Edmond Dantès.

THE SEQUEL TO

ALEXANDER DUMAS'

CELEBRATED NOVEL OF

THE COUNT OF MONTE-CRISTO.

By

Edmund Flagg

AN ENTIRE NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION.

"Edmond Dantès," one of the greatest novels ever written, is the sequel to Alexander Dumas' world-renowned chef-d'œuvre, "The Count of Monte-Cristo," taking up the fascinating narrative where the latter ends and continuing it with marvellous power and absorbing interest. Every word tells, and the number of unusually stirring incidents is legion, while the plot is phenomenal in its strength, merit and ingeniousness. The superb book deals with the exciting career of Edmond Dantès, who first figures as the Count of Monte-Cristo, and then as the Deputy from Marseilles takes an active part in the French Revolution of 1848. Dramatic and graphic scenes abound, the reader finding startling surprises at every turn. Love, philanthropy, politics and bloodshed form the staple of the novel and are handled with extraordinary skill. Besides the hero, Haydée, Mercédès, Valentine de Villefort, Eugénie Danglars, Louise d'Armilly, Zuleika (Dantès' daughter), Benedetto, Lucien Debray, Albert de Morcerf, Beauchamp, Château-Renaud, Ali, Maximilian Morell, Giovanni Massetti, and Espérance (Dantès' son) figure prominently, while Lamartine, Ledru Rollin, Louis Blanc and hosts of revolutionary leaders are introduced. "Edmond Dantès" will delight all who read it.

New York:
WM. L. ALLISON COMPANY
Publishers.

COPYRIGHT:—1884.
T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS.

EDMOND DANTÈS.

AN ENTIRE NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION.

"Edmond Dantès" the Sequel to Alexander Dumas' masterpiece, "The Count of Monte-Cristo," is a novel that will delight, entertain and instruct all who read it. It has wonderful fascination, absorbing interest and rare merit, combined with remarkable power, amazing ingenuity and thorough originality. In it the narrative is taken up immediately at the close of "The Count of Monte-Cristo," and continued in a style of exceeding cleverness. There is a terrible volcanic tempest on the Mediterranean, in which Monte-Cristo and Haydée are wrecked, a vivid picture of the French Revolution of 1848 is given and the love affair of Zuleika and Giovanni Massetti is recounted in a manner unsurpassed for novelty and excitement. The central figure is Edmond Dantès, and about him are grouped Mercédès, Eugénie Danglars, Louise d'Armilly, Valentine de Villefort, Espérance (the son of Monte-Cristo), Benedetto, Albert de Morcerf, Maximilian Morrel, Ali and the other old friends of "Monte-Cristo" readers, as well as numerous political leaders famous in French history, namely, Lamartine, Ledru Rollin, Louis Blanc, Armand Marrast, Flocon, Albert and others. Thiers, Guizot, Odillon Barrot, General Lamoricière, General Bugeaud and other noted historical characters are introduced, as well as Lucien Debray, Château-Renaud, Beauchamp, etc. No one can afford to miss the opportunity to read "Edmond Dantès," which is published only by T. B. Peterson & Brothers, who also issue the only correct, complete and unabridged editions of the other volumes of the great "Monte-Cristo" Series, namely, "The Count of Monte-Cristo," "The Countess of Monte-Cristo," "The Wife of Monte-Cristo, Haydée," and "The Son of Monte-Cristo, Espérance."

CONTENTS.

EDMOND DANTÈS.

THE SEQUEL TO

THE COUNT OF MONTE-CRISTO.

CHAPTER I.

STORM AND SHIPWRECK.

The Count of Monte-Cristo, with the beautiful Haydée clinging lovingly about his neck, her head pillowed upon his shoulder, stood on the deck of his superb yacht, the Alcyon, gazing at the fast-vanishing isle where he had left Maximilian Morrel and Valentine de Villefort.

It was just daybreak, but by the faint glimmering light he could plainly distinguish the figures of a man and a woman upon the distant beach. They were walking arm in arm. Presently another figure, a man's, approached them and seemed to deliver something.

"Look," said the Count to Haydée, "Jacopo has given Maximilian my letter; he reads it to Valentine, and now they know all. Jacopo points toward the yacht; they see us and are waving their handkerchiefs in token of adieu."

Haydée raised her head and glanced in the direction of the Isle of Monte-Cristo.

"I see them, my lord," she replied, in a joyous tone; "they are happy."

"Yes," said the Count, "they are happy, but they deserve their happiness, and all is well."

"They owe their happiness to you, my lord," resumed Haydée, meekly.

"They owe it to God," answered Monte-Cristo, solemnly; "I was but His humble instrument, and He has allowed me in this to make some slight atonement for the wrong I committed in taking vengeance into my own mortal hands."

Haydée was silent. She knew the sad history of Edmond Dantès, and was aware of how remorselessly the Count of Monte-Cristo had avenged the wrongs of the humble sailor of Marseilles. This she had learned from her lord's own lips within the past few days. The strict seclusion in which she had lived in Paris had necessarily excluded her from all personal knowledge of the Count's subtle war upon his enemies; true, she had emerged from her retirement to testify against Morcerf at his trial before the House of Peers, but at that time she was ignorant of the fact that by causing the foe of her family to be convicted of felony, treason and outrage she had simply promoted Monte-Cristo's vengeance on Fernand, the Catalan. But, though silent, the beautiful Greek girl, with her thoroughly oriental ideas, could not realize that the man who stood beside her, the being she almost worshiped, had been guilty of the least wrong in avenging himself. Besides, she would never have admitted, even in the most secret recesses of her own heart, that Monte-Cristo, who to her mind symbolized all that was good, pure and heroic in human nature, could have been wrong in anything he did.

Meanwhile the Count also had been silent, and a shade of the deepest sadness had settled upon his pallid but intellectual visage. He gazed at the Isle of Monte-Cristo until it became a mere dot in the distance; then, putting his arm tenderly about his lovely companion's waist, he drew her gently toward the cabin.

As they vanished down the companion-way, Bertuccio and the captain of the Alcyon, followed by Ali, the Nubian, advanced to the prow of the yacht.

"Captain," said Bertuccio, "can you tell me whither we are bound? I feel an irresistible desire to know."

"Yes," answered the captain, "I can tell you. The Count ordered me to make with all possible speed for the Island of Crete."

Bertuccio gave a sigh of relief.

"I feared we were bound for Italy," he said. "But," he added, after an instant's thought, "why should we go to Rome? Luigi Vampa is amply able to care for all the Count's interests there, if, indeed, any remain now that the Baron Danglars has been attended to."

The captain, who was an old Italian smuggler, placed his finger warningly upon his lips and glanced warily around when Luigi Vampa's name was mentioned, but said nothing. Bertuccio took the hint and the conversation was dropped.

Pressing onward under full sail, the magnificent yacht shot over the blue waters of the Mediterranean with the speed of an eagle on the wing. It sped past Corsica and Sardinia, and soon the arid, uninviting shores of Tunis were visible; then it passed between Sicily and Malta, steering directly toward the Island of Crete.

Up to this time the weather had been of the most delightful description. Not a cloud had obscured the sky, and during the entire voyage the unruffled surface of the Mediterranean had resembled that of some peaceful lake. It was now the tenth of October, and just cool enough to be pleasant; the spice-laden breezes from the coast of Africa reached the yacht tempered by the moist atmosphere of the sea, furnishing an additional element of enjoyment.

The Count of Monte-Cristo and Haydée, who seemed inseparable, came on deck every morning at dawn, and each evening walked back and forth, admiring the gorgeous sunset and watching the shades of night as they gradually settled down upon the wide expanse of the waters.

It required no unusual penetration to see that they were lovers and that their delight in each other's society was unalloyed. Haydée clung to the Count, who, with his arm wound about her slender waist, looked down into the liquid depths of her eyes with a smile of perfect content, while his free hand ever and anon toyed with her night-black tresses.

One evening as they were walking thus—it was the evening of the fifteenth of October, and Crete was distant but two days' sail—Monte-Cristo tenderly took Haydée's hand in his and said to her in a tone of ineffable softness:

"Haydée, do you remember what you said to me on the Isle of Monte-Cristo just before we parted from Valentine and Maximilian?"

"Oh! yes, my lord," was the low reply. "I said I loved you as one loves a father, brother, husband—I loved you as my life."

"And do you now regret those words?"

"Regret them! Oh! my lord, how could I do that?"

"I asked you," said the Count, slowly, "because we are nearing our destination. In two days we shall land upon the shore of Crete, and, once there, it is my intention to make you my wife, provided your feelings toward me are still unchanged. Marriage, my child, is the most important step in life, and I do not wish you to take that step without fully understanding the promptings of your own dear heart. Only misery can follow the union of two souls not in perfect accord, not entirely devoted the one to the other. I am much older than you, Haydée, and my sufferings have aged me still more than years. I am a sad and weary man. You, on the contrary, stand just upon the threshold of existence; the world and its pleasures are all before you. Think, my child, think deeply before you pronounce the irrevocable vow."

Haydée threw herself passionately upon Monte-Cristo's breast.

"My lord," she cried, in accents broken by extreme agitation and emotion, "am I not your slave?"

"No, Haydée," answered the Count, his bosom heaving and his eyes lighting up with a strange flash, "you are free, your fate rests in your own hands."

"Then," said the young girl, ardently, "I will decide it this very instant. I accept my freedom that I may voluntarily offer myself to you, my love, my husband. You have suffered. Granted. So have I. Your sufferings have aged you; mine have transformed a child into a woman—a woman who knows the promptings of her heart, who knows that it beats for you, and you alone in all the world. My lord, I resign myself to you. Do you accept the gift?"

As Haydée concluded, her beautiful eyes were suffused with tears and her whole frame quivered with intense excitement.

Monte-Cristo bent down and kissed her upon the forehead.

"Haydée, my own Haydée," he said, with a slight tremor in his manly voice, "I accept the gift. Be my wife, the wife of Monte-Cristo, and no effort of mine shall be wanting to assure your happiness."

At that moment there was a sinister flash in the heavens, that were as yet without a cloud. The livid light shot downward to the water and seemingly plunged to the depths of the Mediterranean.

The Count gave a start and drew his beloved Haydée closer to him; the frightened girl trembled from head to foot and clung to him for protection.

"Oh! my lord, my lord," she murmured, "does Heaven disapprove of our plighted troth?"

"Calm yourself, Haydée," answered Monte-Cristo. "The lightning is God's seal, and He has set it upon our betrothal."

The flash was now repeated and was succeeded by several others of increased intensity, but as yet no thunder rolled and there was not the slightest indication of an approaching storm.

Monte-Cristo took Haydée's hand and led her to the side of the yacht. Not a single wave wrinkled the surface of the sea for miles and miles; the water seemed asleep, while down upon it the moon poured a flood of silvery radiance. The stars, too, were beaming brightly. Still, however, the intense lightning shot athwart the placid sky. It had become almost incessant. Monte-Cristo could not account for the bewildering phenomenon. He summoned the captain of the Alcyon and said to him:

"Giacomo, you have sailed the Mediterranean all your life, have you not?"

"All my life, Excellency," replied he, touching his cap.

"Have you ever before seen lightning such as this on a calm night?"

"Never, Excellency."

"It certainly cannot be heat-lightning."

"I think not, Excellency. Heat-lightning has a quicker flash and is much less intense."

"What do you suppose it portends?"

"I can form no idea, Excellency."

"Oh! my lord," said Haydée, "a terrible storm is coming, I am sure; I feel a premonition Of approaching danger. I pray you, guard against it."

"Nonsense, my child," returned Monte-Cristo, with a laugh that, in spite of all his efforts at self-control, betrayed nervous agitation and an undefinable dread. "The sky is clear, the moon is shining brilliantly and the sea is altogether tranquil; if a storm were coming it would not be so. Banish your fears and reassure yourself; the lightning is but a freak of nature."

The captain, too, was disturbed, though he could give himself no satisfactory reason for his uneasiness.

Ali, with the characteristic superstition of the Nubian race, had prostrated himself upon the deck, and was making signs the Moslems of his country use to drive away malignant spirits.

The night, however, passed without accident, though the singular lightning continued for several hours.

Next morning the sun rose, encircled by a ruddy band, fringed on the outer rim with a faint yellow, while its beams had a sullen glare instead of their normal brilliancy. The lightning of the previous night was absent, but soon another and not less disquieting phenomenon manifested itself; as far as the eye could reach the sea seemed boiling, and, at intervals, a puff, as if of vapor, would filter through the waves, rising and disappearing in the heavens. Meanwhile the wind had fallen, and amid an almost dead calm the sails of the Alcyon hung listlessly, with only an occasional flapping. The yacht moved forward, indeed, but so slowly that it scarcely appeared to move at all.

Monte-Cristo and Haydée came on deck at dawn, but the young girl displayed such terror at the unwonted aspect of the sun and the sea that the Count speedily persuaded her to return with him to the cabin. There she cowered upon a divan, hiding her face in her hands and moaning piteously. Her fiancé, distressed at her condition, endeavored to soothe and comfort her, but utterly without avail; her fears could neither be banished nor allayed. At length he threw himself on a rug at her feet, and, disengaging her hands from her face, drew them about his neck; Haydée clasped him frantically and clung to him as if she deemed that embrace a final one.

As they were sitting thus, the Alcyon received a sudden and violent shock that shook the noble yacht from stem to stern. Instantly there was a sound of hurrying feet on deck, and the captain could be heard shouting hoarsely to the sailors.

Monte-Cristo leaped up and caught Haydée in his arms. At that moment Ali darted down the companion-way and stood trembling before his master.

"What was that shock?" demanded the Count, hurriedly.

The agitated Nubian made a sign signifying he did not know, but that all was yet safe.

"Remain with your mistress, Ali," said Monte-Cristo. "I am going to see what is the matter."

"Oh! no, no," cried Haydée, imploringly, as the Count placed her again on the divan and was moving away. "Oh! no, no; do not leave me, my lord, or I shall die!"

Ashy pale, Haydée arose from the divan, and cast herself on her knees at Monte-Cristo's feet.

"Swear to me, at least, that you will not needlessly expose yourself to danger," she uttered, in a pleading tone.

"I swear it," answered the Count. "Ali will faithfully guard you while I am gone," he added, "and ere you can realize my absence, I shall be again at your side."

With these words he tore himself away and hastened to the deck.

There a scene met his eye as unexpected as it was appalling. The entire surface of the Mediterranean was aglow with phosphorescence, and the sun was veiled completely by a heavy cloud that seemed to cover the whole expanse of the sky. This cloud was not black, but of a bloody hue, and the atmosphere was so densely charged with sulphur that it was almost impossible to breathe. The sea was boiling more furiously than ever, and the puffs of vapor that had before only occasionally filtered through the waves now leaped up incessantly, each puff attended with a slight explosion; the vapor was grayish when it first arose from the water, but as it ascended it became red, mingling at length with the bloody cloud that each moment acquired greater density. The wind blew fitfully, sometimes amounting to a gale and then utterly vanishing without the slightest warning. Soon the bloody cloud seemed to settle of its own weight upon the sea, growing so thick that the eye could not penetrate it, and a few feet from the yacht all was inky darkness.

Monte-Cristo hurried to the captain, who was endeavoring to quiet the superstitious fears of the sailors. Drawing him aside, he said, in a low tone:

"Giacomo, we are in frightful danger. This elemental disturbance is volcanic, and how it will end cannot be foretold. No doubt an earthquake is devastating the nearest land, or will do so before many hours have elapsed. At any moment rocks or islands may arise from the sea, and obstruct our passage. All we can do is to hold ourselves in readiness for whatever calamity may happen, and make for Crete as rapidly as possible, with the hope of eventually getting beyond the volcanic zone. Do not enlighten the crew as to the cause of the disturbance; did they know, or even suspect it, they could not be controlled, but would become either stupefied or reckless. Try to convince them that we are simply in the midst of a severe electrical storm that will speedily exhaust its fury and subside. Now, to work, and remember that everything depends upon your courage and resolution."

Giacomo rejoined the sailors, who were huddled together at the stern of the yacht like so many frightened sheep. He spoke to them, doing his utmost to reassure them, and ultimately succeeded so well that they resumed their neglected duties with some show of alacrity and even cheerfulness.

Meanwhile, Monte-Cristo, with folded arms and an outward show of calmness, was pacing the deck as if nothing unusual were in progress, and his demeanor was not without its effect on the sailors, who looked upon him with a species of awe and admiration. At times he went below to cheer the drooping spirits of his beloved Haydée, but speedily returned that the influence of his presence might not be lost.

Thus the day passed. A night of painful suspense succeeded it, during which not a soul on board the Alcyon thought of sleeping. Nothing, however, occurred, save that the intense lightning of the previous night was renewed. Toward eleven o'clock the breeze freshened to such an extent that the yacht sped along on her course with great fleetness.

In the morning the sun arose amid a purple haze, and the Mediterranean presented a more tumultuous and threatening aspect than it had the preceding day. The breeze was still blowing stiffly, and the lightning continued. Giacomo informed Monte-Cristo that unless a calm should suddenly come on they would certainly arrive at Crete by noon. The sailors, he added, were in good spirits, and might be relied upon, though they were much fatigued by reason of their unceasing labor.

At ten o'clock the man at the wheel hurriedly summoned the captain to his side, and, with a look of terror and bewilderment, directed his attention to the compass, the needle of which no longer pointed to the north, but was dancing a mad dance, not remaining stationary for a single instant. To complicate the situation still further, the sun was suddenly obscured, absolute darkness invading both sea and sky. Only when the vivid lightning tore the dense clouds apart were those on board the Alcyon enabled to catch a glimpse of what was going on about them, and that glimpse was but momentary. Thunder peals were now added to the terrors of the time, while the yacht tossed and plunged on angry, threatening billows. Showers of sparks and glowing cinders, as if from some mighty conflagration, poured down into the water, striking its surface with an ominous hiss; they resembled meteors, and their brilliancy was augmented by the surrounding gloom. Rain also began to descend, not in drops, but in broad sheets and with the roar of a cataract; in a moment everybody on the Alcyon's deck was drenched to the skin.

Haydée had not ventured from the cabin since the first day of the elemental commotion; in obedience to his master's commands, Ali constantly watched over her whenever the Count was facing the strange storm with Giacomo and the sailors.

As the captain approached the man at the wheel, Monte-Cristo fixed his eyes upon the old Italian's countenance and saw it assume a deathly pallor as he noticed that the needle of the compass could no longer be depended on.

In an instant the Count was beside him and realized the extent of the new evil that had befallen them.

"We can steer but by guess now," said Giacomo, in a low, hoarse whisper. "God grant that we may be able to reach our destination."

As he spoke, a loud crash was heard, and the rudder, torn from its fastenings by the violence of the tempest, swept by them, vanishing amid the darkness. The man at the wheel gazed after it, uttering a cry of despair.

"We are completely at the mercy of the wind and waves!" said Monte-Cristo, in an undertone. "Can nothing be done?" he added, hurriedly.

"Nothing, Excellency," returned the captain. "A temporary rudder might be rigged were the sea calmer, but, boiling and seething as it is, such a thing is utterly impossible."

A panic had seized upon the sailors as they witnessed the catastrophe that rendered the Alcyon helpless, but this immediately gave place to stupor, and the men stood silent and overwhelmed.

Bertuccio, from the time the dread storm had broken forth, had been gloomy and uncommunicative; he had held persistently aloof both from Monte-Cristo and the crew. In the general turmoil and confusion his bearing and behavior had passed unnoticed even by the vigilant eye of the Count.

The steward now approached his master, and, taking him aside, whispered in his ear:

"Heaven's vengeance is pursuing the Alcyon and all on board because of my crimes! I feel it—I know it!"

The steward's face was as white as a sheet, but his eye betokened fixed resolution.

"Not another word of this," cried Monte-Cristo, sternly. "Should the superstitious sailors hear you, they would demand with one voice that you be cast into the boiling sea."

"And they would be right," rejoined Bertuccio, doggedly. "If I remain where I am, the Alcyon's doom is sealed. On the other hand, the moment you are rid of me the storm will cease as if by magic, and you will be saved."

