The Past — The Count of Monte Cristo

Leaving Mercédès probably forever, Monte Cristo finds an abyss of doubt where vengeance once stood. He asks whether one hour can prove an architect's whole design sacrilegious error, orders himself to hide diamonds and bury gold, and walks the Rue de la Caisserie where twenty-four years ago a silent guard marched young Dantès toward the quay. Broad daylight makes the same houses smile while he remembers the Catalans light, the carbine at his forehead, and the Château d'If rising like a mortal enemy.

At the prison a concierge retells how prisoner No. 34 swapped places with a corpse and was thrown into the sea; Monte Cristo shudders hearing his escape as legend told by a stranger. In his old cell, darkness restores every mark: the stone seat, shoulder impressions, blood on the wall, calculations for Mercédès and his father, and the prayer preserve my memory. Faria's room yields the abbé's manuscript with its dragons-and-lions epigraph; the count leaves louis the guide mistakes for little value and rushes to the harbor crying woe to those who confined him.

Twice he overcomes doubt; passing the Catalans he murmurs Haydée with tenderness amounting almost to love. At the cemetery Morrel grieves over a fallen cross while the count points upward and refuses to let him stare at graves. In masked parable he describes a betrothed bride lost, fourteen years in a dungeon, a father who died unknown and left no tomb, and a woman worse than dead because she married a persecutor; Morrel shudders at fourteen years and promises to meet on the fifth of October when the yacht Eurus waits in Bastia.

The count names the Ganymede story allegory, not fable, tells Morrel God sends an eagle for the elect, and leaves him alone with misfortune while the steamer ascends in white steam and vanishes into night fog within an hour.