The Count of Monte Cristo

by Alexandre Dumas

‘The king! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics

there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don’t kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that’s all.

to a happy man, a prayer is a monotonous composition, void of meaning, until the day when suffering deciphers the sublime language through which the poor victim addresses God.

Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces

electricity, electricity produces lightning and lightning gives light.’

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.’

‘Philosophy cannot be taught. Philosophy is the union of all acquired knowledge and the genius that applies it:

‘You are my son, Dantès!’ the old man cried. ‘You are the child of my captivity. My priestly office condemned me to celibacy: God sent you to me both to console the man who could not be a father and the prisoner who could not be free.’

The heart breaks when it has swelled too much in the warm breath of hope, then finds itself enclosed in cold reality.

Hatred is blind and anger deaf: the one who pours himself a cup of vengeance is likely to drink a bitter draught.’

‘I accept,’ said the count. ‘I assure you that I was only waiting for this opportunity to carry out some plans that I have been considering for a long while.’

‘Youth is a flower of which love is the fruit … Happy the vintager who picks it after watching it slowly mature.’

‘My father saw this act as a miracle. He believed that our benefactor was someone who had come back from the dead. Oh, Monsieur, it was a touching superstition and, while I did not believe it myself, I certainly had no wish to destroy the belief in his noble heart! How many times did he mutter the name of a dear, dear friend, a friend whom he had lost; and when he was on the point of death and the prospect of eternity might have given his mind some illumination from beyond the grave, this idea, which until then had been no more than a suspicion, became a certainty, and the last words that he spoke before he died were these: “Maximilien, it was Edmond Dantès.”

When I think of you, my blood churns, my chest swells, my heart flows over; but I shall direct all this strength, all this ardour, all this

Come, Valentine, is that the only idea on your mind? What! I offer you my life, I give you my soul, I dedicate the slightest beat of my heart to you; and, while I am all yours, while I whisper to myself that I should die if I were to lose you,

‘But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?’ Maximilien asked. ‘Because, my friend, I judge it by the past.’

‘Really, Mademoiselle, you are the only woman I know who is so generous in speaking about others of your own sex.’

‘I love everything beautiful,’ said Eugénie.

‘It is not my fault, Madame. In Malta I loved a girl and was going to marry her, when the war came and swept me away from her like a whirlwind. I thought that she loved me enough to wait for me, even to remain faithful to my tomb. When I came back, she was married. This is the story of every man who is aged over twenty. Perhaps my heart was weaker than that of others and I suffered more than they would in my place, that’s all.’

‘Listen to me, my dear, my beloved Valentine,’ he said in his low, melodious voice. ‘People like us, who have never had a thought that would have made them blush before others, before their parents or before God, people like us can read one another’s hearts like an open book. I have never been a character in a novel, I am not a melancholy hero, I have no pretensions to be Manfred or Antony.2 But without words, without oaths and protestations, I entrusted my life to you.

Moral wounds have the peculiarity that they are invisible, but do not close: always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain tender and open in the heart.

Truly generous men are always ready to feel compassion when their enemy’s misfortune exceeds the bounds of their hatred.

For hearts which have long suffered, happiness is like dew on soil parched by the sun: both heart and earth absorb this beneficial rain as it falls on them, and nothing appears on the surface.

For some days, Monte Cristo had realized something that for a long time he had not dared to believe, which is that there were two Mercédès in the world, and he could once more be happy.

‘Not in the slightest, Madame. It never was my vocation to tie myself down to household chores or the whim of a man, whoever he might be. My vocation was to be an artist, free in heart, body and thought.’

‘You heard it first in Marseille, twenty-three years ago, on the day of your wedding to Mademoiselle de Saint-Méran. Look in your files.’

What my thinking today lacks is a proper assessment of the past, because I am looking at this past from the other end of the horizon. Indeed, as one goes forward, so the past, like the landscape through which one is walking, is gradually effaced. What is happening to me is what happens to people who are wounded in a dream: they look at their wound and they feel it but cannot remember how it was caused.

In any case, I am old and quite gristly: a fat white, not good to eat.’

there is neither happiness nor misfortune in this world, there is merely the comparison between one state and another, nothing more. Only someone who has suffered the deepest misfortune is capable of experiencing the heights of felicity. Maximilien, you must needs have wished to die, to know how good it is to live.