards the Pillon. At a cry from the boat, the chain across the entrance to the port was lowered and Dantès found himself in the area known as the Frioul, that is to say, outside the harbour.
The prisoner’s first reaction at finding himself outside had been one of joy. The open air was almost freedom. He drew deep breaths, to fill his lungs with the sharp breeze that carries on its wings all the unknown perfumes of the night and the sea. Soon, however, he sighed: they were rowing in front of the same Réserve where he had been so happy that very morning in the hour before his arrest; and, through two brightly lit windows, he could hear the merry sounds of a ball drifting towards him.
He clasped his hands together, raised his eyes to heaven and prayed.
The boat continued on its way. It had passed by the Tête du Maure and was opposite the cove of the Pharo. It was about to round the Battery, and this Dantès could not understand.
‘But where are you taking me?’ he asked one of the gendarmes.
‘You will know soon enough.’
‘But, even so…’
‘We are not allowed to tell you anything.’
Being half a soldier himself, Dantès knew that it was ridiculous to ask questions of subordinates who had been forbidden to reply, so he kept silent. However, the strangest ideas crowded through his brain. Since they could not go far in a boat of this size, and there was no ship at anchor in the direction towards which they were heading, he thought that they must be going to put him ashore on some distant part of the coast and tell him he was free. He was not bound, and no attempt had been made to handcuff him: this seemed like a good sign. In any case, had not the deputy prosecutor told him that, provided he did not mention the dread name of Noirtier, he had nothing to fear? Had not Villefort, in his very presence, destroyed the dangerous letter which was the only proof they had against him?
So he waited, silent and deep in thought, trying to penetrate the blackness of night with his sailor’s eye, accustomed to darkness and familiar with space.
On their right, they had left behind the Ile Ratonneau, with its lighthouse, and, almost following the line of the coast, they had arrived opposite the bay of the Catalans. Here, the prisoner looked with still greater intensity: here Mercédès lived and he felt at every instant that he could see the vague and ill-defined shape of a woman on the dark shore. Was it possible that Mercédès had been warned by some presentiment that her lover was going by, only three hundred yards away?
There was only one light burning in the Catalan village. By studying its position, Dantès realized that it came from his fiancée’s room. Mercédès was the only person still awake in the whole of the little colony. If the young man were to shout loudly, his fiancée might hear him. But a false feeling of shame prevented him. What would these men who were watching him say, if he cried out like a madman? So he stayed silent, staring at the light. Meanwhile the boat continued on its way; but the prisoner was not thinking about the boat: he was thinking of Mercédès.
The light disappeared behind a small hill. Dantès turned around and noticed that they were making for the open sea. While he had been looking ashore, taken up with his thoughts, sails had been substituted for the oars and the boat was now being driven before the wind.
Despite his reluctance to ask the gendarme any further questions, Dantès moved over to him and took his hand.
‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘in the name of your conscience and as a soldier, I beg you to have pity on me and to give me an answer. I am Captain Dantès, a good and loyal Frenchman, even though I have been accused of I-know-not-what act of treason. Where are you taking me? Tell me, and I swear as a sailor that I will answer to the call of duty and resign myself to my fate.’
The gendarme scratched his ear and looked at his fellow. The latter made a sign that roughly indicated: since we have gone this far, I see no objection; and the gendarme turned back to Dantès.
‘You are a Marseillais and a sailor, and you ask me where we are going?’
‘Yes, because, on my honour, I don’t know.’
‘You haven’t guessed?’
‘Not at all.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘I swear by all that is most sacred to me in the world. I beg you, tell me!’
‘What about my instructions?’
‘Your instructions do not forbid you to inform me of something that I shall know in ten minutes, or half an hour, or perhaps an hour. Yet, between now and then, you can spare me centuries of uncertainty. I ask this of you as though you were my friend. Look: I am not trying to resist or to escape. In any case it would be impossible. Where are we going?’
‘Unless you are blindfolded, or you have never been outside the port of Marseille, then you must surely guess where you are going.’
