The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
‘You see,’ Dantès said, leaving the helm. ‘I might be of some use to you, at least during the crossing. If you want to leave me in Leghorn, you can do so. I shall repay you for my food up to that time, and for the clothes that you will lend me, out of my first month’s pay.’
‘Very well, then,’ said the master. ‘We can come to some arrangement if you are reasonable.’
‘One man is worth as much as another,’ said Dantès. ‘Give me what you give to my companions, and we shall be quits.’
‘That’s not fair,’ said the sailor who had pulled Dantès out of the sea. ‘You know more than we do.’
‘Who the devil asked you? Is this any of your business, Jacopo?’ said the master. ‘Every man is free to sign on at the rate which suits him.’
‘Correct,’ said Jacopo. ‘I was just commenting.’
‘Well, you would do better to lend this poor lad a pair of trousers and a jacket, if you have any to spare; he is stark naked.’
‘I haven’t,’ said Jacopo, ‘but I do have a shirt and trousers.’
‘That is all I need,’ said Dantès. ‘Thank you, my friend.’
Jacopo slid down the hatch and returned a moment later with the two articles of clothing, which Dantès was unspeakably happy to put on.
‘Do you need anything else?’ asked the master.
‘A scrap of bread and another draught of that excellent rum that you gave me. I have not eaten for a long time.’ It was, in fact, around forty hours.
They brought Dantès a piece of bread, and Jacopo offered him the flask.
‘Hard a-port!’ the captain cried, turning to the helmsman.
Dantès looked in the same direction as he put the flask to his lips, but it stopped half-way.
‘Look there!’ the master exclaimed. ‘What is going on at the Château d’If?’
A little puff of white smoke, which is what had caught Dantès’ attention, had just appeared above the battlements of the south tower of the fortress.
A second later, the sound of a distant explosion reached the tartan. The sailors looked up and exchanged glances.
‘What does that mean?’ the master asked.
‘Some prisoner escaped last night,’ said Dantès, ‘and they are firing the warning gun.’
The master looked at the young man who, as he spoke the words, brought the flask to his lips. He drank the liquid with such calm and satisfaction that, if the master had felt the shadow of a doubt, it would immediately have been dispelled.
‘This rum is devilish strong,’ Dantès said, wiping the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.
‘In any case,’ the master thought, looking at him, ‘even if it is him, so much the better. I have gained a fine man.’
Pretending that he was tired, Dantès asked if he could sit at the helm. The helmsman, delighted to be relieved of his job, looked at the master, who nodded to let him know that he could hand the bar over to his new companion. From this vantage point, Dantès could remain with his eyes fixed towards Marseille.
‘What day of the month is it?’ Dantès asked Jacopo, who had come to sit next to him, as they lost sight of the Château d’If.
‘February the twenty-eighth,’ he replied.
‘And what year?’
‘What do you mean, what year! Are you asking me what year it is?’
‘Yes,’ said the young man. ‘I am asking you the year.’
‘You have forgotten what year we are in?’
‘What do you expect! I was so terrified last night,’ Dantès said, laughing, ‘I nearly lost my mind. As it is, my memory is troubled. So I am asking you: this is the twenty-eighth of February, of what year?’
‘Of the year 1829,’ said Jacopo.
Fourteen years earlier, to the day, Dantès had been arrested. He had entered the Château d’If at the age of nineteen and was now emerging from it at thirty-three.
A pained smile crossed his lips: he was wondering what had become of Mercédès during this time, when she must have thought him dead. Then a spark of hatred lit up in his eyes, when he thought of the three men who were responsible for his long, cruel captivity. And once more he vowed that same, implacable oath of vengeance that he had already taken in prison against Danglars, Fernand and Villefort.
But now the oath was no longer an empty threat, because the finest fully-manned sailing ship in the Mediterranean could surely not have overtaken the little tartan which was making for Leghorn at full speed.
XXII
THE SMUGGLERS
Dantès had not been a day on board before he realized the sort of people he was dealing with. Without ever having had lessons from Abbé Faria, the worthy master of the Jeune-Amélie (as the Genoese tartan was called) was acquainted with more or less every language spoken around the great lake known as the Mediterranean, from Arabic to Provençal. This relieved him of the need to employ an interpreter – a class of people who are always bothersome and sometimes indiscreet – and made it easy for him to communicate, whether with any ships that he might encounter at sea, or with the little boats that he met along the coasts, or finally with those people, without name, nationality or evident profession, who are always to be found on the paved quaysides of seaports, living on mysterious and secret resources which one can only believe must come to them directly from Providence, since they have no other visible means of support: the reader may have guessed that Dantès was on a smugglers’ ship.
For this reason the master had been slightly suspicious about taking him on board. He was well known to all the Customs officers along the coast, engaging with these gentlemen in a mutual exchange of stratagems, each more cunning than the last, so he had at first thought that Dantès was an emissary of my lords the excisemen, who were using this ingenious method to root out some of the secrets of his trade. But the brilliance with which Dantès had succeeded in the test of fine navigation had entirely convinced him. Then, at the sight of the puff of smoke rising like a plume over the Château d’If and the distant sound of the explosion, he momentarily guessed that he had just taken on board one of those men – in this respect like kings – whose entrances and exits are honoured by the firing of cannon. This bothered him less, it must be said, than if the newcomer had been a Customs officer, and this new suspicion vanished like its predecessor when he saw how perfectly calm his latest recruit remained.
