The Dappled Grays — The Count of Monte Cristo

Danglars leads the Count through his mansion until they reach Madame Danglars's pink boudoir, the one room decorated with taste instead of gold. Lucien Debray is there with the baroness at the piano. Danglars boasts that the Count plans to spend six million francs in Paris and begs for invitations to his parties.

Talk turns to horses. The baroness learns that her favorite dappled grays are missing from the stables. Danglars claims he sold them for her safety and offers her part of the profit. Then Debray looks out the window and sees those same grays harnessed to the Count's carriage. Danglars had whispered that a fool paid double the price; the Count tells Debray he paid about thirty thousand francs. The baron is humiliated while his wife and Debray watch. As they leave, the Count smiles and thinks domestic peace in that house now belongs to him.

He sends the grays back to Madame Danglars that evening with huge diamonds fixed in their harness rosettes. Danglars gets a polite note asking forgiveness for an Eastern whim. Then the Count drives to his country house at Auteuil with Ali. There he orders Ali to practice with his lasso and stop any carriage drawn by those grays if the horses bolt past the door.

The next afternoon Ali waits in the street with his lasso. A carriage drawn by the same dappled grays runs wild with Madame de Villefort and her young son Edward inside. Ali catches the horses at the risk of his life. The Count carries mother and child inside and revives Edward with a drop from a golden phial. Madame de Villefort is grateful, but Edward refuses to thank Ali because he is too ugly. When the boy wakes, he tries to open every bottle in the Count's medicine case until he is stopped.

Héloïse de Villefort writes a long letter to her friend Hermine Danglars describing the rescue and asking to meet the Count at the Danglars house. Paris buzzes with the story. That same night M. de Villefort, dressed in his finest suit, drives to the Count's house on the Champs-Élysées to pay his debt in person.

The Count has linked two enemy families with the same pair of horses, diamonds, and a rescue no bank draft can settle.