The Promise — The Count of Monte Cristo

Maximilian Morrel meets Valentine at the chestnut gate at dawn, pale with foreboding. Franz d'Épinay has arrived; the marriage contract may be signed tomorrow, and Valentine calls the house a house of mourning before the cup of sorrow is full.

They have stood at this gate before, but now the Saint-Méran deaths have changed the air. Maximilian says it is not the first time they have contemplated their position; he would rather die than obtain happiness by violence, yet he cannot watch Valentine sold to a man she does not love while her family calls it duty.

Valentine begs him not to attempt another mad act. She will not flee or break a public pledge without destroying her father and herself. Maximilian asks what she will do; she answers that she waits on God and her grandfather, the only will in the house that still protects her.

A note arrives: her grandmother's fever has turned to delirium. Valentine presses the paper through the gate and returns indoors while Morrel walks the fence in agony. When the half-hour ends he cannot wait longer and enters the garden by the path he knows.

Behind the sycamore he hears Doctor d'Avrigny with Villefort. The doctor lists symptoms the world called tetanus: broken sleep, nervous spasms, cerebral excitation, then torpor and death. Alone with the procureur he says poisoning by vegetable substances follows the same course.

Villefort, magistrate of Paris, hears his own house named as a scene of domestic murder. d'Avrigny warns that if another death follows, suspicion will fall on anyone admitted since the first funeral. Villefort despairs; every guest, servant, or friend may become evidence in a crime he prosecutes by profession and may be living by necessity.

Morrel, hidden, wonders whether Barrois gave Madame de Saint-Méran the draught prepared for Noirtier. The thought is unbearable because it makes care look like assassination. Yet the chapter has already taught that ordinary medicine and ordinary loyalty can kill in this house.

Public duty still presses the private tragedy. Madame de Saint-Méran's last wish was that the marriage proceed; Villefort tells Franz's side that delay may ruin everything. Valentine has no power alone against father, stepmother, and a contract promised in drawing-rooms and at the cemetery gate.

Maximilian goes to Noirtier. The paralyzed man receives him with a look that has followed Valentine's fate through every recent blow. By gesture and eye he answers what speech cannot ask plainly: Will you assure me it shall not be signed? Yes. The contract shall not be signed.

But Noirtier demands patience and makes Morrel swear tranquility again. A miracle of restored speech is not offered; strategy is. The old man has lost a daughter-in-law and a wife to the same walls; he will not lose his granddaughter to paper signed in haste.

Morrel leaves believing for the first time that Noirtier is his only ally inside the procureur's house. He climbs the wall, finds his cabriolet in the clover-field, and drives to the Rue Meslay. At midnight he throws himself on his bed and sleeps soundly, exhausted by poison overheard, promise received, and the knowledge that one house now holds both murder and hope.