"Be silent!" commanded Monte-Cristo. "You are a Corsican—show a Corsican's courage!"

"I will!" was the determined reply, and the steward walked with a firm tread to the side of the yacht.

"What do you mean?" said the Count, hurrying after him and placing his hand on his shoulder.

"You shall see!" answered Bertuccio.

Shaking off Monte-Cristo's grasp, he leaped upon the bulwarks and suddenly sprang far out amid the seething waves. The Count uttered a cry of horror that was echoed by the captain. As for the crew, so utterly stupefied were they that they did not seem to comprehend the suicidal act. For an instant Monte-Cristo and Giacomo saw the steward whirling about amid the tumultuous flood; then he was swept away, and vanished in the impenetrable darkness beyond.

The force of the wind had meanwhile augmented until a perfect hurricane was raging about the Alcyon; the noise was deafening, and the sails swelled to such an extent that they threatened to snap asunder. Suddenly they gave way, and the tattered shreds flew in all directions, like white-winged sea-fowl. Simultaneously the mast toppled and went by the board. The yacht, now a helpless wreck, pitched and tossed, but still shot onward, impelled by the wild fury of the gale. Gigantic waves at intervals swept the deck, each torrent as it retreated carrying with it all it could tear away, and making huge gaps in the bulwarks, to which the sailors were clinging with all the energy of desperation. Monte-Cristo had grasped the stump of the mast, and the captain clung with all his strength to the remains of the wheel. The lightning had become terrific, and the almost continuous roar of the thunder was sufficient to drown the mad din of the waters.

All at once the jagged outlines of a gigantic rock loomed up, directly in the course of the fated vessel; in another instant the Alcyon struck and remained fast, while a vivid flash of lightning revealed what appeared to be an island, about a quarter of a mile away. But though the wreck of the yacht was motionless, the furious sea continued to break over the deck, and it seemed only a question of a few moments when the battered and torn hull of the Alcyon would go to pieces. The boat the vessel carried had long since been wrenched from its fastenings and swept into the whirlpool.

Monte-Cristo, quitting the stump of the mast, darted down the companion-way into the cabin, and quickly returned to the deck bearing in his arms the swooning form of his adored Haydée. Ali followed him. The Nubian seemed to have entirely recovered from his fear, and manifested both alertness and decision.

Shifting his lifeless burden to his left arm and grasping her firmly, Monte-Cristo advanced to the side of the Alcyon. Pausing there for an instant, he said, addressing Giacomo and the crew:

"The yacht cannot hold together much longer; if we remain where we are we shall inevitably be ground to powder on the rock with our vessel. There is an island some distance to the right of us, and, sustained by Providence, we may succeed in reaching it by swimming. For my part, I shall try the venture and endeavor to save this lady. You, men, are untrammeled and stand a better chance of success than I do. I advise you all to follow my example; to cling further to the wreck is death!"

With these words the Count made his way to a gap in the bulwarks and, grasping Haydée tightly, leaped with her into the midst of the angry sea. Ali followed his master, and soon they were seen far in the distance, struggling and battling with the waves.

CHAPTER II.

THE ISLAND.

It was the month of December, but on the little Island of Salmis in the Grecian Archipelago the temperature was as mild and genial as that of June. The grass was rank and thick, while the blooming almond trees filled the atmosphere with fragrance. On a narrow strip of sandy beach three or four fishermen were preparing their nets and boats for a fishing expedition to the waters beyond. They chatted as they toiled. The eldest of them, a man about sixty, with silvered locks and a long gray beard, said:

"You may talk of storms as much as you please, but I maintain that the most severe tempest ever experienced in this neighborhood was the one I witnessed ten years ago last October, when we had the earthquake and the strange man, who now owns this island, was washed ashore."

"The Count of Monte-Cristo you mean?" remarked one of the party.

"Yes, the Count of Monte-Cristo, who has done so much for us all and whose wife is nothing less than an angel of goodness and charity."

"You rescued him, did you not, Alexis?"

"I found him lying upon the beach, with the lady who is now his wife tightly clasped in his arms, so tightly that I had no end of trouble to separate them. Both were unconscious at the time, and no wonder, for the sea was furious and they must have been dashed about at a fearful rate. It was a miracle they escaped with their lives. Near them lay that dark-skinned African, their servant, who styles himself Ali, as well as the corpses of several sailors. The African, however, revived just as I approached him. He's a man of iron, I tell you, for he immediately leaped to his feet and helped me to restore his master and mistress. When they came to, I took the whole party to my hut and cared for them. The next day I rowed the Count and the African out to the wreck of their vessel on that rock you see away over there, and they brought back with them a fabulous amount of money and jewels that they found in the strangest closets I ever saw in the cabin. Then the Count bought this island and has lived here ever since. He took the lady to Athens and was married to her there, and on his return he had the palace they now occupy built in the midst of the palm grove."

By this time the fishermen had completed their preparations and, leaping into their boats, they started on their expedition.

The palace in the palm grove to which old Alexis had alluded was, indeed, a magnificent dwelling, suitable in every respect for the residence of an oriental monarch. It was built in the Turkish fashion and its exterior was singularly beautiful and imposing. Huge palm trees surrounded it; they were planted in regular rows upon a vast lawn that was adorned with costly statues and fountains, while at intervals were scattered great flower beds filled with choice exotics and blooming plants of endless variety. A wide graveled walk and carriage-road led to the palace, the main entrance to which was flanked on either side by columns of dark-veined marble. The edifice itself was of green stone, and sparkled in the sunlight like a colossal emerald. It was surmounted by three zinc-covered domes, above each of which towered a gilded crescent.

Within all was elegance and luxury. There were immense salons, with marble floors, and walls covered with Smyrna hangings of the most beautiful description that of themselves must have cost a fortune. These salons were furnished with rich divans, tables of malachite, cabinets of ebony, and oriental rugs of the most artistic and complicated workmanship. There were dazzling reception rooms filled with exquisite statues and superb paintings, the works of the greatest sculptors and artists of the east and west, of the past and the present. Figures by Thorwaldsen, Powers and other modern celebrities of the block and chisel stood beside antique masterpieces framed by the genius of Phidias and his brother sculptors of old Greece and Rome, masterpieces that had been torn from the ruins of antiquity by the hand of the untiring and enterprising excavator. Among the paintings were fine specimens of the skill of Albert Dürer, Murillo, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Sir Joshua Reynolds and other votaries of the brush whose names are immortal. These paintings did not hang on the walls, for they were covered with rich tapestry from the looms of Benares and the Gobelins, but rested on delicately fashioned easels, themselves entitled to a high, rank as works of art. In the salons were statues by Michael Angelo, Pierre Puget and Pompeo Marchesi, and paintings by Claude Lorraine, Titian, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Correggio and Salvator Rosa.

The vast library was encircled by lofty bookcases of walnut and ebony, filled with rare and costly volumes from the curiously illuminated missals of monkish days to the latest scientific works, together with a liberal sprinkling of poetry and fiction; upon tables, stands and mantels were superb ornaments in brass repoussé work and grand old faïence, including some wonderful specimens of ancient Chinese crackle ware, the peculiar secret of the manufacture of which had been lost in the flight of ages.

At an exquisite desk of walnut, carved with grotesque images, sat the Count of Monte-Cristo; he was busily engaged in writing, and beside him lay a huge pile of manuscript that was ever and anon augmented by an additional sheet, hastily scrawled in strange, bewildering Semitic characters.

The Count showed but small trace of the passage of years; he did not look much older than when he left the Isle of Monte-Cristo with Haydée on that voyage which was destined to result so disastrously for the Alcyon and her ill-fated crew. To be sure, his hair was slightly flecked with gray, but his visage still retained its full outline, and not a wrinkle marred its masculine beauty. He was clad in an exceedingly picturesque costume, half Greek and half Turkish, while upon his head was a red fez from the centre of which hung down a gilt tassel.

As he wrote his eyes sparkled and he seemed filled with enthusiasm. At length he threw aside his pen, and rising began to pace the vast apartment with long strides. "Alas!" he muttered, "perhaps after all I am only a vain dreamer, as hosts of others have been before me. But no, my scheme is feasible and cannot fail; it is based on sound principles and a thorough knowledge of mankind; besides, the immense wealth that an all-wise God has placed at my disposal will aid me and form a mighty factor in the cause. In the past I used that wealth solely for my own selfish ends, but now all is different; I have no thought of self—the philanthropist has replaced the egotist; I have aided the poor, relieved the stricken and brought joy to many a sorrowing home, but hitherto I have acted only in isolated cases; now I meditate a grand, a sublime stroke—to give freedom to man throughout the entire length and breadth of the Continent of Europe. If I succeed, and succeed I must, every down-trodden human being from the coast of France to the Ural Mountains, from the sunny Mediterranean to the frozen Arctic Ocean, will reap the benefit of my efforts and shake off the yoke of tyranny. Where shall I begin? Ah! with France, my own country, the land that gave me birth. I shall thus return good for evil, and Edmond Dantès, the prisoner of the Château d'If, will free the masses from their galling chains. My most potent instrument will be the public press; by means of journals I will found, or buy, the minds of all Europeans shall become familiarized with the theory of universal liberty and ripened for sweeping revolutions and the establishment of republics; I will also call fiction to my aid; struggling novelists and feuilletonists shall receive liberal subsidies from my hand on condition that they disseminate my ideas, theories and plans in their romances and feuilletons; thus will I reach thousands upon thousands who hold themselves aloof from politics, and almost insensibly they will be transformed into zealous, active partisans of the order of things that is to be; poets, too, shall sing the praises of freedom louder and more enthusiastically than ever before; in fine, no instrument, no means, however humble and apparently insignificant, shall be neglected when the proper moment arrives, but until it does arrive I must wait, wait patiently, wait though while waiting an internal fire consume me, and my veins throb with anxiety and expectation to the point of bursting."

He sank into a chair, and, burying his face in his hands, was lost in profound thought.

Meanwhile, a lovely woman, leading a beautiful girl of eight years and a handsome boy of nine, had noiselessly entered the apartment. It was Haydée, the wife of Monte-Cristo, Haydée grown mature and more beautiful than ever. Her night-black tresses were gathered in two wide braids at the back of her shapely head, so long that they reached below her waist. Her eyes were as bright as stars, and her slender hands, tipped with their pink nails, as white as the lily; her tiny feet, encased in Cinderella slippers of rose-hued satin, peeped out from beneath ample Turkish trousers, which were semi-transparent and disclosed the outlines of her beautifully turned limbs; she wore a close-fitting gilet of pearly silk, adorned with gilt fringe and cut low, displaying her snowy neck and magnificent shoulders; her arms were encompassed but not hidden by flowing sleeves of filmy gauze as fine as the tissue of a spider's web; about her neck flashed a collar of brilliant diamonds of enormous value, and on her tapering fingers were rings of emerald, ruby and sapphire; on her head was a red fez, precisely similar to her husband's; her countenance, a perfect revelation of angelic beauty, was wreathed in sunny smiles that betokened thorough happiness and contentment.

The little girl, Zuleika, the daughter of Monte-Cristo, was her exact image, a reproduction of her lovely mother in miniature, a promise of rare delight for the future. The child's costume was also modeled after Haydée's, but with modifications suited to her tender years. Zuleika was of a gentle, loving disposition, but a vein of romance and poetry had already developed itself in her notwithstanding her extreme youth. She sighed for the unknown delights of the sea, and the wail of the surf sounded to her like the most delicious of mysterious harmonies. Her infant imagination peopled the watery realm with spirits of good and evil always in contention, and the great ships, with their huge white sails, that she saw in the distance from the sandy beach of the Island of Salmis, were in her eyes the mighty birds of Arabian story.

The boy, Espérance, the son of Monte-Cristo, resembled his father both in disposition and appearance; his youthful soul was full of noble aspirations, while his daring and bravery filled even the hardy fishermen of the coast with wonder and amazement. He was a very manly and handsome child; quick, enthusiastic and energetic; his father's hope and his mother's idol; though Haydée saw, with extreme uneasiness, that the little lad was wise beyond his years, and was already devoted to Monte-Cristo's somewhat visionary schemes, which he appeared to grasp in all their complicated details. His attire was that of a Greek fisher boy; his trousers, rolled up above his knees, displayed his naked legs and bare feet; in one hand he held a rough sea cap that he had removed from his head at the door of the library. Espérance loved, above all other things, to be with the fishermen on the beach, and his joy knew no bounds when he was permitted to accompany them on their fishing expeditions to the waters beyond.

Haydée remained silently gazing at Monte-Cristo for a moment; then, advancing into the middle of the room, she stood beside him with the children. Zuleika, dropping her mother's hand, sprang lightly upon her father's knees, and, clasping him about the neck with her chubby arms, kissed him rapturously.

The Count started from his deep reverie and returned his daughter's kiss; then, looking up, he perceived Haydée and Espérance.

"Ah! my loved ones," said he, "so you are all here!"

"Yes, papa," returned Zuleika, in a clear, crystal voice, that sounded like the tinkle of a fairy bell, "we are all here—mamma, Espérance and 'Leika!"

Monte-Cristo smiled faintly, and patted the little girl tenderly on the cheek.

"Haydée," said he, "fortune favors us in our children; they are, indeed, a blessing to us."

"A veritable blessing, my lord," answered the lovely Haydée, "but still I cannot help feeling some terror at the thought that Espérance may one day be drawn into those political struggles you have so often foretold, and in which it is your intention to act a prominent part."

"Papa will lead the people to victory, and I will fight by his side!" cried Espérance, proudly.

Haydée gazed sadly at the enthusiastic boy, and tears came into her gazelle-like eyes.

"Oh! my lord," she said to her husband, "teach Espérance the arts of peace, implant in his boyish bosom, while there is yet time, the love of home and domestic joys."

The Count glanced admiringly at the little lad, who stood with dilated nostrils and eyes flashing fire; then, turning to Haydée, he said in an impressive tone:

"My beloved wife, Espérance is but an infant, and it may be years ere Europe shall awake from her lethargy and strive to overturn the thrones of her despots; before that period, the period of revolution and bloodshed, our son may change his opinions and cease to be the ardent Republican he is now."

"No, no," protested the enthusiastic boy; "I will be a Republican all my life!"

Monte-Cristo smiled sadly, and, drawing the lad to his knee, said to him:

"Espérance, my son, you are yet too young to know the ways of the world and the snares that monarchs set for the inexperienced and unwary. There are temptations at their command capable of winning over even the most zealous enemies, and they never hesitate to use them when the opportunity offers. At the proper time I will instruct you fully about all this; now, you cannot understand it."

As Monte-Cristo ceased to speak, Ali entered the library, followed by three native servants attached to the palace. The Nubian bowed low before his master and reverently kissed Haydée's hand; the servants did likewise. Then Ali handed the Count a sealed letter, making signs to the effect that he had found it tied with a cord to one of the palm trees on the lawn.

Monte-Cristo opened the letter and glanced at the signature; as he did so a look of surprise and annoyance settled upon his face.

The note was written in the French language, and read as follows:

Count of Monte-Cristo: I am in hiding on the Island of Salmis and must see you without delay. Meet me at midnight in the almond grove near the eastern shore. Be sure to come alone.

Benedetto

"Humph!" said the Count to himself as he finished reading this singular epistle. "I thought I was rid of that scoundrel forever, but it seems that the galleys at Toulon cannot hold him. Well, I suppose I must meet him; otherwise he may take a notion to come here, which would be both inconvenient and disagreeable. I imagine he wants a little money to enable him to escape to the east; if that is all, I will gladly give it to be rid of his presence, on the island. I prefer not to have as a neighbor a thief and an assassin, even if he did shine so brilliantly once in aristocratic Parisian society as the Prince Cavalcanti!"

"What is the matter, my lord?" asked Haydée, noticing the expression on Monte-Cristo's countenance. "From whom is the letter?"

"Oh! it is nothing," answered the Count, with a smile. "A poor fellow wishes my assistance, and is too modest to ask it in person; that's all!"

Haydée was not satisfied with this indefinite reply; she knew that the contents of the letter so strangely conveyed to her husband had vexed and troubled him; but she also knew that Monte-Cristo could be as silent as the tomb about anything he wished to keep secret, and, therefore, judged it useless to attempt further questions. Besides, a singular presentiment of evil had taken possession of her at the sight of the ominous note, and she felt certain that some disaster was threatened; hence, she determined to be watchful and keep strict guard over her children until the mystery, whatever it was, should be cleared up.

As the clock in his library struck the quarter before midnight, Monte-Cristo arose from the chair in which he had been sitting; donning his fez and a light cloak, he prepared to go to the almond grove on the eastern portion of the island, the spot Benedetto had appointed for their meeting; prior to setting out he slipped into his pocket a well-filled purse, and thrust a loaded revolver into the belt he wore about his waist.

"The scoundrel was anxious that I should come alone, but he did not prohibit me from arming myself," muttered he, with a grim smile, "and I have seen too much of Signor Benedetto to care to leave the game entirely in his hands!"

Quitting the palace by a private door, after making sure that everybody was asleep and that he was unobserved, Monte-Cristo bent his steps in the direction of the almond grove. It was a moonless night and very dark; the air was rather chill, while the roar of the surf sounded louder than usual in the crisp, bracing atmosphere. The Count gathered his cloak tightly about him and walked steadily onward, notwithstanding the thick darkness. At length the heavy odor of the almond blossoms warned him that he was approaching his destination, and he paused to survey the scene.

About fifty yards away the almond grove loomed up, casting a denser shade upon the surrounding blackness. The Count hastened his steps and in a few seconds stood among the trees. As he paused the figure of a man emerged from behind a huge fragment of rock and thus hailed him:

"Are you the Count of Monte-Cristo?"

"I am," was the firm reply.

"And are you alone, as I recommended?"

"Entirely alone. Now, if you have finished your questions, pray who are you?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Merely for form's sake."

"Well, then, I am Benedetto."

"Of course. As it was too dark for me to distinguish your features, I simply wanted to identify you. Now, state your business as briefly as possible."

"I escaped from Toulon long ago, and, after wandering all over Europe, settled in Athens, where I remained until a week since, when the result of a difficulty compelled me to quit the city."

"An assassination?"

"Yes, an assassination!"

Monte-Cristo shuddered to hear the cold-blooded villain talk so calmly of his foul crime, but, conquering his aversion, he said between his teeth:

"Proceed."

"I fled from Athens under cover of the night and the next morning hired a fisherman to bring me here in his boat, thinking that the island was inhabited only by a few poverty-stricken wretches who gained a scanty subsistence from the sea. On my arrival I was filled with terror at beholding your magnificent palace, which I was told belonged to a great lord. I naturally imagined that no one could inhabit such a dwelling save some high official of the Greek Government, and, without making further inquiries, again secured the services of the fisherman, who took me to the neighboring Island of Kylo. There I was in safety, for I fell in with a band of stout-hearted men, of whom I eventually became the chief."

"Bandits, no doubt!"

"Yes, bandits, if you will, but valiant men all the same. We prospered exceedingly and imagined that our career could be continued with impunity as long as we might desire; in this, however, we were sadly mistaken, for one fatal night the Greek soldiery suddenly descended upon us and hemmed us in on every side ere we were aware of their presence. We fought none the less desperately on that account, and in the sanguinary conflict all my companions were slain. I was grievously wounded and left for dead, but the following day managed to crawl to the beach and contrived to be conveyed hither, having learned by accident that the great lord of the Island of Salmis was no other than my old friend of happier days, the Count of Monte-Cristo, in short, yourself. Now, you know my story. I am a fugitive here as in France, and need your aid to enable me to escape."

"You want money?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"A million of francs!"

"Man!" cried Monte-Cristo, breathless with astonishment at Benedetto's audacious demand, "you are out of your senses! I will give you a thousand francs, but not a sou more!"

"Beware how you trifle with a desperate man!" hissed Benedetto.

"What have I to fear?" said Monte-Cristo, calmly. "You are alone."

"I am not alone, Count of Monte-Cristo; my stout-hearted friends of the Island of Kylo are with me, and ready to support my demand!"

"Then you lied to me; your story was a base fabrication."

