The Count of Monte Cristo

by Alexandre Dumas

he too was to be married, he too was happy, and his own felicity had been disturbed so that he might help to destroy that of a man who, like himself, was on the very brink of happiness.

The contrast!!!

because he was happy and happiness makes even wicked men good, was so effectively spreading the warmth that overflowed from his heart that the accuser himself was not immune to it.

Now, in the depths of that sick heart the first seeds of a mortal abscess began to spread. That man whom he was sacrificing to his own ambition, that innocent man who was paying the price for the guilt of Villefort’s father, appeared before him, pale and menacing, clasping the hand of a fiancée who was no less pale, and bearing remorse in his train: not the remorse that makes its victims leap up like a Roman raging against his fate, but that bitter, muffled blow that intermittently chimes on the soul and sears it with the memory of some past action, an agonizing wound that lacerates, deeper and deeper until death.

The price to pay for a crime committed against the innocent

He had just condemned a man to perpetual incarceration, but an innocent man, poised on the brink of good fortune, depriving him not only of freedom, but also of happiness.

Thus a wounded man will be put on his guard by a powerful and instinctive prescience of pain and tremble whenever his finger approaches the site of an open, bleeding wound, for as long as it remains unhealed.

I love this descrption of a stain on the soul and its manifestation.

Danglars was one of those calculating men who are born with a pen behind their ear and an inkwell instead of a heart.

I understand Danglers so very well now. This is a wonderful description.

Villefort shuddered at the idea of the prisoner cursing him in the darkness and silence, but he had gone too far to retreat. Dantès would have to be broken between the cogs of his ambition.

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.

But mankind, on the contrary, is repelled by blood. It is not the laws of society that condemn murder, but the laws of nature.’

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.’

Whose interests might be served by your disappearance?’ ‘No one’s, for heaven’s sake! I was so insignificant!’ ‘That is not the answer, because that answer is wanting in both logic and common sense. Everything, my good friend, is relative, from the king who stands in the way of his designated successor to the employee who impedes the supernumerary: if the king dies, the successor inherits a crown; if the employee dies, the supernumerary inherits a salary of twelve hundred livres. These twelve hundred livres are his civil list: they are as necessary to his survival as the king’s twelve million. Every individual, from the lowest to the highest on the social scale, is at the centre of a little network of interests, with its storms and its hooked atoms, like the worlds of Descartes;2 except that these worlds get larger as one goes up: it is a reverse spiral balanced on a single point.

‘In their application, no; but the principles, yes. Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.’

‘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.’

Alone! He was once more alone! He had fallen back into silence, he was faced once more with nothingness! Alone, he no longer had even the sight or the sound of the voice of the only human being who still bound him to the earth! Would it not be better for him, like Faria, to go and ask God to explain the enigma of life, even at the risk of passing through the dark gate of suffering? The idea of suicide had been driven away by his friend’s presence, but returned like a ghost and rose up beside Faria’s corpse.

No, I want to live, I want to struggle to the end. No, I want to recover the happiness that has been taken away from me.

Oh, my God, my God! Haven’t I suffered enough? Now, can you do more for me than I can do for myself?’

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.

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?