The Vendetta — The Count of Monte Cristo

Bertuccio tells his story to the Count, beginning in 1815 at Nîmes. Royalist gangs were murdering Bonapartists in the streets. His brother, a Corsican officer returning from the army, was killed at the door of an inn. Bertuccio went to the king's attorney, young Monsieur de Villefort, and begged for justice. Villefort refused and called the killing politics, not murder. Bertuccio swore a Corsican vendetta and left.

He followed Villefort to Paris and to the house at Auteuil. One stormy night he watched the magistrate dig in the garden with a spade and bury a small box. Bertuccio stabbed him in the chest and thought he had killed his enemy. Then he opened the box and found a living baby inside, barely breathing. He saved the child and left him at a foundling hospital in Paris. His sister-in-law Assunta later reclaimed the boy and named him Benedetto.

Benedetto grew handsome but wicked. He stole, lied, and told Bertuccio, "You are not my father." Bertuccio could not punish him without remembering the night he had killed a father. The boy refused honest work and stayed idle while Assunta spoiled him.

Years later Bertuccio became a smuggler. In June 1829, customs officers chased his boat and he hid in a loft at an inn run by Gaspard Caderousse. Below, Caderousse and his wife sold a diamond to a jeweller named Joannes. They said the stone came from Edmond Dantès through Abbé Busoni. Joannes paid forty-five thousand francs in gold and notes, then rode off into a storm.

Bertuccio was still hiding when the jeweller came back, soaked with rain, and asked to sleep at the inn. Caderousse locked the door behind him. Bertuccio's confession ends there, with danger still in the room and the Count listening to every word.