"Partly, Count; but enough of this—I want the million of francs; it is a small sum for you to spare an old friend, who did you as much service as Prince Andrea Cavalcanti! Are you going to give me the money?"

"I am not!" replied Monte-Cristo, drawing his revolver from his belt and cocking it.

"Ho! ho!" laughed Benedetto, mockingly, "that's your game, is it? Again I tell you to beware how you trifle with a desperate man!"

At the repetition of this phrase, as if it had been a preconcerted signal, a dozen stalwart figures started up from the darkness and surrounded Monte-Cristo, who instantly discharged his weapon right and left among them. Several of the bandits fell, pierced by the balls, and Benedetto, with a loud oath, leaped at the Count's throat, brandishing a long, keen-bladed dagger above his head.

Raising his empty revolver, Monte-Cristo with a hand of iron struck his on-coming assailant full in the face, stretching him instantly at his feet; but scarcely had he accomplished this when three of the bandits sprang upon him and hurled him to the earth beside Benedetto.

"Now," cried one of the miscreants with a frightful curse, at the same time placing the muzzle of a pistol at the Count's temple, "now, my lord of Salmis, your time has come!"

As he was about to fire, there arose a tremendous shout, and, headed by Ali, who swung aloft a Turkish yataghan, the entire force of Monte-Cristo's servants, armed to the teeth, swept down upon the astonished bandits. At the same instant a pistol-shot rang out, and the man who had threatened to take the Count's life fell to the ground a corpse. As Monte-Cristo regained his feet he saw Espérance standing a short distance away, the smoking weapon with which he had just killed his father's would-be murderer still clenched in his boyish hand. The struggle that ensued was of short duration, for the bandits, finding themselves outnumbered, speedily fled to their boats, leaving their wounded comrades behind them.

When the Count realized that Espérance, his beloved son, had saved him from death, he rushed to the heroic lad, took him in his arms and bore him beyond the reach of danger; this done, he returned to aid Ali and the servants, but they were already victors and in full possession of the field.

A search was made for the body of Benedetto, but it had disappeared.

CHAPTER III.

THE CONFLAGRATION.

As the Count of Monte-Cristo, Espérance, Ali and the servants approached the palace on their return from the struggle with the bandits in the almond grove, their ears were suddenly saluted by loud cries of terror. They came from the library and thither Monte-Cristo hurried, followed by his son. On the floor in the centre of the apartment Haydée lay in a swoon, and bending over her mother was Zuleika, screaming and wringing her little hands. The Count raised his wife and placed her upon a divan, while Espérance brought a water-jar and bathed her temples with its cool, refreshing contents, Zuleika meanwhile holding her mother's hands and sobbing violently.

At last Haydée recovered consciousness, and opening her eyes gazed wildly around her; seeing her husband, Espérance and Zuleika safe beside her, she uttered a faint sigh of relief. It was several moments longer before she could speak; then she exclaimed in a tremulous voice:

"Oh! my lord, did you meet that terrible man?"

"What man, Haydée?" asked the Count. "Do you mean Benedetto?"

"I do not know his name; I never saw him before," answered Haydée; "but his face was all battered and bleeding; on his uncovered head the locks were matted and unkempt, and his garments were torn as if in wrenching his way through a thicket of tangled briers."

"Benedetto, it was Benedetto!" cried Monte-Cristo. "You do not mean to say he was here, in this room?"

"He was here and only a short time ago," replied Haydée, with a shudder. "I was standing at the window with Zuleika when he rushed by me like a whirlwind, and going to your secretary endeavored to open it, but in vain; then with a cry of rage he ran to the window, leaped out into the darkness and was gone! I know nothing further, for as he vanished I fell to the floor in a swoon."

Monte-Cristo touched a bell and almost immediately Ali stood bowing before him, as calm and unmoved as though nothing unusual had occurred.

"Ali," said the Count, "post all the servants within and without the palace, and let the strictest watch be kept until dawn. The chief of the bandits, who is no other than the former Prince Cavalcanti, was here in our absence and must yet be hovering in the vicinity. See that he does not effect another entrance, as his purpose is robbery if not murder!"

Ali signified by his eloquent pantomime that he had already taken it upon himself to station the servants as his master directed, and that it would be utterly impossible for any one to approach the palace without being seen and seized.

As the faithful Nubian turned to retire, Monte-Cristo noticed that his right hand was bandaged as if wounded, and inquired whether he had been hurt in the conflict with the bandits. Ali explained that a dagger thrust had cut his palm, but that the wound had been properly cared for and would soon heal.

When the Count and his family were once more alone together, Haydée threw herself at her husband's feet and humbly demanded pardon.

"What have you done to require pardon?" asked Monte-Cristo, in astonishment. "Speak, but I forgive you beforehand.'

"Oh! my lord," said Haydée, still maintaining her kneeling posture despite her husband's efforts to raise her, "oh! my lord, I have been guilty of a despicable act, but my love for you and fears for your safety must be my excuse. You left the letter you received so strangely this morning lying upon your secretary. I opened it and hurriedly made myself acquainted with its contents, for I had a premonition that some terrible danger threatened you. Oh! my lord, pardon, pardon!"

Monte-Cristo raised her to her feet, and imprinted a kiss upon her pallid brow.

"So then, it is to you, Haydée, that I owe my timely rescue from the hands of Benedetto and his band of cut-throats! Had you committed even a much more serious fault than peeping into my correspondence, that would be more than sufficient to secure my full forgiveness. But do you know that Espérance shot and killed the miscreant who held his pistol to my temple and was about to blow out my brains?"

"Espérance?" said Haydée in bewilderment. "Did he not remain behind with Zuleika and myself?"

"No, mamma," said the boy, holding his head proudly erect. "I could not remain behind. I knew papa was in danger, and, taking a pistol that I had seen Ali load this morning from the cabinet of fire-arms, I followed the servants, arriving at the almond grove just in time."

Haydée ran to her son, and, taking him in her arms, pressed him fondly to her heart, kissing him again and again.

"Oh! Espérance," she cried, "had I known you were in the midst of those bloodthirsty cut-throats I should have died of terror! But you have saved your father's life, my son, and I bless you for it!"

"He is a little hero," said Monte-Cristo, impressively.

Zuleika had thrown herself upon the divan, and, utterly worn out by the excitement through which she had passed, was already wrapped in a deep slumber. The Count, Haydée and Espérance, however, could not resign themselves to sleep, and when the gray light of dawn appeared in the eastern sky, they were still in the library and still watching.

Benedetto had not been seen again, and a diligent search of the entire island, made by Ali and the servants, failed to reveal even the slightest trace of him. He had evidently succeeded in finding some fisherman's skiff and in it had made his escape.

This view of the case was confirmed a few hours later, when old Alexis came to the palace and informed Monte-Cristo that his smack had vanished during the night, having, in all probability, been carried off by thieves.

"I knew," said the fisherman, "that the Island of Kylo was infested by bandits, but I had no idea they would venture here. Now, however, I thought I had better put you on your guard."

"I am much indebted to you, Alexis," said the Count; then, slipping a purse of money into his hand, he added: "Take that and provide yourself with a new boat."

Alexis touched his cap, bowed and was about to withdraw when Monte-Cristo said to him, assuming a careless tone:

"By the way, my good fellow, have you ever chanced to meet any of the bandits you mentioned?"

"Often, Excellency," replied Alexis.

"What kind of men are they?"

"Bold, bad wretches, whose hands have been more than once stained with innocent blood."

"What is their strength?"

"They number about fifty."

"Do any women dwell among them?"

"Yes, Excellency, their wives and sweethearts."

"Who is the leader of the band?"

"A strange, morose man, who has not been long in their midst."

"Is he a Greek?"

"No, Excellency, he is a foreigner."

"A Frenchman?"

"Quite likely, though I am not sure."

"What is his name?"

"He calls himself Demetrius."

"Did he ever question you about me?"

"Yes, Excellency."

"And what did you reply?"

"I told him you were the Count of Monte-Cristo."

"Ah! What did he say then?"

"He said he had heard of you before."

"That will do, Alexis; I have all the information I require."

The fisherman again touched his cap, and, making a low bow, took his departure.

Under ordinary circumstances Monte-Cristo would not have been disturbed by the presence of bandits so near the Island of Salmis, but it became an altogether different thing when those bandits were led by Benedetto.

A month passed, but in it nothing occurred calculated to break the tranquillity of the Count and his family. The bandits had not reappeared and Benedetto had given no sign of life. The faithful Ali no longer deemed it necessary to maintain his precautions against surprise, and the strict watch that had been kept up day and night ever since the conflict in the almond grove was abandoned. Haydée, Zuleika and Espérance resumed their usual mode of life, having apparently dismissed the robbers from their minds, while even Monte-Cristo seemed free from all uneasiness.

One night, while the Count was writing at a late hour in the library, he yielded to fatigue and fell asleep over his papers. His slumber was troubled with a strange and vivid dream.

A man in the picturesque garb of a Greek peasant, and wearing a mask on his face, suddenly stood before him, with his arms folded upon his breast. Monte-Cristo saw him distinctly, though unable to stir either hand or foot. The singular visitant surveyed the Count long and steadily. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but as to his identity the sleeper could form no idea. At last he slowly removed the mask, and recognition was instantaneous. The man was Danglars. He raised his right hand, and, pointing with his forefinger at the Count, said deliberately, with a hiss like some venomous serpent:

"Edmond Dantès, there is a bitter account open between us, and I am here to force you to a bitter settlement!"

The light of the huge lamp, suspended from the ceiling, fell full upon Danglars' countenance; it was as bloodless as that of a corpse, and the eyes shone with a remorseless, vindictive glare. The banker continued in the same hissing tone, his words penetrating to the very marrow of the slumberer's bones:

"Count of Monte-Cristo, for by that name it still pleases you to be called, listen to me. By the most ingenious and fiendish combinations possible for a human being to contrive, you wrecked my fortune and with it my hopes. You drove me ignominiously from Paris; in Rome you caused me to be starved and robbed by Luigi Vampa and his brigands; then with the malevolent magnanimity of an arch-demon you sent me forth into the world a fugitive and an outcast. Count of Monte-Cristo, Edmond Dantès, low-born sailor of Marseilles, modern Mephistopheles as you are, I will be even with you! You have had your vengeance; now you shall feel mine! Here in the Grecian Archipelago, on the Island of Salmis, I will torture you through your dearest affections, and grind you to dust beneath my heel!"

As Danglars finished, his features changed and became those of Villefort, while his Greek peasant's garb was transformed into the sombre habiliments of the Procureur du Roi. Villefort's face wore the look of madness, but there was a freezing calmness in his voice as he said:

"Edmond Dantès, Count of Monte-Cristo, gaze upon the ruin you have made. Through you I was dragged down from my high position, exposed, humiliated and deprived of reason. But although the mere wreck of my former self, I am not utterly powerless, as you shall learn to your cost. You raised up my infamous son, Benedetto, to be the instrument of my destruction. Now, he shall work yours, and avenge his unhappy father!"

The apparition paused, sighed deeply, and then resumed in a tone of still greater menace:

"Count of Monte-Cristo, look well to your beloved wife, Haydée, look well to your heroic son, Espérance, look well to your darling daughter, Zuleika, for this night they are in frightful danger! Look well to your fabulous riches, for they are threatened; look well to your stately and magnificent palace, for already the element that shall devour it is noiselessly and stealthily at work! Count of Monte-Cristo, farewell!"

A heart-rending shriek rang in the sleeper's ears, a mighty flash dazzled his eyes, and, with a grim smile upon his pallid countenance, Villefort vanished.

Monte-Cristo awoke with a quick start and passed his hand across his forehead, as if dazed; then he leaped to his feet and glanced breathlessly about him. Danglars and Villefort had been only the idle coinage of his brain, but the heart-rending shriek, the mighty flash, they were, indeed, stern realities—the shriek was Haydée's, and the flash was fire!

"My God!" cried Monte-Cristo, standing for an instant rooted to the spot, "can it be possible that this dream is the truth after all, and that I am even now to feel the vengeance of those two men?"

He sprang into the spacious hall that was as light as day, and, as he did so, the figure of a man rushed by him—it was Benedetto, and in his hand he held a long knife dripping with blood. The Count turned and pursued him, snatching a dagger from a table as he ran. At the door leading to the lawn, he grasped him firmly by the shoulder and held him.

"Murderer!" he shouted, "whose blood is that upon your knife?"

"The blood of Haydée, the Greek slave!" hissed Benedetto, with a glare of ferocious triumph, "the blood of Haydée, your wife! Edmond Dantès, I am even with you!"

Monte-Cristo struck at the assassin with his dagger, but Benedetto eluded the blow, and raising his own weapon inflicted a frightful gash upon the Count's cheek.

A terrible struggle ensued. Monte-Cristo was possessed of wonderful strength and activity, but in both these respects the two desperate antagonists seemed fairly matched. Three times did the Count bury his dagger in Benedetto's body, but, though the assassin's blood gushed copiously from his wounds, he continued to fight with the utmost determination. At length the men grappled in a supreme, deadly effort, but Monte-Cristo, making a false step, slipped on the blood-spattered marble floor, and Benedetto, with the quickness of thought, hurling him backward, freed himself and bounding through the open doorway vanished in the darkness beyond.

The Count uttered a groan of despair as he saw Haydée's self-confessed murderer escape him, and staggered to his feet; the fierce conflict with Benedetto had exhausted him, and he stood for an instant panting and breathless. The shrieks had now grown fainter and the hall was full of smoke. During all this time neither Ali nor any of the servants under him had appeared, a circumstance that, to Monte-Cristo, seemed inexplicable. He, however, did not pause to give it thought, but dashed up the stairway and strove to reach his wife's apartment; blinding, stifling clouds of smoke, through which penetrated the glare of the conflagration, drove him back again and again, but he renewed his attempts to force a passage with undaunted energy and courage. Finally, compressing his lips and holding his nostrils with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he gave a headlong plunge, and succeeded in reaching Haydée's door; it was open, displaying a scene that caused the Count's heart to sink within him; the whole chamber was one sea of flame; fiery tongues, like so many writhing and hissing serpents, were licking and consuming the costly tapestry, the richly carved furniture and the magnificent objects of art; the curtains of the bed were blazing, and upon the couch lay the senseless form of the wife of Monte-Cristo, the pallor of her faultless countenance contrasting painfully with the ruddy glow of the devouring element. In Haydée's breast was a gaping wound, from which her life blood was slowly oozing in ruby drops.

Rendered utterly reckless by the terrible sight, the Count madly rushed to the couch, tore his beloved Haydée from it, and, clasping her tightly against his bosom, staggered into the corridor with his precious burden. There the smoke had increased in volume and density, but, summoning all his resolution and endurance to his aid, he plunged through it, and finally was successful in reaching the library.

Then, with the swiftness of a flash of lightning, the husband was replaced by the father, and Monte-Cristo, for the first time since Haydée's shrieks had awakened him from his dream, thought of his children. Where were they and what had happened to them? The Count felt a cold perspiration break out upon his forehead, and a feeling of unspeakable dread took entire possession of him. Haydée demanded immediate attention, but Espérance and Zuleika must instantly be found and rescued. At the top of his voice Monte-Cristo shouted for Ali, but no reply was returned. Fearing to leave Haydée for even a moment, the Count strode about the library like a caged wild animal, still holding her in his arms. He shouted again and again until he was hoarse, calling distractedly upon Espérance, Zuleika and all the servants in turn.

At last an answering shout came suddenly from the lawn, and old Alexis, followed by several fishermen, leaped into the library through an open window.

Resigning Haydée to Alexis, the Count, accompanied by the fishermen, fairly flew to the apartment of his children, situated on a corridor in another portion of the palace. There Espérance and Zuleika were discovered gagged and bound; they lay upon the floor of their chamber, while Ali, who had been treated in like manner, was extended near them. To release the prisoners was but the work of a moment, and then it was learned that all the servants under Ali were confined in their dormitory. They, as well as Monte-Cristo's children and the Nubian, had been suddenly seized by a party of rough-looking Greeks, evidently a portion of Benedetto's band.

Meanwhile the flames had spread from Haydée's chamber to the adjoining quarters of the edifice, and the entire palace seemed doomed, for to check the conflagration appeared impossible, but so happy had the Count been made by the recovery of his son and daughter, unharmed, that he gave himself no concern about the probable destruction of his magnificent property.

Seizing his children, he directed Ali and the fishermen to release the captive servants, and hastily returned to the library. As he entered the room Haydée uttered a low groan and opened her eyes; she was lying on a divan, where old Alexis had placed her. Espérance and Zuleika sprang to her side; she took each by the hand, and as she did so they saw the wound in her breast. Zuleika burst into tears. Espérance compressed his lips and grew deadly pale.

"My loved ones," said Haydée, faintly, "I feel that I am about to leave you forever, perhaps in a few moments. Be good children and obey your father in all things. Espérance, Zuleika, stoop and kiss me."

They did as she desired; her lips were already purple and cold; the stamp of death was upon her features. Suddenly her frame was convulsed and her eyes assumed a glassy look.

"Monte-Cristo, my husband, where are you?" she said, in a broken voice.

"Here, Haydée," answered the Count, approaching.

He strove to appear calm, but could not control his emotion.

"Nearer, nearer, Edmond," said Haydée, growing weaker and weaker.

The Count sank on his knees beside his dying wife and put his arms about her neck.

"Oh! Haydée, Haydée," he sobbed; "thrice accursed be the infamous wretch who has done this!"

"Edmond, my children, farewell," gasped Haydée; "I am going to a better land!"

The death rattle was in her throat; she raised herself with a mighty effort, gazed lovingly at her husband and children, and strove to speak again, but could not; then a flickering shade of violet passed over her countenance, and she fell back dead.

Espérance and Zuleika stood as if stunned; Monte-Cristo was overwhelmed with grief and despair.

"The whole palace is in flames! Save yourselves, save yourselves!" cried a fisherman, rushing into the library, followed by his companions, Ali and the servants.

Monte-Cristo leaped to his feet, seizing the corpse of Haydée and raising it in his arms. Ali grasped Espérance and Zuleika, and the entire party hastened from the burning edifice. They were not an instant too soon, for as they quitted the library the tempest of fire burst into it, accompanied by torrents of smoke. The fishermen and servants, commanded by the Nubian, had made every effort to save the doomed mansion, but in vain.

Monte-Cristo and his children found refuge in the hut of Alexis, to which Haydée's body was reverently borne.

The wife of Monte-Cristo was buried on the Island of Salmis, and over her remains her husband erected a massive monument.

Shortly afterwards the Count, Espérance and Zuleika, attended by the faithful Ali, quitted the Island and took passage on a vessel bound for France.

CHAPTER IV.

THE NEWS FROM ALGERIA.

Beauchamp, the journalist, sat at his desk in his editorial sanctum early one bright morning in the autumn of 1841. He had gone to work long before his usual hour, for important movements were on foot, the political atmosphere was agitated and Paris was in a state of feverish excitement; besides, Beauchamp had that day printed in his journal a dispatch from Algeria that would be certain to cause a great sensation, and, with the proper spirit of pride, the journalist desired to be at his post that he might receive the numerous congratulations his friends could not fail to offer, as the dispatch had appeared in his paper alone.

The sanctum had not an attractive look; in fact, it was rather dilapidated, while, in addition, the disorder occasioned by the previous night's work had not been repaired, and all was chaos and confusion.

Beauchamp was busily engaged in glancing over the rival morning papers when Lucien Debray entered and seated himself at another desk. The Ministerial Secretary smiled upon the journalist in a knowing way, and the latter, nodding to him with an air of triumph, silently pointed to the pile of journals he had finished examining. Lucien took them up, and without a word began scanning their contents.

"Glorious news that from the army in Algeria!" cried Château-Renaud, rushing into the sanctum.

"Glorious, indeed!" replied the editor, looking up from the paper over which he was hurriedly skimming. On the huge table at his side, as well as beneath it, and under his feet and his capacious arm-chair, nothing was to be seen but newspapers.

"Take a chair, Renaud, if you can find one, and help yourself to the news. You see I have Lucien similarly engaged yonder."

