While Danglars races through Paris, Madame Danglars leaves her carriage in plain dress and slips through the Passage du Pont-Neuf to Villefort's office. She wears a thick black veil so no one at the Palais will recognize her. The doorkeeper already expects her and leads her through a private passage. Villefort bolts the door, checks every corner, and thanks her for coming on time to a conversation neither of them wants.
Monte Cristo's dinner story has shaken them both. Hermine thought the Count dug up her baby under the trees at Auteuil. Villefort tells her the terrible truth in a hollow voice: when Monte Cristo dug there, he found neither skeleton nor chest, because neither was ever in that spot.
Then Villefort confesses what really happened twenty years ago. In the red damask room at Auteuil, Hermine gave birth to a child they believed dead. He placed the infant in a chest, dug in the garden, and buried it in haste. A Corsican stabbed him in the dark and saw everything. Later Villefort returned alone, annulled the lease, and dug again by moonlight, but the chest was gone.
The fear grows worse. Perhaps the child was alive. Villefort searched the foundling hospital and learned a baby arrived that night wrapped in half a linen napkin marked with a baron's crown and the letter H. A woman claimed the child six months later with the other half of the cloth, then vanished at Châlons. Hermine sobs that her child may still live somewhere, while Villefort wrings his hands because he does not know where.
They agree Monte Cristo must know their secret, since he described a burial that only they understood and named the very room where Hermine once lay in labor. Hermine offers money if he is dangerous. Villefort refuses and vows to learn within a week who the Count is and why he speaks of children disinterred in a garden. Hermine returns by another cab while her coachman still sleeps, and Monte Cristo never appears in the room, yet his story has forced the whole truth into the open.
Coming Up in Chapter 68
That same day Albert visits Monte Cristo from Tréport, receives a cold handshake, and begs him to his mother's summer ball, where Mercédès has spoken of no one else for four days.
