emotions were wholly personal: she was thinking only of
Villefort's departure.

She loved Villefort, and he left her at the moment he was
about to become her husband. Villefort knew not when he
should return, and Renee, far from pleading for Dantes,
hated the man whose crime separated her from her lover.

Meanwhile what of Mercedes? She had met Fernand at the
corner of the Rue de la Loge; she had returned to the
Catalans, and had despairingly cast herself on her couch.
Fernand, kneeling by her side, took her hand, and covered it
with kisses that Mercedes did not even feel. She passed the
night thus. The lamp went out for want of oil, but she paid
no heed to the darkness, and dawn came, but she knew not
that it was day. Grief had made her blind to all but one
object -- that was Edmond.

"Ah, you are there," said she, at length, turning towards
Fernand.

"I have not quitted you since yesterday," returned Fernand
sorrowfully.

M. Morrel had not readily given up the fight. He had learned
that Dantes had been taken to prison, and he had gone to all
his friends, and the influential persons of the city; but
the report was already in circulation that Dantes was
arrested as a Bonapartist agent; and as the most sanguine
looked upon any attempt of Napoleon to remount the throne as
impossible, he met with nothing but refusal, and had
returned home in despair, declaring that the matter was
serious and that nothing more could be done.

Caderousse was equally restless and uneasy, but instead of
seeking, like M. Morrel, to aid Dantes, he had shut himself
up with two bottles of black currant brandy, in the hope of
drowning reflection. But he did not succeed, and became too
intoxicated to fetch any more drink, and yet not so
intoxicated as to forget what had happened. With his elbows
on the table he sat between the two empty bottles, while
spectres danced in the light of the unsnuffed candle --
spectres such as Hoffmann strews over his punch-drenched
pages, like black, fantastic dust.

Danglars alone was content and joyous -- he had got rid of
an enemy and made his own situation on the Pharaon secure.
Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the
ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart. Everything with
him was multiplication or subtraction. The life of a man was
to him of far less value than a numeral, especially when, by
taking it away, he could increase the sum total of his own
desires. He went to bed at his usual hour, and slept in
peace.

Villefort, after having received M. de Salvieux' letter,
embraced Renee, kissed the marquise's hand, and shaken that
of the marquis, started for Paris along the Aix road.

Old Dantes was dying with anxiety to know what had become of
Edmond. But we know very well what had become of Edmond.



Chapter 10
The King's Closet at the Tuileries.

We will leave Villefort on the road to Paris, travelling --
thanks to trebled fees -- with all speed, and passing
through two or three apartments, enter at the Tuileries the
little room with the arched window, so well known as having
been the favorite closet of Napoleon and Louis XVIII., and
now of Louis Philippe.

There, seated before a walnut table he had brought with him
from Hartwell, and to which, from one of those fancies not
uncommon to great people, he was particularly attached, the
king, Louis XVIII., was carelessly listening to a man of
fifty or fifty-two years of age, with gray hair,
aristocratic bearing, and exceedingly gentlemanly attire,
and meanwhile making a marginal note in a volume of
Gryphius's rather inaccurate, but much sought-after, edition
of Horace -- a work which was much indebted to the sagacious
observations of the philosophical monarch.

"You say, sir" -- said the king.

"That I am exceedingly disquieted, sire."

"Really, have you had a vision of the seven fat kine and the
seven lean kine?"

"No, sire, for that would only betoken for us seven years of
plenty and seven years of scarcity; and with a king as full
of foresight as your majesty, scarcity is not a thing to be
feared."

"Then of what other scourge are you afraid, my dear Blacas?"

"Sire, I have every reason to believe that a storm is


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