The Ministerial Secretary glanced up from his papers, returned his friend's salutation and resumed his reading. He was dressed with his customary elegance and richness, but his form and face were fuller than when last before the reader, and his brown hair was besprinkled with gray.

"I congratulate you, Beauchamp, on being the first to give the news," continued Château-Renaud. "Not a paper in Paris but your own has a line from the army this morning."

"Rather congratulate me and my paper on having a friend at court."

"Ha! and that explains the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that an opposition journal has intelligence, which only the Bureau of War could have anticipated! Treason—treason!"

The editor and the Secretary exchanged significant smiles.

"Oh! I don't doubt that your favors are reciprocal," continued the young aristocrat, laughing. "I've half a mind to be something useful myself—Minister—editor—anything but an idler and a law-giver—just to experience the exquisite sensation of a new pleasure—the pleasure of revealing and publishing to the world something it knew not before. Why, you two fellows, in this dark and dirty little room, are the two greatest men in Paris this morning—or were, rather, before your paper, Beauchamp, laid before the world what only you and Lucien knew previously. Oh! the delight, the rapture of knowing something that nobody else knows, and then of making the revelation!"

"And this news from Algeria is really important," remarked the editor.

"Important! So important that it will be before the Chambers this morning," replied the Secretary.

"So I supposed," said the Deputy, "and called to learn additional particulars, if you had any, on my way to the Chambers."

"We gave all we had, my dear Lycurgus, and for that were indebted to an official dispatch, telegraphed to the War Office, and faithfully re-telegraphed to us by our well-beloved Lucien."

"It's true, then, as I have sometimes suspected, that the wires radiate from the Minister's sanctum to the editor's?" was the laughing rejoinder.

"It must be so, or there's witchcraft in it. There's witchcraft, at any rate, in this new invention. Speed, secrecy, security and surety—no eastern genius of Arabian fiction can be compared to the electric telegraph; and how Ministers or editors continued to keep the world in vassalage, as they always have done, without this ready slave, seems now scarce less wonderful than the invention itself. Instead of detracting from the power of the press, the telegraph renders it more powerful than ever."

"But affairs in Algeria—is not the news splendid!" cried the editor. "Why did we not all become Spahis and win immortality, as some of our generals have?"

"As to immortality," said the Secretary, "we should have been far more likely to win the phantom as dead men than as living heroes."

"Debray was at the raising of the siege of Constantine," said Beauchamp laughing, "and knows all about the honors of war."

"Yes, indeed, and all about the raptures of starvation, of cold and hunger, after victory, and the ecstatic felicity of being pursued by six Bedouins, and after having slain five having my own neck encircled by the yataghan of the sixth!"

"And how chanced it that you saved your head, Lucien?" asked the Count.

"Save it—I didn't save it; but a most excellent friend of mine—a friend in need—galloped up and saved it for me."

"Yes," replied Beauchamp, "our gallant friend, Maximilian Morrel, the Captain of Spahis—now colonel of a regiment, and in the direct line of promotion to the first vacant bâton—eh, Lucien? A lucky thing to save the head of one of the War Office from a Bedouin's yataghan. Up—up—up, like a balloon, has this young Spahi risen ever since."

"You are wrong, Beauchamp. Not like a balloon. Rather like a planet. Maximilian Morrel is one of the most gallant young men in the French army, and step by step, from rank to rank, has he hewn his own path with his good sabre, in a strong hand, nerved by a brave heart and proud ambition, to the position he now holds."

"His name I see among the immortals in the dispatch of this morning. Well, well, Morrel is a splendid fellow, no doubt, but it's a splendid thing to have friends in the War Office, nevertheless, who will give that splendor a chance to shine—will plant the lighted candle in a candlestick, and not smother its beams under a bushel."

"Morrel has now been in Africa five whole years," said the Secretary—"a few months only excepted after his marriage with Villefort's fair daughter, Valentine, (as was said) when he was indulged with a furlough for his honeymoon."

"She is not in Paris?" asked Beauchamp.

"No; she leads the life of a perfect recluse with her child, during her husband's absence, at his villa somewhere in the south—near Marseilles, where the department forwards her letters."

"Yet she is said to be a magnificent woman," remarked the Count.

"Wonderful!" cried Beauchamp. "A magnificent woman and a recluse!"

"Oh! but it was a love-match of the most devoted species, you must remember."

"True; she was to have married our friend, Franz d'Epinay."

"And died to save herself from that fate, I suppose—and afterwards was resurrected and blessed Morrel with her hand and heart, and the most exquisite person that even a jaded voluptuary could covet. Happy—happy—happy man!"

"Apropos of dying," said the Secretary, "do you remember how fast people died at M. de Villefort's house about that time?"

"Horrible! A whole family of two or three generations, one after the other! First M. and Madame de Saint-Méran—then Barrois, the old servant of M. Noirtier—then Valentine, and, last of all, Madame de Villefort and Edward, her idol. No wonder that M. le Procureur du Roi himself went mad under such an accumulation of horrors! By the by, Debray, is M. de Villefort still an inmate of the Maison Royale de Charenton?"

"I know nothing to the contrary," replied the Secretary, who had resumed his paper, and to whom the subject seemed not altogether agreeable. "He is an incurable." Then, as if to turn the subject, he continued: "Apropos of the immortals of Algeria, here is a name that seems destined even to a more rapid apotheosis than that of the favored Morrel."

"You mean Joliette?" said the editor. "Who, in the name of all that is mysterious and heroic, is this same Joliette? I have found it impossible to discover, with all the means at the command of the press."

"And I, with all the means at the command of the Government. All we can discover is this—that he is a man of about twenty-five; that he enlisted at Marseilles, and in less than three years has risen from the ranks to the command of a battalion. His career has been most brilliant."

"And to whose favor does he owe his wonderful advancement, Beauchamp?" asked the Deputy, laughing.

"To that of Marshal Bugeaud, Governor-General of Algeria."

"Ah!"

"Who has indulged him with an appointment in every forlorn hope!"

"Excellent!" cried the Count. "What more could a man resolved to be a military immortal desire? Immortality the goal—two paths conduct to it—each sure—death—life!—the former the shorter, and, perhaps, the surer! But there is one name I never see in the war dispatches. Do you ever meet with it, Messrs. editor and Secretary—I mean the name of our brilliant friend, Albert de Morcerf? The rumor ran that, after the disgrace and suicide of the Count, his father, he and his mother went south, and he later to Africa."

"I have hardly seen the name of Morcerf in print since the paragraph headed 'Yanina' in my paper, about which poor Albert was so anxious to fight me."

"Nor I," said Debray. "But where now is Madame de Morcerf? Without exception, she was the most splendid specimen of a woman I ever saw!"

"High praise, that!" cried the Count, laughing. "Who would suppose our cold, calculating, ambitious, haughty, talented and opulent diplomat and aristocrat had so much blood in his veins? When before was he known to admire anything, male or female—but himself—or, at all events, to be guilty of the bad taste of expressing that admiration?"

"Debray is right," replied the journalist, somewhat gravely. "Madame de Morcerf was, indeed, a noble and dignified woman—accomplished, lovely, dignified, amiable—"

"Stop!—stop!—in the name of all that's forbearing, be considerate of my weak nerves! You, too, Beauchamp. Well, she must have been a paragon to make the conquest of two of the most inveterate bachelors in all Paris! But where is this marvel of excellence—pardon me, Beauchamp," perceiving that the journalist looked yet more grave, and seemed in no mood for bantering or being bantered—"where is Madame de Morcerf at the present time?"

"At Marseilles, I have heard."

"And is married again?"

"No. She is yet a widow."

"And is a recluse, like Morrel's beautiful wife?"

"So says report. They dwell together."

"How romantic! The young wife, whose hero-husband is winning glory amid the perils of war and pestilence, pours her griefs, joys and anticipations into the bosom of the young mother, who appreciates and reciprocates all, because she has a son exposed to the same perils—and both beautiful as the morning! A charming picture! Two immortals in epaulets and sashes in the background are only wanted instead of one. But I must to the Chambers. M. Dantès is expected to speak in the tribune this morning upon his measure for the workmen."

"Do you know, Count, who this M. Dantès really is?" asked Debray.

"There's a question for a Ministerial Secretary to ask a member while a journalist sits by! I only know of M. Dantès that he is the most eloquent man I ever listened to. I don't mean that he's the greatest man, or the profoundest statesman, or the wisest politician, or the sagest political economist; but I do mean that, for natural powers of persuasion and denunciation—for natural oratory—I have never known his rival. If Plato's maxim, 'that oratory must be estimated by its effects,' is at all correct, then is M. Dantès the greatest orator in France, for the effect of his oratory is miraculous. There is a sort of magic in his clear, sonorous, powerful, yet most exquisitely modulated voice, and the wave of his arm is like that of a necromancer's wand."

"You are enthusiastic, Count," observed Beauchamp, "but very just. M. Dantès is, indeed, a remarkable man, and possessed of remarkable endowments, both of mind and body. His personal advantages are wonderful. Such a figure and grace as his are alone worth more than all the powers of other distinguished speakers for popular effect. 'The eyes of the multitude are more eloquent than their ears,' as the English Shakespeare says."

"I never saw such eyes and such a face," remarked Debray, "but once in my life. Do you remember the Count of Monte-Cristo, Messieurs?"

"We shall not soon forget him," was the reply. "But this man differs greatly from the Count in most respects, though certainly not unlike him in others."

"True," replied the Secretary; "in manners, habits, costume and a thousand other things there is a marked difference. Besides, the Count was said to be incalculably rich, while the Deputy has every appearance of being in very moderate circumstances. But he leads a life so retired that he is known only in the Chambers and in his public character. I allude to the Deputy's person, when I speak of resemblance to that wonderful Count, who set all Paris in a fever, and, more wonderful still, kept it so for a whole season. There is I know not what in his air and manners that often recalls to me that extraordinary man. There are the same large and powerful eyes, the same brilliant teeth for which the women envied the Count so much, the same graceful and dignified figure, the same peculiar voice, the same good taste in dress, and, above all, the same colorless, pallid face, as if, to borrow the idea of the Countess of G——, he had risen from the dead, or was a visitant from another world, or a vampire of this. Her celebrated friend, Lord B——, she used to say, was the only man she ever knew with such a complexion."

"But, if I recollect rightly," said Beauchamp, "the Count of Monte-Cristo was somewhat noted for his profusion of black hair and beard. The Deputy Dantès is so utterly out of the mode, and out of good taste, too, as to wear no beard, and his hair is short. His face is as smooth as a woman's, and he always wears a white cravat like a curé."

"But he is, nevertheless, one of the handsomest men in Paris," added the Count—"at least the women say so. You might add, the Deputy has many gray hairs among his black ones, and many furrows on his white brow, while Monte-Cristo had neither. Besides, M. Dantès has a handsome daughter and a son who resembles him greatly, both well grown, while the Count was childless."

"Well, well, be his person and family what they may," said the Secretary, rising, "I wish to God the Ministry could secure his talents. I tell you, Messieurs, that man's influence over the destinies of France is to be almost omnipotent. His powerful mind has grasped the great problem of the age—remuneration for labor. The next revolution in France will hinge upon that—mark the prediction—and this man and his coadjutors, among whom Beauchamp here is one, are doing all they can to hasten the crisis. The whole soul of this remarkable man seems devoted to the elevation of the masses—the laboring classes—the people—and to the amelioration of their condition. His efforts and those of all like him cannot ultimately succeed. But they will have a temporary triumph, and the streets of Paris will run with blood! These men are rousing terrible agencies. They are evoking the fiends of hunger and misery, which will neither obey them nor lie down at their bidding."

"And the magicians who have summoned these foul fiends will prove their earliest victims!" said Château-Renaud, in some excitement.

"Messieurs, listen a moment!" cried Beauchamp, rising. "Pardon me, but this discussion must cease, at least here. It can lead to no good result. As the conductor of a reform journal, I entirely differ with you both. But let not political differences interfere with our personal friendship. Come, come, old friends, let us forsake this place, redolent with politics, having a very atmosphere of discussion, and repair to the Chambers, taking Véry's on our way."

"Agreed!" cried the Deputy and the Secretary, and the three left the journalist's sanctum arm in arm.

CHAPTER V.

EDMOND DANTÈS, DEPUTY FROM MARSEILLES.

Beauchamp, Lucien Debray and Château-Renaud were not the only persons puzzled with regard to the enigmatical M. Dantès; all Paris was more or less bothered about him; his entire career prior to his appearance at the capital as the Deputy from Marseilles seemed shrouded in impenetrable mystery, and this was the more galling to the curious Parisians as his wonderful oratorical powers and his intense republicanism rendered him the cynosure of all eyes and made him the sensation of the hour. The Government had instituted investigations concerning him, but without result; even in Marseilles his antecedents were unknown; he had come there from the east utterly unheralded, attended only by a black servant, and bringing with him his son and daughter, but almost immediately he had plunged into politics, winning his way to the front with startling rapidity. From the first he had ardently espoused the cause of the working people, and such was his personal magnetism that he had made hosts of admirers, and had been chosen Deputy with hardly a dissenting voice. Some of the inhabitants of Marseilles, indeed, remembered a youthful sailor named Edmond Dantès, but they asserted that he had been dead many years, and that the Deputy was unlike him in every particular.

As the young men passed the Théâtre Français, on their way to the Chamber of Deputies, after a glass of sherry and a biscuit at Véry's, their attention was attracted by a crowd gathered around an immense poster spread upon the bill-board. There seemed no little excitement among the throng, a large proportion of whom appeared to be artisans and laborers, and loud expressions of admiration, accompanied by animated gestures, were heard. Nor were there wanting also words of deep denunciation and of significant threatening.

"Down! down with the tyrants! Bread or blood! Wages for work! Food for the laborer!" and other cries of equally fearful significance were audible.

"Do you hear that, Beauchamp?" said Debray, quietly.

"Undoubtedly," was the equally quiet reply.

"Those laborers have deserted the daily toil which would give them the bread they so fiercely demand, in order to discuss their imaginary misery, and denounce those who are richer than themselves."

"But what brings them to the theatre at this hour?" asked Château-Renaud.

"The new play," suggested Beauchamp.

"Ah! the new play. 'The Laborer of Lyons,' is it not?"

"Yes," said Debray, "and one of the most dangerous productions of the hour."

"It is evidently from the pen of one unaccustomed to dramatic composition, yet familiar with stage effect," added the journalist. "And yet, without the least claptrap, with but little melodramatic power, against strong opposition and bitter prejudices, and without claqueurs, its own native force and the popularity of the principles it supports have carried it triumphantly through the ordeal of two representations. It will, doubtless, have a long run, and its influence will be incalculable in the cause it advocates—the cause of human liberty and human right."

"No doubt it will exert a most baneful influence," bitterly rejoined Debray. "Without containing a syllable to which the Ministry can object, at least sufficiently to warrant its suppression, it yet abounds with principles, sentiments and theories of the most incendiary description, well calculated to rouse the disaffection of the laboring classes to frenzy. Its inevitable effect will be to give them a false and exaggerated idea of their wrongs and their rights, and to stimulate them to revolution. Oh! these men have much to answer for. They are drawing down an avalanche."

"They are the champions of human liberty," said Beauchamp, warmly, "and will be blessed by posterity, if not by the men of the present generation."

"Truce to politics, Messieurs!" cried the Deputy, observing that his friends were becoming excited. "I had heard of this play and its powerful character. Who's the author, Beauchamp?"

"The production is attributed to M. Dantès, the Deputy from Marseilles, with what truth I know not; but he is fully capable of composing such a drama. To-morrow night, it is supposed, the author, whoever he may be, will be compelled by the people to appear and claim the laurels ready to be showered on him in such profusion. But it is nearly three o'clock," continued Beauchamp, "and M. Dantès is expected to speak in the early part of the sitting."

"To the Chamber, then," said the others, and the trio mingled with the crowd hurrying in the same direction.

"What a glorious thing is popularity!" exclaimed the Count.

"What a glorious thing to be the champion of the people!" rejoined Beauchamp.

"And how glorious is that champion's glorious career!" cried the Secretary. "Let the hydra alone. Like the antique god of mythology, it eats up its own children as soon as they get large enough to be eaten. It is a fickle beast, and the idol of to-day it crushes to-morrow."

The hall of the Chamber of Deputies was crowded when the three friends entered. Although the hour for the President to take the chair had not yet arrived, the benches were full, and the galleries, public and private, were overflowing. Strong agitation was visible among the Ministerial benches of the extreme left. The Premier himself was present, although his cold countenance, like the surface of a frozen lake, betrayed neither apprehension nor the reverse. Self-reliant, self-poised, calm, seemingly insensible to surrounding objects and events, this man of iron, with a heart of ice and a brain of fire, glanced quietly and fixedly around him, with his cold, dark eye, which, from time to time, rested on the Communist benches of the extreme right, unmoved by the stern glances hurled at him by his many fierce opponents and the almost tumultuous excitement by which they were agitated.

At length President Sauzet took the chair. The house came to order, and the sitting opened with the usual preliminary business. A large number of petitions from the workmen of Paris for employment by the Government were presented and referred, and one immense roll containing a hundred thousand names, which came from the manufacturing districts, was brought in on the shoulders of two men and placed in the area before the President's chair, escorted by a deputation from the artisans; it was received with an uproar of applause from the centre of the extreme right of the benches, and from the throngs of blouses in the galleries. The tumult having, at length, subsided, the order of the day was announced to be the discussion of the bill introduced by M. Dantès, having for its purpose the general amelioration of the condition of the industrial classes in the Kingdom; and M. Dantès was himself announced to be the first on the list to occupy the tribune. A deep murmur of anticipation ran around the vast hall at this announcement. The multitudes in the galleries leaned forward to gain a better view of this idol, and to catch every syllable that might fall from his lips; and every eye among the members was turned to the seat of M. Dantès, on the centre right of the benches.

A tall figure in black, with a white cravat, rose and advanced to the tribune slowly, amid a stillness as hushed and breathless as the prior excitement had been noisy. In age, M. Dantès seemed about fifty or fifty-five. His form was slight and his movements were graceful and dignified. His face was livid and as calm as marble; but for the large and eloquent eye, dark as night, one might have thought that broad white brow, that massive chin, those firmly compressed lips and that colorless mouth were those of a statue. Yet in the furrows of that forehead and the deep lines of that face could be read the record of thought and suffering. The busy plowshare had turned up the deep graves of departed passions. No one could gaze or even glance at that face and not perceive at once that it was the visage of a man of many sorrows—yet of a man proud, calm, self-possessed, self-poised and indomitable. His hair, which had been raven black, now rested in thin waves around his expansive forehead and was sprinkled with gray, while his intellectual countenance wore that expression of weariness and melancholy which illness, deep study and grief invariably trace.

Mounting the steps of the tribune with slow and deliberate tread, he drew up his tall figure, and resting his left hand, which grasped a roll of papers, upon the marble slab, glanced around on the turbulent billows of upturned and excited faces, as if at a loss how to address them. Having read the bill, after the usual prefatory remarks, he began by laying down the platform which he proposed occupying in its advocacy and support, consisting, of course, of abstract, self-evident propositions, which none could have the hardihood to gainsay, yet, when once admitted, the deductions inevitably flowing therefrom none could resist. The propositions seemed safe and indisputable, but the deductions evolved from those propositions were as frightful to the legitimist as they were delightful to the liberal. That each man is born the heir to the same natural rights—that each man, alike and equally with all others, has a birthright of which he cannot be divested and of which he cannot divest himself, to act, to think and to pursue happiness wherever he can find it without infringement on the rights of his fellow beings—none were disposed to deny. That each human animal, as each animal of inferior grade, has, also, the right of subsistence, drained from the bosom of the earth, the great mother of us all, which without his foreknowledge or wish gave him being, seemed, also, indisputable. But when from these propositions were deduced that crime is rather the result of misery than depravity, and that the office of government is more to prevent crime by creating happiness than to punish it by creating misery, and that for the natural rights resigned by the individual in entering into and upholding the social system human government is bound to afford employment and subsistence to each of its members, that labor and its produce should be in partnership, that competition should be abolished, and work and wages so distributed by the State as to equalize the condition of each individual in the community, and, finally, that the claims of labor are not satisfied by wages, but the workman is entitled to a proprietary share in the capital which employs him, inasmuch as all the woes and miseries of the laborer arise exclusively from the competition for work—when these deductions were advanced the opulent and the conservative started back in terror and dismay. Distribution of property, universal plunder, havoc, bloodshed, sans culottism, a red republic and the ghastly shapes of another Reign of Terror rose in frightful vividness before the fancy. As the speaker proceeded to illustrate and sustain his positions, which were those of the Communist, Socialist, Fourierist, call them which we may, and poured forth a fiery flood of persuasion, invective, denunciation and shouts of applause, mingled with cries of rage and dismay, rose from all quarters of the hall. Unmoved and undaunted, that marble man, livid as a spectre, his dark eyes blazing, his thin and writhing lip flecked with foam, his tall form swaying to and fro, rising, bending—now thrown back, then leaning over the marble bar of the tribune—continued to pour forth his scathing sarcasm, his crushing invective, his eloquent persuasion and his unanswerable argument in tones, now soft and tuneful as a silvery bell, then sad and pitiful as an evening zephyr, then clear, high and sonorous as a clarion, then hoarse and deep as the thunder, for a period of four hours, unbroken and continuous, without stop or stay.