‘No.’
‘But look around you…’
Dantès got up and naturally turned his eyes to the point towards which the boat appeared to be heading: some two hundred yards in front of them loomed the sheer black rock from which, like a flinty excrescence, rises the Château d’If.1
To Dantès, who had not been thinking about it at all, the sudden appearance of this strange shape, this prison shrouded in such deep terror, this fortress which for three centuries has nourished Marseille with its gloomy legends, had the same effect as the spectacle of the scaffold on a condemned man.
‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The Château d’If! Why are we going there?’
The gendarme smiled.
‘You can’t be taking me to incarcerate me there?’ Dantès continued. ‘The Château d’If is a state prison, meant only for major political criminals. I haven’t committed any crime. Are there examining magistrates or any other sort of judges in the Château d’If?’
‘As far as I know, only a governor, jailers, a garrison and solid walls. Come now, my friend, don’t be so surprised, or I’ll think you are showing your gratitude for my indulgence by making fun of me.’
Dantès grasped the gendarme’s hand with crushing force.
‘Are you telling me, then, that I am being taken to the Château d’If to be imprisoned there?’
‘It seems like it,’ said the gendarme. ‘But, in any case, my friend, it won’t do you any good to grip my hand so tightly.’
‘Without any further enquiry or formalities?’ the young man asked.
‘The formalities have been gone through and the enquiry made.’
‘Like that, despite Monsieur de Villefort’s promise?’
‘I don’t know what Monsieur de Villefort promised you,’ said the gendarme. ‘All I do know is that we’re going to the Château d’If. Hey, there! What are you doing? Hold on! Give me a hand here!’
With a movement as swift as lightning, though not swift enough, even so, to escape the gendarme’s practised eye, Dantès tried to leap overboard but was held back just as his feet left the planks of the boat, into which he fell back, screaming furiously.
‘Fine!’ the gendarme exclaimed, kneeling on his chest. ‘Fine! So that is how you keep your word as a sailor. Still waters run deep! Well now, my good friend, make a single movement, just one, and I�
��ll put a shot in your head. I disobeyed my first instruction, but I guarantee you that I shall not fail to abide by the second.’
He gave every indication of his intention to carry out his threat, lowering his musket until Dantès could feel the barrel pressing against his temple.
For an instant he considered making the forbidden movement and so putting a violent end to the misfortune that had swooped down and suddenly seized him in its vulture’s grip. But, precisely because the misfortune was so unexpected, Dantès felt that it could not be long-lasting. Then he remembered M. de Villefort’s promises. And finally, it must be admitted that death in the bilge of an open boat at the hands of a gendarme struck him as ugly and grim. So he fell back on to the planks of the vessel with a cry of rage, gnawing at his fists in his fury.
Almost at the same moment, the boat shook violently. One of the oarsmen leapt on the rock that had just struck against its prow, a rope groaned as it unwound from a pulley, and Dantès realized that they had arrived and the skiff was being moored.
His guards, holding him simultaneously by his arms and the collar of his jacket, forced him to get up, obliged him to go ashore, and dragged him towards the steps leading up to the gate of the fortress, while the officer took up the rear, armed with a musket and bayonet.
In any case, Dantès did not attempt to struggle pointlessly: his slowness was the result of inertia rather than resistance. He stumbled dizzily like a drunken man. Once more he could see soldiers lined up along the steep embankment. He felt the steps obliging him to lift his feet and noticed that he was passing beneath a gateway and that the gate was closing behind him, but all of this in a daze, as if through a mist, without clearly perceiving anything. He could no longer even distinguish the sea, that vast sorrow of prisoners who stare into space with the awful feeling that they are powerless to cross it.
There was a momentary pause, during which he tried to gather his wits. He looked around him: he was in a square courtyard, enclosed within four high walls. He could hear the slow, regular footfalls of the sentries and, each time they passed in front of the two or three reflections cast on the walls by the light of as many lamps burning inside the castle, it reflected on the muzzles of their guns.
The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) Page 12