In this way, Edmond had the advantage of knowing what his master was, while his master did not know the same about him. Whenever the old seaman and his crew questioned him, and on whatever subject, he held firm and confessed nothing, giving a wealth of details about Naples or Malta, both of which he knew as well as he knew Marseille, and sticking to his first story with a consistency that was a credit to his memory. Thus the Genoan, wily as he was, let himself be taken in by Edmond, thanks to the young man’s gentle manner, his experience of the sea and, above all, his unusual skill at deception.
But, then, perhaps the Genoan was like those clever men who never know more than they need and believe only what it is in their interests to believe.
This was the situation when they arrived at Leghorn.
Here Edmond had to face a new trial: he had to find out if he would recognize himself, not having seen his own face for fourteen years. He could remember the young man quite clearly; now he would discover what he had become as a mature one. As far as his companions were concerned, he had fulfilled his vow. He had already been twenty times to Leghorn and knew a barber in the Rue Saint-Fernand. That was where he went to have his beard shaved and his hair cut.
The barber looked with astonishment at this man, with his long hair and thick black beard, who resembled one of those fine heads by Titian. At that time it was not yet the fashion to wear one’s beard and hair long; nowadays a barber would rather be surprised that a man who could enjoy such physical attributes should wish to deprive himself of them. He said nothing and set about his work. When it was done, when Edmond felt his chin to be clean-shaven and when his ha
Dantès was now thirty-three years old, as we have said, and his fourteen years in prison had brought what might be described as a great spiritual change to his features. He had entered the Château d’If with the round, full, radiant face of a contented young man whose first steps in life have been easy and who looks to the future as a natural extension of the past. All that had changed utterly.
His oval face had lengthened and his once merry lips had adopted a fixed, firm line that spoke of stern resolve. His eyebrows arched under a single, pensive line and his eyes themselves were imprinted with deep sadness, behind which from time to time could be seen dark flashes of misanthropy and hatred. His complexion, kept so long from daylight and the sun, had taken on the dull tones that give such aristocratic beauty to men of the north when black hair frames their faces. Moreover the knowledge that he had acquired gave a look of intelligent self-confidence to his whole face. Though naturally quite tall, his body had taken on the compact vigour of one that has learnt to concentrate all its strength within itself.
The elegance of lean, nervous limbs had been replaced by the solidity of a well-built, muscular man. His voice, accustomed to prayers, sobs and curses, had at times a strangely soft resonance, at others a rough edge that was almost husky. In addition, having been constantly in darkness or half-light, his eyes had acquired the remarkable ability of seeing in the dark, like those of wolves and hyenas.
Edmond smiled when he saw himself. It would have been impossible for his best friend – if he had any friends left – to recognize him; he didn’t recognize himself.
The master of the Jeune-Amélie, who was very keen to keep someone of Edmond’s ability in his crew, had offered him an advance on his share of future profits and Edmond had accepted, so the first thing he did on leaving the barber’s where he had undergone this preliminary metamorphosis was to find a shop where he could buy a complete set of seaman’s clothes. Of course, this is very simple, consisting of white trousers, a striped shirt and a Phrygian cap.
Edmond returned the trousers and shirt that Jacopo had lent him, and appeared in his new dress before the master of the Jeune-Amélie, who asked him to repeat his story. The master could hardly recognize the heavily bearded man, half drowned and with seaweed in his hair, whom he had brought, naked and dying, on to the deck of his ship, in this smartly dressed and stylish sailor. Encouraged by this change in appearance, he repeated his offer to take Dantès on, but Dantès would accept it for only three months; he had plans of his own.
The crew of the Jeune-Amélie was a very busy one and subject to a master who was not used to wasting time. They had been hardly a week in Leghorn before the ship’s swelling hold was full of coloured muslin, forbidden cotton cloth, English powder, and tobacco on which the state monopoly had forgotten to put its stamp. They had to get all this out of Leghorn, duty paid, and unload it on the Corsican coast, from where certain speculators would take charge of conveying it to France.
They set sail, and Edmond found himself once more crossing the azure sea that had been the first horizon of his youth and which he had seen so often in his prison dreams. Leaving the Gorgone on their right and the Pianosa on their left, they set out for the birthplace of Paoli and Napoleon.
Coming up on deck early the following day, as was his custom, the master found Dantès leaning against the side of the ship with a strange look on his face as he stared out towards a heap of granite that the rising sun was bathing in rosy light: the island of Monte Cristo.
The Jeune-Amélie passed, some three-quarters of a league to starboard, and continued to make for Corsica.
As they sailed past this island, the name of which held such significance for him, Dantès was thinking that he had only to leap into the sea and within half an hour he would be in this promised land. But what would he do there, with no tools to recover his treasure and no weapons to defend himself? In any case, what would the sailors say? What would the master think? He must wait.