The effect of this speech, as the orator, pale, exhausted, shattered, unstrung, with nerves like the torn cordage of a ship that has outridden the tempest, descended from the tribune, baffles all description. Fearful of its influence, the Minister of Foreign Affairs at once arose, and in order to divert the attention of the Chamber asked leave to lay before it the late dispatches from the seat of war, setting forth the glorious triumphs of the French arms in Algeria. This intelligence, which, at any other time, would have been received with rapturous enthusiasm, was listened to under the influence of a counterirritant already at work, with comparative calmness, and its only effect was to cause a postponement of the vote on the laborers' bill upon the plea of the lateness of the hour, although not without strenuous opposition from the extreme right. The rejoicing of the galleries at the triumph of their champion and their fierce applause knew no bounds at the close of the sitting, and their idol escaped being borne in his chair to his lodgings only by gliding through a private exit from the hall to the first carriage he could find.

"What think you?" cried Beauchamp, triumphantly, to the Ministerial Secretary, as they were pressed together for an instant by the excited throng on the steps as they left the hall.

"Think, Monsieur!" was the bitter rejoinder of the Secretary, whose agitation completely overcame his habitual and constitutional self-possession, "I think Paris is on the eve of another Reign of Terror!"

Beauchamp laughed, and the friends were drawn apart by the conflicting billows of the crowd.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MYSTERY THICKENS.

M. Dantès' wonderful speech was the principal topic of conversation in every quarter of Paris, exciting comment of the most animated description. Of course, the workmen and their friends were delighted with it, and could not find words strong enough to adequately express their enthusiastic admiration for the gifted orator. Those belonging to the Government party, on the other hand, denounced the speaker as a demagogue and the speech as in the highest degree incendiary and dangerous. Strange to relate, whoever spoke of the oration always mentioned the new play, "The Laborer of Lyons," attributing its authorship to the mysterious Deputy from Marseilles, and the drama received cordial endorsement or scathing censure, according to the political opinions of those who alluded to it.

For these reasons curiosity in regard to M. Dantès ran higher than ever, but instead of decreasing as he became more prominent, the mystery surrounding him seemed only to thicken. Nevertheless, the Deputy was the lion of the hour, or rather would have been, had he permitted himself to be lionized, but this he persistently declined to do, holding aloof from society and mingling with none save his political associates, though even to them he was a problem they could not solve; they, however, recognized in him a powerful coadjutor, and with that were forced to be content.

"The Hall of the Chamber of Deputies was last evening thronged to overflowing. It had been understood that M. Dantès was to advocate the People's Bill, and, as usual, it had but to be known that this distinguished orator was to occupy the tribune to draw out all classes of citizens. Nor was the vast multitude disappointed. A more powerful speech has never been heard within those walls. More than four hours was the audience enchained by the matchless eloquence of this remarkable man, which was received with thunders of applause. A report of this speech will be found under the appropriate head."

"The New Play entitled, 'The Laborer of Lyons,' recently produced at the Théâtre Français with triumphant success, and which has caused such a deep and universal sensation, is repeated to-night. There is reason to anticipate that the author, who is supposed to be a celebrated orator of the opposition, may be induced to comply with the call, which will be again renewed, to avow himself."

Such were two paragraphs which the following morning appeared in Beauchamp's journal, and similar notices of both speech and drama were published in every other opposition sheet in Paris. In the Ministerial organ, on the contrary, and in all the papers of like political bias, appeared the following and similar paragraphs:

"The Speech of M. Dantès, last evening, in the Chamber of Deputies, was one of the most dangerous diatribes to which we ever listened—dangerous for the insidious and sophistical principles it advanced, and the almost fiend-like eloquence with which they were urged. Where are these things to stop? At what terrible catastrophe do these men aim? What crisis do they contemplate?"

"The New Drama at the Théâtre Français, called 'The Laborer of Lyons,' which is to-night to be repeated, is calculated and seems to have been designed by its reckless author to produce the very worst effects among the laboring classes. We deeply regret that it has been suffered by the censors to be brought out."

The multitude called forth by paragraphs like these to witness the new play was, of course, immense. Long before the time for the curtain to rise, the vast edifice was crowded to its utmost capacity with an eager and enthusiastic assemblage. Not only were the galleries, parquette and lobbies filled with blouses, but the boxes were glittering with a perfect galaxy of fashion, loveliness and rank. Conspicuous in the orchestra stalls were the three friends—the Secretary, the journalist and the Deputy. In a small and private loge in the second tier, concealed from all eyes by its light curtain of green silk, and its position, but himself viewing everything upon the stage or in the house, sat the author of the play, calmly awaiting the rising of the curtain.

The performance at length began, and the piece proceeded to its termination amid thunders of applause, which, as the curtain finally descended on the last scene of the last act, became perfectly deafening, accompanied by cries for the author. But no author appeared behind the footlights or in the proscenium box; and, at last, the uproar becoming redoubled, the manager came forward, and, in the author's behalf, tendered grateful acknowledgments for the unprecedented favor, even by a Parisian audience, with which the production had been received, but, at the same time, entreated the additional favor that they would grant the author's request, and permit his name, for the present, to remain unknown. He would, however, venture to reveal this much, that the author was a distinguished friend of the people. The earthquake of applause which succeeded this announcement was almost frightful, and while the scene was at its height, the three friends with great difficulty managed to extricate themselves from the multitude which wedged up the lobbies, and to make their escape.

"A friend of the people!" cried Debray, bitterly, as his coupé, containing himself and companions, drove off to Véry's. "From such friends let the people be saved, and they may save themselves from their foes."

"And the play, what think you of that?" cried Beauchamp.

"That it is a most able and abominable production, eminently calculated to cause exactly the evils which we have this night perceived—to excite and rouse the worst passions of the mob, and render the masses dissatisfied with their inevitable and irredeemable lot, and as dangerous as wild beasts to all whose lot is more favored."

"Man has rights as man, and men in masses have rights, and one of those rights is to know actually what those rights are," said Beauchamp. "The most melancholy feature in the oppression of man is his ignorance that he is oppressed. Enlighten him as to those rights, elevate his mind to appreciate and value them, and then counsel him firmly and resolutely to demand those rights, and quietly and wisely to obtain them."

"Aye! but will he obey such counsel?" exclaimed Château-Renaud. "Will not the result of such enlightenment and excitement prove, as it ever has proved, anarchy, revolution, guilt, blood? Who shall restrain the monster once lashed into madness?"

"But you can surely perceive no such design in this play, and no such effect," rejoined Beauchamp.

"In the abstract," replied the Count, "this production is unexceptionable—most beautiful, yet most powerful. How it could have been the work of an unpracticed pen, embodying as it does passages of which the first dramatists of the romantic school might be proud, I cannot imagine. Besides, there seems familiar acquaintance with stage effect and the way in which it is produced. But that might have been, and probably was, the result of some professional player's suggestions."

"And, then, the profound knowledge of the human heart evinced—its passions, motives and principles of action," added the journalist. "There seems an individuality, a personality in the production, which compels the idea that the author is himself the hero, that he has himself experienced the evils he so vividly portrays, that the drama is at once the effusion of his own heart and the embodiment of his own history. Can that man be M. Dantès?"

"If it be he," cried the Secretary, "there is more reason than ever to call him the most dangerous man in Paris. What with his speeches in the Chamber and his plays at the theatre, all tending to one most unrighteous end, and all aiming to inflame such an explosive mass as the workmen of Paris, he may be regarded as little less than the very agent of the fiend to accomplish havoc on earth!"

"Yet, strange to say, my dear Secretary," said the journalist, laughing, "you have not yet estimated the tithe of this man's influence for good, or, as you think, for evil. Rumor proclaims him to be as immensely opulent as appearances would indicate him to be impoverished. That his whole soul, as you say, is devoted to the people, with all his wonderful powers of mind and person, is undoubted. That he has availed himself of that grand lever, the press, to accomplish his purposes, be they good or bad, seems equally certain. 'La Réforme,' the new daily, is undoubtedly under his control, if not sustained by his pen and his purse, for it has a wider circulation than all the other Parisian papers put together. It goes everywhere—it seeks the alleys, not the boulevards, finds its way to the threshold of all, whether paid for or not."

"Ah!" cried Debray, in great agitation. "Is it so?"

"And, then, not only is the public press subsidized by this man, if report is not even falser than usual, but a whole army of pamphleteers, journalists, littérateurs and students await his bidding, as well as some of the most distinguished novelists and dramatists of the nation and age!"

"My God!" exclaimed the Count. "Can this be so?"

"Nay—nay," replied Beauchamp, "I make no assertions, I merely retail rumors. But what cannot uncounted wealth achieve, directed by genius and intelligence?"

"But is this man actually so wealthy?" asked Debray, pale with agitation. "His manners, dress, equipage, residence and mode of life would indicate just the reverse."

"I know not—no one knows," said Beauchamp. "It is only known to myself and to a few others that he dwells in the mansion No. 27 Rue du Helder, formerly the residence of the Count de Morcerf, and that his private apartment is that pavilion at the corner of the court, where at half-past ten, on the morning of the 21st of May, 1838, we breakfasted with our amiable friend Albert, and were met by that remarkable man, the Count of Monte-Cristo."

"I remember that morning well," said Château-Renaud.

"Everything, it is said, remains in that once splendid mansion precisely as when it was deserted by the Countess and her son, at the time of the suicide of the Count—everything except that glorious picture of the Catalan fisherman by Leopold Robert, in Albert's exquisite chamber, which alone he took with him."

"It is strange that a man so opulent as you represent M. Dantès to be, should adopt his magnificence at second hand," observed Debray, coolly.

"But I do not represent him as opulent, my dear Lucien; and he certainly is the last man either to invent magnificence or to adopt it. Why, he is as plain in manners and mode as St. Simon himself. His dress you have seen; as to equipage his only conveyance is a public fiacre; as to diet, household arrangements and everything else of a personal nature, nothing can be more republican and less epicurean than is witnessed at his house. His study, Albert de Morcerf's pavilion, is said to be the only sumptuous apartment in the whole establishment; and that sumptuousness is of a character entirely literary and practical. His retinue consists of three servants, called Baptistin, Bertuccio and Ali, the latter being a Nubian, although fame gives him a perfect army of servitors prompt to execute his bidding. But I will not indulge your skeptical and sarcastic nature, Lucien, with a detail of all that rumor says of this wonderful man. I will only say that all he is, and has or hopes for seems devoted to one single object—the welfare of his race."

"Has he a wife?" asked Debray.

"He is a widower, with two children, a young girl, called Zuleika, and a youthful son, called Espérance. But my acquaintance with him is wholly of a public character. I have never been in his house, and very few there are who have been. But here we are."

And the coupé stopped at Véry's.

CHAPTER VII.

DANTÈS AND HIS DAUGHTER.

Even in the immediate vicinity of the Morcerf mansion, No. 27 Rue du Helder, no one was aware that its new tenant was M. Dantès, the famous Deputy from Marseilles. All the neighbors knew was that the palatial edifice had been purchased by a stranger, who said he was acting for his master, a man of great wealth lately arrived from the east. No repairs or alterations had been made, while the Morcerf furniture was bought with the house, the only new articles making their appearance being several huge bookcases and a number of large boxes evidently containing books, together with a host of traveling trunks filled, as was to be presumed, with the wardrobe of the family. The servants took possession during the day and were duly noted, but how or when the proprietor came could not be ascertained, while after his installation glimpses of him were exceedingly rare.

Occasionally, however, a beautiful girl, with an oriental look notwithstanding her tasteful and elegant Parisian attire, would be seen for a moment at the windows, but she invariably vanished on realizing that she was observed. Sometimes, a handsome young man stood at her side, but he also seemed anxious to avoid the scrutiny of the curious, although he evinced less timidity than his companion, always withdrawing slowly and with great deliberation.

It was after midnight. On the second floor of the pavilion once inhabited by the Viscount Albert de Morcerf was now a spacious library. The walls were lined with tall book-shelves, mounting to the lofty ceiling, and groaning under ponderous piles of volumes, from the huge black letter folio of the Middle Ages to the lightest duodecimo of the day; while in all parts of the chamber, on the floor, tables and chairs, and in the deep embrasures of the windows, were scattered huge masses of papers, pamphlets, manuscripts and charts. Over the bookcases stood marble busts of Danton, Mirabeau, Napoleon, Armand Carrel, the Duc de St. Simon and other great men whose names are identified with France; between the windows looking out on the garden, shrouded in shrubs and creeping plants, hung a full-length and magnificent picture of Fourier. Near the centre of the apartment stood a vast table covered with books, papers, manuscripts and writing materials, beside which stood one of those sombre and massive arm-chairs, on the possession of which the former proprietor had so felicitated himself, bearing on a carved shield the fleur-de-lis of the Louvre, and in whose sumptuous and antique embrace had, perhaps, reposed a Richelieu, a Mazarin or a Sully. The windows were hung with heavy tapestry of ancient pattern and rich dye, and also the walls, save where covered with books. A soft and summery atmosphere, the warmth of which emanated from concealed furnaces, neutralized the chill of an autumnal night, and the mellow chiaro-oscuro of a vast astral diffused its lunar effulgence on all around.

Within this chamber was a man, who, with arms crossed upon his bosom and eyes fastened in profound and seemingly mournful contemplation upon the floor, slowly paced from one extremity of the spacious apartment to the other.

This man was M. Dantès, representative of Marseilles in the French Chamber of Deputies.

"At last, at last," he murmured, "the avenging Nemesis ceases to gnaw! At length the angel Peace begins to smile! The tempest, which, for nearly thirty years, has raved and swelled in my heart, begins to lull! At length I commence to live—at length I realize and pursue life's true end. Let me reflect," he continued, after a pause, "let me review the past. The past! alas! my past is a painful blank! At twenty, from the very marriage-feast, from the side of her whom more than life I loved, I was torn by the envy of one man and the jealousy of another, and then, by the ambition of a third, to whom nothing was crime if it but ministered to that unhallowed impulse, I was plunged into a dungeon, whose counterpart only the vaults of hell can furnish. For fourteen long years I was the tenant of a sombre tomb. The agony, the despair of those awful years—oh! God! oh! God!" and he shuddered and clasped his hands over his head as if to crush the recollection.

After a pause he resumed: "And then those daily vows of vengeance! oh! vain and impotent vows as then they seemed! vows of awful agony, of fiendish retribution, though at that time I knew not all! I knew not that a venerable father had pined and died of starvation through the wrong done to me! I knew not that the woman I loved had become the bride of my destroyer! Yet those vows, awful and blasphemous as they were, those vows of vengeance have been terribly, dreadfully fulfilled! As the destroying angel of God's retributive providence, I was endowed with superhuman powers to walk the earth, to administer His justice and to execute His decrees. For fourteen years was that vengeance prepared, yet delayed. At last, it fell—it fell. All who had wronged me met their dreadful doom. Ambition was changed to madness. Avarice was tortured with bankruptcy. Falsehood sought refuge in self destruction; and all—all—all—even the meanest of those who had contributed to blight my life—perished miserably at my will! And did the guilty suffer alone? Alas! impious, remorseless, horrible revenge! The innocent and the criminal suffered alike. A might approaching omnipotence was vouchsafed me, but no power of omniscience to direct my hand or stay its effects. Blind and mad I knew not what I did. Those I most loved fell beneath the blow which crushed those I most abhorred, and shared the same fate. The terrible agencies I had summoned as my slaves became my masters. The fiends which, as ministers of God's justice, garbed in the guise of angels of light, I had, by hideous necromancy, evoked to aid me in righteous retribution, proved the dark demons of hell and derided all orders to accomplish my bidding. The awful engines I had set in motion I found myself powerless to arrest or control. Effects ceased not with the causes in which they had their origin. The stroke of vengeance, aimed at foes, recoiled on friends—recoiled on myself. And when I fain would stop, when I would arrest the awful havoc which my will had commenced, the dark ministers I had called up howled in my ears, 'On! on! on! vengeance is thine! vengeance is thine!' They mocked my terror and laughed at my apprehensions.

"At last there seemed a pause. Fate appeared to have done her worst, to have executed her decrees. The blind agencies of vengeance blasted no more, because there seemed no more to blast. The misery I had caused I strove to alleviate, the innocent hearts I had crushed I endeavored to heal; rejoicing in the joy I had created and the affection I gratified, once more I loved—loved, but, oh! not as I first had loved—not with that deep, adoring, delirious passion of my youth, and yet with a subdued, fraternal feeling I loved; in the calm and sweet seclusion of a favored clime, parted from the world with all its miseries and its crimes, environed by all that man or nature could contribute to human bliss, I began to dream of happiness, in the happiness I had created. But, alas! I forgot that man's happiness lies not in his own hand, but in the hand of his Maker. I forgot that an omniscient eye pursued me, that a blasphemed and omnipotent Power was over me. The blow paused—hovered—fell, not upon me, not on the guilty, but again it fell on the innocent; and she, who was my only hope, my beloved Haydée, my wife, was snatched from my heart, ruthlessly murdered by that fiend, Benedetto!"

The unhappy man pressed his hand to his forehead, and for some time paced the chamber in silence; then, approaching a small alcove at one extremity of the apartment, he raised the heavy and sumptuous hangings and revealed a small silver casket of exquisite workmanship and appointments, that sparkled as the mellow light poured in upon it. M. Dantès knelt beside the ebony table on which this casket rested, and for some moments seemed absorbed in prayer; then, rising and taking the casket in his hands, he touched a spring, when the lid flew open, disclosing a miniature portrait of Haydée, set in a frame of gold, ornamented with flashing diamonds and emeralds; he gazed long and lovingly at this portrait, that seemed designed to show how exquisitely fair God's creatures may be, after which he kissed it reverently, closed the casket, restored it to the table, and slowly dropped the hangings to their place. Resuming his walk, he said, mournfully: "But the deepest wound will close; the heaviest grief, the bitterest woe, becomes assuaged. Time, the comforter, soothes and consoles. From this stroke of bereavement I at length awoke, and, at the same moment, awoke to the conviction that my whole past had been an error; that my life had been a lie; that the years which had succeeded my imprisonment had been more utterly lost than those passed within my dungeon itself; and there came to me the conviction that time, talent, power and wealth had been worse than wasted—that the wondrous riches, undreamed of save in the wildest flights of oriental fiction, and by a miracle bestowed upon me, were designed for nobler, holier purposes than to subserve a fiendish and blasphemous vengeance for even unutterable wrongs, or to minister to the gratification of pride, and the satisfaction of selfish tastes and appetites, however refined and sublimated.

"I looked around me—the world was full of misery—and the same disposition which had plunged me into a dungeon was crushing the hearts and hopes of millions of my race. My bosom softened by bereavement yearned toward my suffering fellows, and the path of duty, peace and happiness seemed open to my desolate and despairing heart. Resolution followed conviction; the world was my field; liberty, equality and fraternity were my objects. Not France alone, with her miserable millions, but Russia with her serfs, Poland with her wrongs, the enslaved Italian, the oppressed German, the starving son of Erin, the squalid operative of England, the priest-ridden slave of Jesuit Spain, and the oppressed but free-born Switzer. Great men and good men I found had already, with superhuman skill, constructed a system, a machine for the amelioration of mankind's condition, which needed only the co-operation of boundless wealth to set it in motion. That wealth was mine! The common house for the laborer, the asylum for the insane, for the orphan, the Magdalen, the destitute, the sick, the friendless, the deserted, the bereaved, or the asylum for the victim of his own vices, or the vices of others, for the depravity which originates in misery, ignorance or fate—all these my riches could sustain. Around me, in the accomplishment of this design, the uncounted wealth intrusted to my stewardship has already gathered the mightiest minds in every department of intellect, and the best hearts; and if but a few years are vouchsafed us to carry out the system we have adopted, all Europe, despite her throned and sceptred tyrants, impiously claiming the right to oppress by the will of God, shall be free! Silently but surely, the principle of human liberty is ceaselessly at work, undermining thrones and overthrowing dynasties. The hush that precedes the tornado even now broods over Europe; nations slumber the heavy sleep that preludes the earthquake. The hour of revolution is at hand—of social regeneration, disenthrallment, redemption, over all the world. In every capital of Europe the mine is prepared—the train laid to be lighted, and from this solitary chamber the free thought on the lightning's pinion flies to Vienna, St. Petersburg, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, London, over mountain and plain—over sea and land—through the forest wilderness and the thronged city; taken up by the press, it makes thrones totter and tyrants tremble—tremble at an influence which emanates they know not whence and contemplates a purpose they know not what—an influence whose mystery they are impotent to penetrate, and whose shadowy but awful right they are powerless to resist!"

At that instant the silvery tinkle of a bell was heard at the table, and a low and continuous whizzing as of clockwork at once commenced. The Deputy advanced hastily to the table. The register of the electric telegraph like a living thing was unfolding the secrets of events at that moment transpiring at the furthest extremity of the Kingdom! Eagerly seizing the slip of paper which was gliding through the machine, he glanced over the cabalistic cipher there traced. "Lyons—Marseilles—Rome—Algeria," he murmured. "All goes well." And while the wonderful register, like a thing of life, still whizzed, clicked and delivered its magic scroll, covered with characters unintelligible to all but him for whose eye they were designed, he touched a spring, and a row of ivory keys resembling those of a piano-forte was revealed. Then rapidly touching them with the fingers of one hand, while he held up before him the endless slip of paper in the other as it was evolved, he transferred its cabalistic contents, character by character, to their distant destination.

And when the day dawned on Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Madrid, the intelligence thus concentrated, and thus distributed in that solitary chamber, was laid by the press before a hundred thousand eyes, in a language which each could comprehend, for in every capital of Europe unbounded wealth had established a press which groaned in unceasing parturition for human rights, causing princes to tremble and ministers to wonder and grow pale; over each press, thus set in motion as if literally by an electric touch a thousand miles away, presided men of the greatest powers and most varied attainments which philanthropy or covetousness could enlist, while the result of their labors was sown broadcast among the poorest and humblest, without price or compensation, pouring light upon their darkened understandings and giving them knowledge of their rights.

Nor was the newspaper press alone active. The feuilleton press was also at work; and magazines, reviews, pamphlets, whole libraries of volumes, were flung like Sibylline leaves on the four winds of heaven. Fiction, the drama, religion, art, literature, moral and mechanical science—all departments of intellect—silently, unseen, yet surely exerted their omnipotent influence for the attainment of one single glorious end—the happiness, rights, freedom of man; all this was under the guidance of one powerful mind and benevolent heart, wielding the resistless necromancy of countless and exhaustless treasure! Not a point in all Europe whence influence could radiate and be distributed was there at which this man, in one brief year, had not set in motion the press and the telegraph, those tremendous levers of the age to move the world, and all the more powerfully to move it because oft unseen. Not a court was there of emperor or prince, czar or kaiser, king, duke or potentate in which dwelt not his emissary, who suspected, least of all, knew everything that occurred, and, on the lightning's wing, dispatched it to its destination, so that the most important decrees of the cabinet-council of Vienna were exposed to the whole world by the Parisian press long before they had been communicated by Metternich to his sovereign. And thus, often, the ruler first learned the purposes of the Minister. Not a city or village was there in all Europe which nourished not in its bosom the germ of reform and revolution, while the great principle of association combined, embodied, and concentrated into a focus energies and influences which would otherwise have proved comparatively powerless.

The click and buzz of the register ceased—the engine had revealed its secret—the shadowy tale had been caught up as it fell and given to the press of all Europe, thence to be laid before men's minds.

Exhausted by the severe mental toil, and by the lateness of the hour, the Deputy sank back into his arm-chair and clasped his hands. "Glorious, omnipotent science!" he exclaimed in low and trembling, yet eager and enthusiastic tones. "Wealth must yield in power to thee, for what wealth can rival thy achievements or secure thy results? Thou hast girt the earth with web-work, forced the lightning to syllable the unspoken thought and made man's mind ubiquitous like God's; ere long, thou wilt have knit together with thy magic spells a world of mankind into one vast brotherhood!"

M. Dantès ceased and, closing his eyes wearily, continued to think over the possibilities of the future. As he sat there motionless and seemingly asleep, a light footfall was heard in the apartment and his daughter stood before him. Zuleika was now sixteen, tall and matured beyond her years; she greatly resembled her dead mother, Haydée, the beautiful Greek, and the half-oriental costume she wore helped to render the resemblance still more striking; her abundant hair was the hue of the raven's wing, her feet and hands were those of a fairy, while her large and expressive eyes flashed like diamonds, and her parted lips, as red as rubies, disclosed perfect teeth of the whiteness of pearls. A shade of anxiety settled upon her handsome countenance as she bent over her weary father. The Deputy opened his eyes and glanced at her.

"Why are you up so late, my child?" he asked, fondly. "I thought you were sleeping soundly long ere this."

"I was waiting for you, papa," replied Zuleika, in a low, musical voice, that sounded like a chime of tiny bells; "I could not retire to my couch while you were toiling."

M. Dantès pointed to a stool; the young girl brought it and seated herself at his feet; he drew her to his knee, smoothing her tresses gently and affectionately.

"So you would not desert me, darling?" he said, with a glad smile.

"No, indeed, dear papa," answered she, nestling closer to him.

"Will you always love me as you do now, Zuleika?" asked the father, looking down into the liquid depths of her eyes.

"Oh! papa, what a question, what a singular question!" said the girl, springing to her feet, throwing her arms around his neck, and kissing him again and again.

"But love of another kind and for another will come along after awhile," said the Deputy sadly, "and then you will forget your father."

Zuleika blushed and hung her head in maidenly modesty; then she exclaimed:

"No, no, papa; never will I forget you whatever may happen!"

"Ah! my darling, you know not what you are saying; it is only natural for a woman to cast her father aside and cleave unto her husband."

"But, papa, I have not even a lover yet, and, besides, I am not a woman; I am merely a little girl and your own, true, loving daughter."

"Yes, yes, but you must remember that last year, young as you were then, you attracted marked attention from several youthful Romans of the best families in the Eternal City, and that one of them, the Viscount Giovanni Massetti, went so far as to ask me for your hand."

At the mention of Massetti's name the blush upon Zuleika's cheek deepened. She trembled slightly, but said nothing; her heart fluttered painfully, but the pain was not altogether disagreeable. The young Viscount was evidently not unpleasing to her.

M. Dantès resumed, looking at her fixedly the while:

"My daughter, as you were then attending the convent school I felt it my duty to deny Giovanni Massetti's solicitation, nay, his ardent, impetuous prayer, but I did not deprive him of all hope; I gave him permission to urge his suit with you personally after a year from that time had elapsed. Did I do right?"

Zuleika maintained silence, but blushed and trembled more than ever, while her heart fluttered so that she placed her hand upon her breast to still it.

"Come, come, my daughter, answer me," said the Deputy, kindly, "did I do right? Tell me what your little heart says."

"I do not know, oh! I do not know!" cried Zuleika, bursting into tears.

"There, there now," said her father, soothingly; "I did not mean either to frighten or wound you. If the Viscount is displeasing to you I will answer his letter to-morrow and tell him as gently as possible that he has no hope of winning your hand."

"What! have you received a letter from Giovanni?" exclaimed Zuleika, with sudden interest, her tears vanishing instantly and her pretty face brightening up.

"Ho! ho!" said M. Dantès to himself, "Mademoiselle has waked up in earnest now." Then he added aloud: "Yes, one came this afternoon. The Viscount is in Paris, and has claimed the privilege I accorded him a year ago, provided you interposed no objection. However, the matter can speedily be settled. Young Massetti is a man of honor, and will not for an instant think of troubling with his attentions a lady to whom they cannot prove acceptable."

"Oh! papa, papa, don't tell him that; he wouldn't come here if you did; besides, did—did—did I ever tell you that Giovanni's attentions would prove unacceptable to me?"

"No, not in so many words," answered M. Dantès, archly, "but I inferred as much from your manner and tears just now. So I am to understand that you do not want me to reply to the Viscount's letter, am I?"

"Oh! yes, I want you to reply to his letter, but—but——"

"But what, darling?"

"I do not wish you to tell him there is no hope!"

"You think there is hope, then?"

"I—I—am afraid so, dear papa!"

"Yet a moment ago you told me you had no lover, and were merely a little girl!"

"I did not know then that Giovanni was in Paris, and I—I—thought he had forgotten all about me."

M. Dantès smiled as he said:

"That makes all the difference in the world, doesn't it, Mademoiselle?"

"Yes," answered Zuleika, innocently; then she added in a tone of great earnestness: "Write to Giovanni in the morning, and—and tell him I shall be delighted to see him."

"I will write and inform him that, so far as I have been able to discover, my daughter does not object to receiving a visit from him."

"Oh! that would be too cold and formal, and Giovanni is such an old friend."

"Well, well," said M. Dantès, "I will so frame my reply as to give entire satisfaction both to you and him. Now, my child, kiss me and retire to your couch, for it is very, very late."

Zuleika embraced her father and kissed him repeatedly; then, with beaming eyes and a countenance overflowing with happiness she ran lightly from the apartment.

As she tripped joyously away, M. Dantès arose from his arm-chair and gazed after her with a look of the utmost sadness.

"Oh! my daughter, my daughter," he murmured, "soon will you also quit me, and then I shall be alone, indeed! True, Espérance will remain, but, generous, manly and heroic as he is, he can never fill the void Zuleika will leave. Oh! Haydée, Haydée, my beloved wife, why were you torn so ruthlessly from your husband's heart!"

Zuleika's dreams that night were rose-hued and delicious, and in all of them the central figure was the youthful Roman Viscount.

When day dawned M. Dantès was still pacing his library.

CHAPTER VIII.

A VAST PRINTING HOUSE.

A street somewhat famous in Paris is the Rue Lepelletier, famous not for its length, for its breadth, for the splendid edifices it exhibits, or for the scenes and events it has witnessed, but famous for the exploits beheld by its neighbors, and the magnificent structures by them displayed. Not that the Rue Lepelletier can boast no fine edifices, for the grand opera-house would give the loud lie to such an assertion. And then there is the Foreign Office near by, the Hôtel of the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue des Capucines, and other noted places.

But there is one structure on the Rue Lepelletier not very noticeable save for its immense size and its ancient and dingy aspect, which has witnessed more scenes and events, and is more important than all its more splendid neighbors put together.

This edifice is of brick, five stories in height, and, as has been intimated, is time-stained, storm-stained, smoke-stained and stained, it would seem, by all other conceivable causes of stain, so begrimed and dingy, yet so venerable and imposing, does it seem.

This vast and ancient pile can be said to represent no order of architecture. Architectural elegance appears not to have been thought of when it was designed, and yet the façade of the old building seems to bear the same relation to the building itself as the face of an old man bears to his body, and that face is full of character, as are the faces of some men—sombre, sedate, serious, almost sinister in aspect. This old face, too, seemed full of apertures, through which unceasing and sleepless espionage could be kept up on the good citizens of the good City of Paris. Doors, and especially windows, numberless, opened and looked upon the street, and on a cul de sac at one end of the edifice.

One of the doors opening on the cul de sac, at its further extremity, was broad, low, dark and sombre; like the gates of hell, as portrayed by the English bard, it "stood open night and day." If you entered this door and advanced, you would immediately find yourself ascending a narrow, gloomy and winding flight of stairs. Having with difficulty groped your way to the top, without having broken your neck, by having first reached the point from which you started, to wit, the bottom; or your shins, by stumbling against the steps—having, I say, accomplished the ascent to the first landing, your further passage is effectually stopped by a massive door, which resists all your efforts to open it; and, as you are contemplating the dangerous descent which you now think you are immediately and inevitably forced to make, an ivory bell-handle against the wall, beside the door, arrests your attention, with the words around it, which, with difficulty, you decipher by the dim light, "Editor's Room—No Admittance," followed by the encouraging, but somewhat contradictory word, "Ring," which, doubtless, means this: "If you are a particular friend of the editor, or have particular business with him as a journalist, ring the bell, and perhaps you may be admitted." Supposing either of these positions yours, you "ring the bell," and immediately you are startled by the tinkling of a small bell in the darkness close beside you, and the ponderous door, firm as a barricade till then, is now opened by unseen hands—by the same hand, indeed, and by the same action of that hand which caused the bell to tinkle.

You enter the door, and find yourself in a corridor or passage, long and dark, for everything in this building is dark, and gaslight is the only light eighteen hours in the twenty-four; you find yourself in a corridor, I say, running the entire depth of the building, and bringing you back again toward the Rue Lepelletier, which you left on entering the cul de sac, to seek the low entrance below. As you traverse the endless gallery, your attention is arrested by a deep hum, as of many voices at a distance, with which the entire structure seems pervaded, accompanied by a heavier sound, which rises and falls with measured stroke. This mysterious hum might have been heard when you first approached or entered the building; but the silence and solitude of the corridor have caused you to notice it now for the first time, and to wonder at its cause.

Now had you the power of those magicians, necromancers, clairvoyants and demi-devils, whether of the flesh or the spirit, who, at a glance, can gaze through massive walls and peer down the chimneys of a great city, and who, almost without glancing at all, can see through partitions, key-holes and iron doors, your wonder at the cause of these unknown sounds would instantly cease, while it would be yet more excited by those causes themselves, for the vast building all around you, and through which you are passing, and which envelops you in its ceaseless hum, like the voice of a great city, would seem to you nothing less than a leviathan of life and action—a Titan—a Frankenstein—a mental and material giant, with its acoustic tubes, like veins and arteries, running all over the structure, just beneath the surface of the walls, and uniting in every apartment; with its electric wires, like bundles of nerves, which, having webbed the whole body with network, converge into a focus-tube, and thence pass down into the vaults, through the massive foundations, and beneath, the pavements of the thronged streets of the metropolis, and thence, rising again to the surface, branching on distinct, diverse and solitary routes without the suburbs all over Europe. You would see, too, the mighty heart of this Titan, whose heavy heavings you have felt, heard and wondered at—THE PRESS—in its subterranean tenement, amid smoke and flame. The press; which, like the animal heart, receives eventually all that the veins convey to it, and flings forth everything in modified form through lungs and arteries. Tireless and untired in its action, never ceasing, never resting, for as well might a man think to live when his heart had ceased to beat, as a printing office exist when the throbbings of its press were no longer felt; and as well could a man be supposed to live without breath as a printing-office of the nineteenth century without its lungs, the steam engine, or its breath of life, the subtle fluid by which it is moved.

But to drop metaphor. In the basement of the building you would find the press-room, with its steam engine, its furnaces, its presses, its dark demi-devils, and ghostly and ghastly gnomes and genii groping or flitting about amid the glare and gloom, begrimed and besmoked, seemingly at work at unhallowed yet supernatural toil, which toil, as if a punishment for sin, like that of Sisyphus, or the daughters of Danae in the heathen Tartarus, was eternal. The press never stops.

On the first floor you would perceive the financial and publishing department in all its endless ramifications, with the separate bureaus for folding, enveloping, mailing, etc.

On the second floor—but that you will shortly behold, and it will describe itself.

On the third floor you would discover immense magazines of material—paper, ink, of every hue and quality, and type of every known description; and all in quantities seemingly as useless as incalculable.

On the fourth and fifth floors you would find the composition rooms, whence fly the winged words all over the world, peopled by its whole army of compositors; while from the long platoons of cases, "click—click—click" is heard, the sole and unceasing sound which alone in those apartments is ever suffered to fall on the ear. If we add that the entire structure is warmed in winter by heated air, conveyed in tubes from the furnaces of the press, our description will be complete, and we may say such is the printing office of the nineteenth century in Paris. How changed from that of German Guttenberg or English Caxton, three hundred years before! Such is it by daylight. Flood every object and apartment with gaslight, and you have the scene at night—through all the night, for couriers and dispatches never cease to arrive—and the journal issues with the dawn—and the workmen are relieved by constant and continuous relays. Such an office gives employment to hundreds and bread to thousands. It demands twenty editors, exclusive of their chief, twenty reporters, exclusive of the same number in the commercial and mercantile corps; twenty-five clerks and bureau agents, sixty carriers, twenty mechanicians and margers, sixty folders, twenty pressmen, seventy correctors and compositors and five hundred distributors, besides a numberless and nameless army of attachés and employés too numerous to be specified. The aggregate compensation of this army is ten thousand francs per day, the annual income is nine millions of francs, the circulation is ninety thousand copies daily, and each number is read by half a million people, and through their influence by half a million more.

The daily tax of the Government is nine thousand francs. The press has been called the Third Estate of France. It is not! Nor is it the second—nor is it the first! It combines all three. Nay, the power of all three united equals not its tithe; and its position—its rank!—royalty itself bows to the press! Ask the history of the past ten years. Point to the man of power or position in the court or State, who owes it not to the press! Where is the statesman who is not, or has not been, a journalist, or the savant, the philosopher, the philanthropist, the poet, the orator, the advocate, the diplomat, even the successful soldier? The sword and the pen are emblems of the power of France—its achievements and its continuance; Sir Bulwer Lytton says,

"The pen is mightier than the sword!"

But I have left you, dear reader, perambulating the dim corridor—so dim that your eyes can hardly decipher, although it is now high noon, the various signs upon the series of doors in the wall on your left, designating the various rooms of the editorial corps, for to the editorial department is devoted the second floor of this extensive edifice. The last door in this prolonged series bears the name of the chief journalist. You ring a bell, are bid to enter, and the apartment is before you. Immense windows, rising from the floor to the ceiling, and opening upon a balcony, which overhangs the Rue Lepelletier, afford abundance of light for your eye to detect everything in the room by day, and an immense chandelier with gas-burners and opaque shades, pouring forth its flood of mellow radiance, would facilitate the same investigation yet more at night. Beneath the chandelier is spread the immense oval slab of the table. At it sits a man writing. Well, let him write on, at least for the present. Beside him, pile upon pile, pile upon pile, rise papers, wave after wave, flood upon flood, nothing but papers; on the floor beneath his feet, on the table and under the table, before him, behind him, and all around him, naught but papers, papers, rising, rising, as if in wrathful might and stormy indignation, while the very walls are lined with papers in all languages, from all climes and governments, and of every age and dimension, deposited in huge folio volumes and arranged in huge closets, along one whole side of the room. From the four continents, yea, and from the islands of the sea likewise, has this vast army come. In those tall closets extending from floor to ceiling might be found the full files for years of every leading paper in every part of Christendom, affording a treasury of reference, universal, unfailing, exhaustless, of knowledge of every conceivable description, rapidly found by means of exact and copious tables of contents.