Waiting, fortunately, was something that he knew how to do. He had waited fourteen years for his freedom and, now that he was free, he could easily wait for six months or a year to obtain his wealth. Would he not have chosen freedom without wealth if he had been offered it? In any case, was the wealth not an illusion, which had been born in poor Abbé Faria’s sick brain and died with him? Yet Cardinal Spada’s letter was oddly precise – and Dantès repeated it in his head from beginning to end. He had not forgotten a single word.
Evening came. Edmond watched the island pass through all the colours of sunset and dusk, then fade into the darkness for all except himself: his eyes, accustomed to the darkness of a prison cell, doubtless continued to make out the island, since he was the last to leave the deck.
The next day they woke up off Aleria. All day they tacked, backwards and forwards, and in the evening bonfires were lit on shore. The placing of the fires must have shown that it was safe to disembark, because a lantern took the place of the flag on the little ship’s yard-arm and they sailed to within gunshot range of the coast.
Dantès had noticed that, approaching land on what he must consider solemn occasions, the master of the Jeune-Amélie would set up two little culverines on pivots, of the sort that might be used in defending a rampart and which, without making much noise, would project a quarter-pound shot a thousand paces.
This evening, however, the precaution proved unnecessary. Everything went off as peacefully and as genteelly as might be imagined. Four launches rowed quietly over to the ship which, no doubt to welcome them, put its own launch in the water; and between them the five rowing-boats had laboured so hard that, by two o’clock in the morning, the whole cargo had been transferred from the Jeune-Amélie to dry land.
The master of the ship was a man of such well-regulated habits that the very same night the bounty had been divided up. Each man had his share, a hundred Tuscan lire, which is about eighty francs in our money. But the voyage was not over. They set course for Sardinia, with a view to reloading the vessel that had just been unloaded. This second operation went as smoothly as the first; the Jeune-Amélie was in luck.
The new cargo was destined for the duchy of Lucca. It was almost entirely composed of Havana cigars, sherry and malaga wine.
Here, however, they had a brush with the excise, that eternal enemy of the Jeune-Amélie’s master. A Customs officer was laid low and two sailors were wounded; Dantès was one of them: a shot passed through his left shoulder, leaving a flesh wound.
He was almost happy at this skirmish and his wound. These hard tutors had taught him how he viewed danger and bore suffering. He had laughed at danger and, as the shot pierced him, said like a Greek philosopher: ‘Pain, you are not an evil.’
Moreover he had looked at the mortally wounded Customs man and – whether because his blood was up or because his feelings were chilled – the sight made very little impression on him. Dantès was on the track that he wished to follow, proceeding towards the end that he wished to attain: his heart was turning to stone in his breast.
Jacopo, seeing him fall, had thought him dead and rushed to his side, raised him up and finally, when he was under cover, tended him like the good friend he was.
In short, could it be that the world was neither as good as Doctor Pangloss1 pretended, nor as bad as it seemed to Dantès, since this man, who had nothing to expect from his friend except to inherit his part of the bounty, had felt such distress at seeing him fall dead?
Happily, as we have said, Dantès was only wounded. With the help of some herbs picked at special times and sold to the smugglers by old Sardinian women, the wound quickly healed. So Edmond wanted to tempt Jacopo: as a reward for his care, he offered him his share of the bounty, but Jacopo refused indignantly.
As a result of this kind of sympathetic devotion that Jacopo had accorded to Edmond from the first moment that they met, Edmond conceded a certain degree of affection to Jacopo. The latter asked
In this way, during the long days on board, when the ship was safely gliding across an azure sea with a favourable wind swelling its sails and needing no more than the attention of its helmsman, Edmond would take a chart of the coast and make himself Jacopo’s instructor as poor Abbé Faria had become Edmond’s. He showed him how to take bearings in coastal waters, explained the compass to him and taught him to read in that great open book above our heads which is called the sky and in which God writes on the blue firmament in diamond letters.
When Jacopo asked him: ‘What is the use of teaching all these things to a poor sailor like me?’, Edmond replied: ‘Who knows? One day you may be captain of a ship. Your fellow-countryman Bonaparte became emperor!’
We forgot to mention that Jacopo was a Corsican.
Two and a half months passed in such successive journeys. Edmond had become as skilled in navigating the coastal waters as he had once been on the open sea. He got to know all the smugglers around the Mediterranean and learned the Masonic signs that these semi-pirates used to recognize one another.
Twenty times he had sailed one way or the other past his island of Monte Cristo, but not once had he found an opportunity to land there. So he made a resolution, which was that, as soon as his contract with the master of the Jeune-Amélie came to an end, he would hire a little boat on his own account (which he could well do, having saved around a hundred piastres on his different voyages) and, on some pretext or other, sail to Monte Cristo.
There he would be free to hunt for his treasure.
Well, not entirely free, since he would no doubt be spied upon by those who had crossed with him. But in this world one must learn to take some risks. However, prison had made Edmond cautious and he would have preferred not to risk anything.