Upon the other side of the apartment extend ranges of shelves, from floor to ceiling, filled with ponderous tomes in black substantial binding, seeming to belong to that class of standard works chiefly valuable for reference as authorities, and bearing ample testimony in their wear and tear, and their soiled appearance, to having been faithfully fingered. No thin, delicate and perfumed duodecimo is there, resplendent in gold and Russia, with costly engravings on steel, and letter-press in gilt or hot-pressed post. No, the books, the table, the journalist and the whole chamber bear the dark, stern, toil-soiled aspect of labor, the severe air of practical utility. The only ornaments, if such they can be styled, are busts—the busts of the silver-tongued Vergniaud and a few of his political brothers—the victim Girondins of '92 being conspicuous. Here, too, in a prominent niche is the noble front of Armand Carrel, the brave, the knightly, the chivalric, the true Republican, the true statesman, the true journalist, the true man—Armand Carrel, who, with Adolphe Thiers, his associate, sat first in this apartment as its chief—Armand Carrel, who fell years ago before the pistol of Émile de Girardin, a brother journalist, the founder of the cheap press, the hero of scores of combats before and since, yet almost unscathed by all.

Such are some of the ornaments of the chief editor's sanctum. At the further extremity of the apartment, the wall is covered with maps and diagrams, as well as charts of the prominent cities and points in Europe; and a large table beneath is heaped with books of travel, geographical views, and historical scenes arranged with no regard to order, and seeming to lie precisely as thrown down after having been used.

In a word, the whole room bears unmistakable evidence of stern, practical thought. In it and about it display is everywhere scrupulously eschewed. Practical utility is the only question of interest as touching the instruments of an editor, as of those of a carpenter; and the workshop of the journalist bears no inconsiderable similarity to that of the artisan in more respects than one. To each a tool is valuable, be that tool a book or a chisel, only for its usefulness, and the facility and rapidity with which it will aid the possessor to accomplish his ends, and not for its beauty of form, or costliness of material or construction.

In one respect only was there variance from this settled custom to be perceived, and that was in that delicate mechanism embodying the triumphs of modern science, which facilitates transmission of thought, and which, by skillful adaptation, made this one chamber a focus to which ideas and feeling in every other apartment of that vast establishment converged, and which enabled one man, without rising from his chair, to issue his orders to every department, from press-room to composing-room, from foundation stone to the turrets of that tall pile, everything being governed by the will and impulse of a single mind. Indeed, to such an extent is labor-saving carried in the Parisian printing office that the compositor may never have seen the journalist whose leaders he has spent half his life in setting up, for copy, proof and revise glide up or down as if by the agency only of magic, and the real actors rarely meet.

CHAPTER IX.

ARMAND MARRAST.

The journalist who now occupied the editorial chair was seemingly about thirty-five years of age, and one whom the ladies would call "a fine-looking man." His stature was about the average, his shoulders broad and his form thick-set. His face was long and thin, his forehead full and capacious, though not high, and was furrowed by thought. His beard, which, like his hair, was black, encircled his chin, and a moustache was suffered to adorn his lip. His dress was black and a plain stock, without a collar, surrounded his throat. His eyes were large, black, and piercing, and the expression of his countenance was contemplative and sad.

Such is a hasty limning of the personal outlines of the first journalist in Paris, the chief editor of the chief organ of the democracy in Europe, Armand Marrast, of "Le National."

An air of depression, exhaustion and regret was upon his face as he sat beside the table, with a pen in his hand and paper before him, in a thoughtful mood, as if planning a leader for his journal, of which but a single line was written. Whatever were his reflections, they were evidently far from pleasant; but the single line traced at the head of the paper indicated the source of his uneasiness. It read:

"Again the House of Orléans triumphs!"

Throwing down his pen, he folded his arms, and began hastily pacing the chamber.

"Again the House of Orléans triumphs!" he bitterly exclaimed. "Aye, again and again! It is thus forever, and thus forever seems likely to continue. Every measure, however imperative, of the opposition, ignominiously fails—every measure of the Government, however infamous, succeeds. And so it has been for twelve years. Ah! what a barren sceptre did the Three Days of '30 place in the hands of the French people! The despotism of a Citizen King has been as deadly as that of the Restoration, and more insulting. For twelve years his acts have been but a continuous series of infringements upon the rights, and insults to the opinions, of the men of July. The Republican party is trampled on. Freedom of the press, electoral reform, rights of labor, restriction of the Royal prerogative, reduction of the civil list, all these measures are effectually crushed. The press is fettered, and its conductors are incarcerated. Out of a population of thirty-three millions, but two hundred thousand are electors. Out of four hundred and sixty deputies, one-third hold places under the Government, the aggregate of whose salaries would sustain thousands of starving families at their very doors. Paris, despite every struggle of freedom, is, at this hour, a Bastille. The line of fortification is complete. Wherever the eye turns battlements frown, ordnance protrudes, bayonets bristle. Corruption stalks unblushingly abroad in the highest places, and the frauds of Gisquet all Paris knows are but those of an individual. The civil list, instead of being reduced, is every year enlarged. A Citizen King receives forty times the appropriation received by the First Consul, while his whole family are quartered on the State. The dotation to the Duke of Orléans, on his marriage, would have saved from starvation hundreds of thousands whose claim for charity far exceeded his. Thank God, his own personal unpopularity defeated the dotation designed for the Duke of Nemours. But the appanages were granted because the King's life was attempted by an assassin. A Citizen King, indeed! This man cares only for his own. He would be allied to every dynasty in Europe. His policy is unmixed selfishness. His love for the people who made him their monarch is swallowed up in love for himself. Millions have been wrung from the sweat of toil to accomplish a worse than useless conquest, thousands of Frenchmen have been sacrificed on the burning sands of Africa, and all for what?—that a throne might be won for a boy—a boy without ability, or experience, and now the Duke of Aumale is Governor-General of Algeria, while hundreds of brave men are forgotten."

As these last words, which indicated the cause of the present agitation, were uttered by the excited journalist a door at the further end of the apartment softly opened, and a young man of very low stature and boyish in aspect entered. He seemed, at a first glance, hardly to have attained his majority, though actually he was ten years older. His face was round, yet pale, his lips full, his brow commanding, his eye large, dark and thoughtful, and His characteristic expression mild and benevolent. He wore a dark frock coat, buttoned to the chin, and a plain black cravat was tied around his neck.

The journalist was so deeply absorbed in his meditations that for some moments he seemed unaware that he was no longer alone, and he might have remained yet longer in that ignorance had not the guest approached and exclaimed:

"Algeria!"

The journalist raised his head and hastily turned.

"Ah! Louis, is it you?" he said, cordially extending his hand; "I'm glad you've come. But why did I not hear you?"

"For two reasons, my dear Armand," said the visitor, seating himself in an editorial chair: "one, that I came in by the private entrance, and the other, that you were too zealously engaged in cursing the recent appointment of the King to hear anything short of a salvo of artillery."

"Ah! that cursed appointment! What next I wonder? Thank God, the old man has no more sons to make governors, although he'll never be satisfied till each one of them has a crown on his head, by his own right or the right of a wife."

"And what care we whom the boys marry, so long as marriage takes them out of France? Montpensier can find favor in the eyes of the Spanish Infanta, Christina's sister, and thus balk England; be it so, yes, be it so, especially since it can't be helped or prevented."

"But this affair of Algeria, Louis—"

"Is a very different affair you would say. No doubt, no doubt. As to Algeria, I have always viewed it as a very costly bauble for France, 'an opera-box' as the Duke of Broglie once said, 'rather too expensive for France.'"

"But then it has been a splendid arena for French valor. It has given the rough old Bugeaud a Marshal's bâton, and has made the gallant Lamoricière, his sworn foe, a general officer, thanks to his own intrepid conduct and the court influence of his brother-in-law, Thiers."

"In the late dispatch appear the names of some new candidates for advancement, I perceive."

"You allude to Morrel and Joliette among others, I suppose. Morrel has received a regiment, and Joliette is Chef d'Escadron of Spahis. Luckily for aspirants, and thanks to disease and slaughter, there is no lack of vacancies."

"The name of Morrel I have seen before in the 'Moniteur,' but Joliette—who is he?"

"A sort of protégé of Bugeaud, 'tis said. He is reported to have enlisted at Marseilles, and in three years has risen to his present position from the ranks. He is of a good family, rumor says, but, suddenly reduced by some calamity, he became a soldier."

"He must be a brave fellow, Armand! As I said before, Algeria has been a fine field for the development of military genius. My chief objections to French conquests are these—they have drained millions from France which should have been devoted to the cause of labor, and have tended to dazzle the masses with the glory of the achievements of French valor abroad; thus while thousands of the young and enterprising have been lured away to fill up the ranks, and to seek fame and fortune, the minds of those remaining have been withdrawn from their own wrongs, oppression and suffering, and from efficiently concerting to sustain the measures of their friends for their relief. There is not a race in Christendom so fond of military glory and achievement as the French. Dazzled by this, the people, the masses—"

"The people, the masses!" impatiently interrupted the journalist. "You know me, Louis; for years you have known me well, for years have we devoted every energy of heart and soul to the cause of the people, and for years, ever since we came to man's estate, have we been equal sufferers in the same cause—"

"Sufferers in the cause of the people of France, in the cause of man, we both, doubtless, have been, but not equal sufferers. What have been my sacrifices or sufferings, my dear Armand, compared to yours? In that dark hour when Armand Carrel fell—fell by an ignoble bullet in an ignoble cause—fell in bitterness and without a hope for liberty in his beloved France—I felt impelled to come forward and exert myself for the welfare of my race, and endeavor to aid others in filling the gap created by his loss. To France, to my country, did I then, though but a boy, devote myself—France, my country!—for such I feel her to be, though I was born in Spain and my mother was a Corsican. Since that hour my pen has been dedicated to the cause of the people, the dethronement of the Bourgeoisie and the organization of labor. As to sacrifice or suffering, I have sacrificed only my time and toil at the worst. I have not been deemed worthy of suffering even a fine for a newspaper libel, and my paper has never been thought worth suppression!"

"And what have I accomplished, Louis?" asked Marrast, gloomily. "My life seems almost a blank."

"With Armand Carrel, you have for fifteen years been the champion of Republicanism in France, and with you, as leaders, has all been accomplished that now exists. When Carrel died, on you fell his mantle. As editor of 'La Tribune,' your boldness and charging Casimir Perier and Marshal Soult with connivance in Gisquet's scandalous frauds brought upon you fine and imprisonment. Your boldness and patriotism during the insurrection of the 5th and 6th of June, 1832, once more caused your paper to be stopped and your presses to be sealed. In April, '34, your press was again stopped, and you, with Godefroi Cavaignac, were thrown into Sainté Pélagie, whence you so gallantly escaped, though to become an exile in England. Again, in '35, you were sentenced to transportation. So much for sufferings; as to sacrifices—why, you have been utterly ruined by fines!"

"Well, Louis, well," was the sad answer, "granting all this, my sacrifices and sufferings are only the more bitter from the fact of having been utterly in vain, entirely useless. You, Louis, have been wiser than I. Your journal is well named 'Bon Sens.'"

"Possibly wiser," was the reply, "and possibly less bold. But does not discretion sometimes win what boldness would sacrifice? In rashly struggling for all we sometimes lose all. Prudence and perseverance, my dear Armand, are invaluable."

CHAPTER X.

THE COMMUNISTS.

At this moment the private door opened, and three men entered the editorial sanctum.

Marrast quickly turned, and his friend was silent.

"Ha! Albert, Flocon, Rollin!" he cried. "Welcome, welcome! Our friend, Louis Blanc, was just about wasting on me a sermon upon patience, but now he'll have an audience worthy of the subject. Be seated and listen!"

"Patience!" exclaimed Flocon. "Well, I'm sure we need it."

"That we do, in our present low estate," echoed Rollin.

Albert said nothing, but smiled with sarcastic significance.

When the salutations were over and the party, all but Marrast, who restlessly paced the room, were seated, Louis Blanc looked around on his friends with a sad smile, and continued:

"Marrast is right, Messieurs. I was, indeed, preaching patience. I was endeavoring to soothe his irritation and chide his depression with a sermon; since we are all old friends and fellow-sufferers in the good cause and have a common interest in knowing the reasons of failure and the means of triumph, I will by your leave proceed."

"Aye, dear Louis, go on!" cried Marrast, kindly. "But you are the most youthful sage I ever listened to."

"Yes, Louis, proceed; you look like a curé," said Rollin, laughing.

"I subscribe to Louis Blanc's creed, be it what it may," added Flocon, briskly.

"And so do I," said Albert, gravely, in a deep tone.

Of the new visitors, Ledru Rollin was a man of medium stature, about thirty-five years of age and dressed in the extreme of the mode. His complexion and hair were light, his eyes large, blue and protruding, his mouth prominent, and his full cheeks covered with whiskers, which like those of Marrast, were closely trimmed and met beneath his chin. His head and shoulders were thrown back, and his air was bold and independent. He was a lawyer of talent, who had gained celebrity as advocate of the accused on many occasions of State prosecutions.

Flocon was an older man than Rollin, and his countenance bore the wary, vigilant and suspicious look which experience alone gives. He was low in stature, thick-set and close-knit in figure; his eyes seemed always half closed; his brow was broad and massive; his face was long; a moustache was on his lip, and his hair was closely cut. The outline of his head and the expression of his face seemed those rather of one born on the banks of the Rhine than on the banks of the Seine, so calm and passionless did they appear. His dress was plain but neat. Flocon was the chief editor of "La Réforme," the name of which indicates its character. It was this man who, in February, 1833, repressed the violence of his partisans and saved the office of the "Gazette de France," yet the very next day published his celebrated letter to the Legitimists, which, for audacity, force and pungency was only equaled by the paralyzing effect it produced. The fines, imprisonments and civil incapacities to which this man had been subjected for assaults upon a government he deemed corrupt, for the ten years preceding, had been literally numberless.

Albert was a man of fifty or more, with a large head, square German face and forehead, a large hazel eye, fixed and unexcitable, hair closely cut, and beard upon his chin and lip. His dress was a long iron-gray frock coat, buttoned closely to his chin. His face was rather thin, and his complexion bronzed. His name had for years been identified with reform; and though a manufacturer himself, of the class of workmen, being proprietor and chief engineer of a large machine factory at Lyons, he had established and sustained in that city a paper to advocate his principles, named "La Glaneuse," the prosecution of which by the Government for libel and the fining and imprisonment of its editor formed an originating cause of the revolt in Lyons of April, 1834. For the part played by this man in the revolt thus arising, he was sentenced to transportation, a penalty afterwards commuted to fine and imprisonment. He was a man of few words, remarkably few, but of deep thought and prompt action, and, in moments of crisis and emergency, a man of unshaken and inflexible nerve. To the casual observer, he seemed only a silent man, or a sullen one, astute or stolid; in times of peril he was a man of iron, but a man of action and passion, too, moving with resistless might. To rouse his powers, mental or physical, demanded, indeed, circumstances of unusual import, but once roused they were irresistible.

Such were the personages now assembled in the office of "Le National;" and, of those five men, all were connected with the press, directly, as editor or proprietor, save only Ledru Rollin, and he was a writer for "La Réforme," as well as an advocate.

The name of Louis Blanc's paper was, as has been said, "Le Bon Sens."

But to return to the narrative.

"And you really wish a sermon from me, old comrades, with patience as the text?"

"Aye—aye—aye!" exclaimed all.

"Suppose I add to it this line I find on the paper before me on the table, that our good Marrast had just written as the text for a paragraph which would probably have cost him another fine and imprisonment, had the paragraph been completed and published?"

"Read! read!" cried Rollin.

"With your permission, Armand?"

"Certainly," replied the editor, still continuing his promenade.

"'Again the House of Orléans triumphs!'" read Louis Blanc, aloud.

"And is it not true—the accursed tyrants?" vociferated Rollin.

"Aye, true!" was the mild answer; "alas, too true! That perfidious House does triumph, and for that very reason the fact should never be acknowledged by its opponents."

Rollin shook his head, and, throwing himself back in his capacious chair, folded his arms, sunk his chin upon his breast and closed his eyes.

Marrast continued his walk.

Flocon remained silent and thoughtful.

Albert gave a significant smile.

"Oppose ceaselessly, but quietly, every act of despotism this Bourgeois Government may attempt; but, be the result what it may, never admit yourselves discouraged, depressed, dismayed, defeated. From every fall rise like Antaeus, with renewed vigor. Nor is it wise or prudent in those engaged in a great and glorious cause to provoke danger, to brave penalty, when nothing of good to that cause can reasonably be expected. Prudence, policy, patience and perseverance accomplish more than rashness, yet are not inconsistent with intrepidity, boldness, patriotism and philanthropy the most exalted. Comrades, what says the past, the past ten years, in whose events we have all so intimately mingled? Shall I tell you?"

"Aye! 'L'Histoire de Dix Ans,'" said Flocon.

"We are all sure of being immortal there, in that same book of yours! Eh! Louis?" cried Rollin, opening his large blue eyes.

Louis Blanc smiled and continued:

"Shall I convince you, comrades, by the history of the past ten years, the scenes we have all witnessed, the events we have all deplored, the defeats we have all sustained, the insulting ovations we have all been forced to behold and the unceasing triumphs and tyranny of the House of Orléans that, had patience and prudence been our motto, these defeats and triumphs would never have been witnessed, because these premature revolts would never have been made?"

Albert bowed and gave his peculiar smile.

"Our friend Albert smiles, and well he may. He has had a sad experience in this error of premature outbreaks. In April, 1834, he exerted every energy to restrain the revolt in Lyons, as chief of the Société des Droits de l'Homme, and as the undoubted friend of the operatives. But his efforts were futile. Exasperated, urged on by less experienced leaders, they were in full tide of revolution, and could no more be restrained in their unwise rising than could the mountain cataract in mad career be dammed. The result was, of course, defeat—most disastrous defeat. Hundreds of the people perished, and our friend was imprisoned and fined for taking part in a movement, which he had in vain attempted to quell, and then, with the certainty of defeat, had joined, rather than desert the people who trusted and relied on him."

"A noble act!" cried Marrast, as he paced the room.

Albert quietly smiled, but otherwise his countenance remained unmoved.

"And was it not a most noble and a most wise act," continued the author of "The Ten Years," "when our friend Flocon, by an energetic and eloquent harangue, restrained the indignant people from razing to the ground the office of the 'Gazette de France,' the organ of the Duchess of Berri, and his bitter foe? Terribly would that rash act have recoiled on us, and yet, at the same time, with this most patriotic and prudent deed before us, a wilder measure than even that was adopted, and it was quelled only by force. You all remember the events. In February, '33, Eugène Brifault, in his 'Corsair,' alluded jestingly to the mysterious pregnancy of the mother of Henry V., Duke of Bordeaux, as did every one, she then being imprisoned at Baye because of her prior conspiracy to place her son on the throne, and her secret marriage in Italy being unrevealed. The Legitimists of 'Le Revenant' challenged; the allusion was repeated, and a second trial and a death ensued. 'Le National' and 'La Tribune,' regarding these repeated challenges as a menace to the Republicans, hurled defiance at the Legitimists, and demanded twelve distinct rencontres in behalf of as many names of our friends posted at their offices, among which those of Armand Carrel, Godefroi Cavaignac and Armand Marrast were conspicuous. The challenge is accepted—the names of twelve Legitimists are furnished—Armand Carrel selects Roux Laborie—they fight, and Carrel is dangerously wounded—the police then interfere—the affair ends with Flocon's terrific and audacious defiance flung down at the whole Legitimist and Orléans parties in the columns of 'La Réforme.' Now, what to Republicans were the quarrels of Legitimists and Orléanists? If we were to be ruled by a king, what cared we whether that king were Henry V. or Louis Philippe? How would the sacrifice of Carrel, Marrast, Cavaignac, or of any of those twelve brave men have been repaid, or made up? And afterwards, alas! in July of '36, when Armand Carrel, causelessly assuming a quarrel not his own, because of a fancied attempt to degrade the press, by rendering its issues accessible, by cheapness, to the masses, was slain in the Bois de Vincennes by the vulgar bullet of Émile de Girardin, of 'La Presse.' What reparation to our cause was it that our champion had died like a hero, and Châteaubriand, Arago, Cormenin and Béranger wept around his grave? Alas! that inestimable life belonged to his country and his race, and not to himself, to fling away in an obscure quarrel."

"But we are not all of us Armand Carrels," said Rollin.

"And yet, to the great cause of human liberty, and the amelioration of man's condition, to which each of us stands sworn, are pledged our lives. To hazard that cause, by the sacrifice of those lives, or by rashly and unwisely attempting its advancement, makes us violators of our vows, quite as much in reality as if we had become traitors."

"But the instances you cite are those only of individual rashness, Louis, and not of the people, or of their leaders acting in concert," remarked Marrast.

"True, concert of action has been chiefly needed, but I have only to recall the dates and places of our repeated attempts and defeats, for the past ten years, to convince you all that those attempts were premature, and had they not been so, they might have been successful—that they have frittered away energies which, properly concentrated and directed, might have achieved a revolution; and that while they have betrayed our designs and depressed our friends, have enabled our foes insultingly to triumph and caused them to be on the constant qui vive to anticipate our movements. What but premature and undigested uprisings were the conspiracy of the bell-tower of Nôtre Dame, in January of '32, when 'Le National' was seized—or the disturbances in La Vendée—or those in Grenoble—or those in Marseilles—or those in the Rue des Prouvaires—or those in April, during the cholera, when Casimir Perier died—or those of the 5th and 6th of June, on the occasion of General Lamarque's funeral, on pretence of avenging upon the Government the affront offered during the obsequies of Casimir Perier, the victim-Premier of the cholera? For the part taken by 'La Tribune,' then conducted by Marrast, in this revolt, its press was seized and sealed. The same was the fate of 'La Quotidienne,' and the same would have been the fate of 'Le National,' but for its barricades. Well do I remember the meeting of our friends in this very apartment on the night after General Lamarque's funeral. The great shade of the venerable warrior seemed among us, repeating for our counsel and imitation his last impressive words, 'I die but the cause lives!' But, alas! we observed it not. Doubt, dissension, dismay and despair were in our midst. All was dark—all was defiance and denunciation, crimination and recrimination—brother's hand raised against brother. Armand Carrel that night sat in this chair, but he was not the man to command his own will or opinions; how could he then bring to obedience and concert the conflicting impulses of others? Armand Carrel was a wonderful man. His motto, like that of Danton, was this: 'Audacity, audacity, always audacity!' Yet with all the audacity of Danton, he had little of his firmness. An officer under the Restoration, a conspirator at Bifort, in arms in Spain against the white flag, three times a prisoner before a council of war—in 1830 he was with Thiers, the founder of this journal; but everywhere he carried the exactitude of the camp; even in dress, manner and bearing he was a soldier—lofty, haughty, seemingly overbearing, yet, at heart, noble and generous, and to his friends accessible in the extreme. To his military notions, nothing could be accomplished without soldiers, and for the people to carry a revolution against soldiers seemed to him absurd."

"Armand Carrel would have been, nevertheless, a good revolutionist, Louis," said Marrast; "but he was a bad conspirator. He had no faith in the people, no confidence in the efforts of undisciplined and unarmed masses."

"And therein," said Rollin, "he greatly erred."

"Although we can as yet boast of having accomplished but very little by them, Ledru," added Flocon, with a meaning smile. "The masses are easily roused, but they don't stay roused, and then they often get unmanageable, even by those by whose summons they were stirred up. They fight well, but, somehow or other, they always get beaten; they succumb at last, and bow their necks to the yoke lower than ever."

"It is not the people," said Louis Blanc, "it is we the leaders, who are to be blamed. We rouse them before we are ready for them—before we have prepared them or anything else for a result; and then it is not strange that they only rush bravely on to death and defeat. We seize on the occasion of a funeral for an outbreak without organization, and the cuirassiers of the military escort trample our ranks beneath their horses' hoofs. But for unusual efforts, such would have been the case at the funeral of Dulong, the Deputy who fell in a duel with General Bugeaud, in January of '34."

"What were the circumstances?" asked Rollin.

"Armand recollects them better than I," replied Louis Blanc.

"The circumstances were these, as I remember them," said Marrast. "General Bugeaud remarked in the course of a speech in the Chamber that 'obedience is always a soldier's duty.' 'What if the order be to become a turnkey?' asked Dulong, in allusion to the General's position in relation to the Duchess of Berri, during her pregnancy and confinement at Baye. Armand Carrel endeavored to pacificate, but the effort failed. They met in the Bois de Boulogne at ten o' clock in the morning; the weapons were pistols; the distance forty paces. Bugeaud fired almost as soon as he turned, advancing only a few steps; his ball entered above Dulong's right eye, and at six o'clock that evening he was dead."

"There was a splendid ball at the Tuileries that night, was there not?" asked Flocon.

"There was, and this, with other things, excited in the masses the idea that their champion was the victim of a Royalist conspiracy, which all the influence of Armand Carrel and Dulong's uncle, Dupont de l'Eure was hardly sufficient to suppress. But Dupont immediately resigned his seat in the Chamber. He would sit no longer in a body one man of which he deemed the murderer of a beloved nephew. The obsequies were grand. Armand Carrel pronounced the eulogy, and two hundred and thirty-four deputies wet the grave with their tears. The people were greatly excited, and, as has been said, were with great difficulty restrained by Carrel and Dupont. Had they been suffered to revolt, the only result which could have followed would have been a terrific outpouring of their blood, furnishing another instance, I suppose, of the evil of impatience; is it not so, Louis?"

"Undoubtedly," was the reply; "and only two months after that other instance actually occurred, for our warning, in the revolt at Lyons, with which we are all familiar, and in which we were all actors, most of us to our sorrow. This was in April. Albert's journal, 'La Glaneuse,' had been seized for libel on the Government, and the editor fined and imprisoned. Next a reform banquet of the operatives was forbidden, although but a year before Garnier Pages had been suffered to banquet the Lyonnese to the number of two thousand, and although at no period had so many gorgeous festivities and public balls been given by the rich Royalists, as if in premeditated scorn of the banquet prohibited to the poor Republicans. The result was so prompt as to seem inevitable; there was a strike of the operatives, an insurrection of the people. Albert was sent to Paris as an envoy, to find a man to lead the revolt. MM. Cabet and Pages were deemed too moderate. Cavaignac would go only with Cabet. Lafayette was too feeble, but gave his name and letters. Carrel and Marrast were not members of the Société des Droits de l'Homme, and Albert had been cautioned that Carrel was too moderate. Thiers had denounced 'La Tribune,' and Marrast's friends were hiding him from the police. In despair concerning his mission, the envoy was about returning home, when he was sent for to Armand Carrel's house, and Carrel offered to go to Lyons and lead the revolt, provided Godefroi Cavaignac would accompany him. Now these friends had long been at feud, but all private grievances were forgotten in this crisis of the cause, and Albert is just about preceding them in the post-chaise, to announce their coming, when, lo! the telegraph says, 'Order reigns in Lyons!' Here, then, after a terrific slaughter, was recorded another fruitless revolt, because a premature one. Nay, it was infinitely worse than fruitless. Not only did the Republicans utterly fail in their attempts, not only were they cruelly crushed by the Royal mercenaries, but they were openly derided in their defeat, and the cause was gloomier than ever. The slaughter of women and children in the streets of Lyons, and on their own hearthstones, in the course of this insurrection, was hideous, and is graphically portrayed in the memorial of our friend Ledru Rollin, as advocate in the matter. But, as if all this were not enough for our persecuted cause, the decease of the great and good Lafayette, the idol of freemen all the world over, took place in the following May. Alas! his sun went down in clouds. His end was dark. Bitter maledictions quivered on his dying lips. He had lived to mourn that July day, only three years before, when, on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, he had, with his own hands, been called to invest a cold-blooded, perfidious, selfish, and most ungrateful tyrant with Royal robes. Alas! there was order in Lyons—Lafayette was in his grave—peace reigned in Paris—the House of Orléans triumphed!"

"Those were dark days," said Marrast, sadly.

"They were, dear Armand, dark, indeed, for you and your friends, for your journal had been suppressed, and you were an inmate, with Cavaignac, of Sainté-Pélagie."

"Whence you both, bravely and boldly effected your escape more than a year afterwards and fled to England, to the most glorious discomfiture of the knaves who put you there!" cried Rollin. "Vive la République! yet, Messieurs! We've all seen dark days, and the present is none of the brightest; and we've all come together at these old headquarters of liberty just to be unhappy together, just to help each other be miserable, which, in fact, is vastly happier unhappiness than being miserable alone. At all events, that's what I want. But it can't always be right. I predict a revolution before another ten years shall have rolled round, which shall make immortals of us all—that revolution for which we have been waiting, watching, toiling and writing, lo! now these thirteen years and upward, for the which waiting, watching, toiling and writing we have some of us been fined, who had money enough to pay a fine, and others imprisoned and hunted about and persecuted. Why, there's Albert and Flocon haven't been able to get a franc cleverly warm in their pockets these ten years, before forth it was drawn in the form of a fine; while as for Marrast, he has the perfect air and bearing of a bandit, so often has he seen the inside of a dungeon; and our friend Albert isn't much better looking. As for Louis and myself, why, we never knew what it was to have a franc get warm in our pockets, so we escaped having any drawn forth by Ministers, and they have never thought us worth prosecuting or imprisoning. But they may change their minds when Louis' book, that is to make us all immortal, comes out. Eh, Louis?"

Louis Blanc smiled, but made no answer.

"Well, it is only meet, I suppose, that I should receive my share of the blows," said Marrast. "I'm sure I'm not very delicate or very ceremonious in bestowing them. Besides, every one of my predecessors has endured the same—Carrel, Thomas, Bastide; while poor Rouen, the proprietor, would have been ruined, indeed, a dozen times with fines, but for his enormous profits. Why, this old office has been a perfect butt for Ministers to fire at—it has received a dozen fusillades, at least; but it stands yet, and, strange as may have been the scenes it has witnessed, it will witness yet other and stranger ones, and we shall all be witnesses thereof, and actors in them, too, or greatly do I err."

"So be it, with all our hearts!" was the general shout.

"Apropos of State prosecutions against 'Le National,'" said Louis Blanc, "that was a most exciting time when Rouen was brought by Thiers before the Court of Peers, for a libel on that most august and erudite body."

"Aye! and a most, liberal, honest and honorable conclave—the thrice-sodden and most solemn knaves and mules!" cried Rollin.

"Rouen at the bar demanded Armand Carrel for his defence," continued Louis Blanc. "To refuse was impossible, but a bitter pill must it have been to Thiers and Mignet to consent. They must have foreseen what came. Both, now in the Ministry, only four years before both had been in 'Le National'—Thiers as the colleague of Carrel, and Mignet as a collaborateur. The files of the journal were produced, and, lo! there stood paragraphs proven to have emanated from the pens of the prosecutors far more libelous and venomous on the august peers than anything Rouen had published. You all remember the scene that ensued and won't forget it soon."

"No; nor shall we soon forget that noble passage in Armand Carrel's defence," said Flocon, "in which he evoked the shade of Marshal Ney, and from the wild excitement that followed, one would suppose that it had really risen in the hall, bleeding and ghastly, and pointing to its wounds, like the ghost of Banquo, to blast his hoary, jeweled and noble assassin, who, seated on those very seats, had sentenced him to an infamous doom. Carrel was instantly stopped, but General Excelmens rose in his seat and pronounced the charge true. It was then reiterated with tremendous applause from the galleries. How Carrel escaped punishment for contempt is not known. Rouen was convicted of libel on the peers, of course; his sentence was a fine of ten thousand francs and imprisonment for two years."

"But of what words did this famous libel actually consist?" asked Ledru Rollin.

"Louis can tell you better than I," said Flocon.

"Why, the words were severe enough, no doubt," replied Louis Blanc, "but Thiers and Mignet had themselves expressed the same ideas a hundred times, though in less powerful and pointed language. The passage which seems particularly to have given offence was this, that in the eyes of eternal justice and those of posterity, as well as in the testimony of their own consciences, these renegades from the Revolution, these returned emigrants, these men of Ghent, these military and civil parvenus, these old Senators and spoiled Marshals of Bonaparte, these Procureur Generals, these new-made nobles of the Restoration, these three or four generations of Ministers sunk in public hatred and contempt, and stained with blood—all these, seasoned with a few notabilities, thrown in by the Royalty of the 7th of August, on condition they should never open their lips save to approve their master's commands—all this farrago of servilities was not competent to pronounce on the culpability of men seeking to enforce the results of the Revolution of July!"

"It was not until the commencement of 1835, I think," said Marrast, "that Ministers opened a general onslaught upon the Parisian press. 'Le Républicain' was interdicted that year. It was then, too, that the laws against public criers and newspaper hawkers were instituted. As far back as '33, however, Rodde had braved all such prohibitions by selling and with impunity, too, his own paper in the streets. In May of '35 came on the general prosecution of the press. Rollin was advocate in the defence. There were warm words between Armand Carrel and his friend Dupont, the lawyer, and there was at one time apprehension of a duel."

"The position of Armand Carrel with Thiers, his former colleague, was, at that time, a singular one," remarked Rollin. "Each seemed to be on the constant search for opportunities to exasperate the other. The editor assailed the Minister in his columns, and the Minister retaliated by an arrest. Carrel censured and ridiculed Thiers, though he respected his abilities, and Thiers feared and hated Carrel, though he admired his talents."

"It was about this time that Fieschi exploded his infernal machine at the King, was it not?" asked Flocon. "Thiers arrested Carrel then, I know."

"It was on the 28th of July of '35, at ten in the morning, on the Boulevard du Temple. This was the second attempt on the King's life, the first having been that of Bergeron, in November of '33. Carrel was arrested as an accomplice, it was pretended, for every one of these attempts has been attributed to the whole body of the Republicans, while they were utterly ignorant of them until they took place, and then bitterly denounced them. But the Government has made capital out of all these insane attempts, and against the opposition, too."

"I've heard it asserted," said Rollin, "that the Government got up some of those little exhibitions of fireworks for that very purpose. They are quite harmless, so far as the old man is concerned—wonderfully so—and Fieschi was made a perfect fool of, so ridiculously lionized was he by King, Court and Ministers. Our friend Marie was advocate for that wretched old man, Pépin, Fieschi's accomplice, more a ghost than a living creature."

"You are entirely right, friend Rollin," said Louis Blanc, "in the idea that every one of these attempts strengthens the Government and recoils on the opposition. No one should so vigilantly and vigorously watch for and suppress such attempts as we. Heaven defend the old despot from the assassin's weapon, as it seems well inclined to do, or the deed will surely be attributed to us. Every unsuccessful attempt at assassination is viewed like an unsuccessful attempt at revolt on the part of the opposition, and injures our cause accordingly. Better never to attempt than never to succeed."

"Do you think it true, Louis, as was reported," asked Marrast, "that as soon as the smoke of Fieschi's explosion swept off, and the old man found himself standing unharmed amid a heap of slain and mangled, Marshal Mortier and Colonel Rieussec being among the killed, his first exclamation was this, with, ill-concealed gratification, 'Now I shall get my appanages and the dotations for the boys.'"

"Nothing is more probable," said Louis Blanc. "That old man has but one impulse—selfishness, and but one attachment—to his family—his family, because it is his. His purse and family have for years been his sole objects of love. To aggrandize his own has been for years his sole end and aim. He parcels out the thrones and kingdoms of Europe among his children as if it were but a family estate."

"What thoughtful selfishness!" exclaimed Flocon; "and at a moment, too, when he had but just escaped an awful death, and all around him flowed the blood and lay scattered the lacerated limbs of his faithful servants, either dead or dying with groans and shrieks of most agonizing torture, and all because of himself; how disgraceful that, at such a terrible moment, his first thought should have been of the few more francs his trembling hand was striving to tear from a people by whom he had already been made the richest man in Europe, and which the occurrence of this dreadful event might serve to win for him."

"Well," said Rollin, "whether this event aided to win the appanages and dotations, and was so designed, or not, it is very sure the aforesaid appanages and dotations were secured. No wonder that such attempts succeed each other so rapidly—one every year, at the least! When was the next, Louis—that of Alibaud, I think?"

"That took place about sunset on the 25th of June, '36," was the reply. "Alibaud discharged a walking-stick-gun at the King, as he left the Tuileries, on his way to Neuilly, at the corner of the Porte Royale. That Alibaud was a mere boy, and a very interesting and intelligent boy, too; but for some mysterious cause he did not find favor with the court, as did Fieschi. He evidently attempted the assassination from conviction, from a feeling of manifest destiny. After his failure, he only wished to die, and to die at once. All who have succeeded Alibaud have been but vulgar cut-throats."

"In what year was the insurrection of Armand Barbes and Martin Bernard?" asked Flocon. "That proved most disastrous to our cause."

"That was in '39, May, I think," answered Rollin. "Barbes, Blanqui and Bernard were arraigned as leaders. Marie and myself were advocates for Barbes. Blanqui was sentenced to death and Barbes to the galleys for life. But we obtained commutation of penalty for both."

"And where is to be the end of all these things?" asked Marrast, gloomily, as he continued pacing the chamber with folded arms, his head resting on his bosom. "Are the ten years on which we have now entered to be characterized by the fruitless efforts of the past? Are the people of France again, and again, and again to strike for freedom, only to be stricken into the dust and trampled beneath the armed heel of a despot's myrmidons? Are the streets of Lyons, Paris and Marseilles again to be drenched with the life-blood of their dwellers, poured out as freely as water and as fruitlessly? Are we all again, for full ten years, to toil, strive, struggle and suffer; to be hunted down like the vilest criminals, and, like criminals, plunged into the most pestilential dungeons; to be stripped like slaves of our hard-won earnings, and to be deprived of the most humble franchises of men claiming at all to be free; to be treated with scorn and contumely, and to be debarred the exercise of those common rights, which, like air and water, belong to all; I say, brothers, are all these scenes to be repeated during the ten years on which we have now entered, as they have been witnessed during the ten years now past?"

"You speak sadly, Armand," observed Rollin.

"Not so sadly as I feel. I have listened with attention to the recapitulation of the political events of the past ten years in France; and most plainly, and as sadly as plainly, does the result prove that every movement in our cause has been as premature as it has been unsuccessful."

"May we not gather wisdom, which shall conduct us to success in the future, from the very errors and disasters of the past?" remarked Flocon.

"Alas!" despondingly replied Marrast, "what is there in our present to promise a bright future more than was in our past to promise us a bright present? Our great leaders of another generation have all left us, one after another—all have dropped into their graves. The cold marble has closed over their venerable brows, and they rest well. Yet they died and made no sign of hope. On us, young, inexperienced and rash, has devolved their task; but the mantle of their power and virtue has not, alas! descended with that task to aid in its momentous accomplishment. General Lamarque's sun went down in clouds. Midnight, deeper than Egyptian darkness, brooded over the delirious deathbed of Lafayette. Armand Carrel fell without hope; and are we wiser than they? How often, oh! how often have I listened to the words of wisdom that fell from those eloquent lips, even as a boy reverently listens to a parent—for such was Armand Carrel to me. Upon this very spot have I stood, in that very chair has he sat, that chair, which, with mingled shame and pride, I reflect is now filled by me—shame, that it is filled in a manner so unworthy of him—pride, that I should have been deemed fit, after him to fill it at all—in that very chair, I say, has his noble form reclined, when he for hours, even from night till the next day's dawn, dwelt with sorrowful eloquence upon his country's present, and looked forward with gloomy foreboding and prediction for the future. It almost seems to me that this mighty shade is with us now!"

"And why was all this despondency, my dear Armand?" remarked Louis Blanc, mildly. "Was it not because our noble and gifted friend was essentially a soldier, not a civilian, not a statesman, not a revolutionist? Had Armand Carrel gone to Algeria, he would have died—if died he had not in an unknown duel, with an unknown bravo—he would have died a Marshal of France—a Bugeaud, a Chaugarnier, a Bedeau, a Cavaignac, a Clausel, a Lamoricière. Carrel had no faith in the masses to achieve a revolution. He never believed that they could even withstand a single charge of regular troops, much less repel and overcome it."

"Not even with barricades?" asked Rollin.

"Not even in defence of barricades," continued Louis Blanc.

"Regular troops have much to learn," added Rollin, with a significant smile. "They will see the day—aye! and we all shall see it and rejoice at its coming, despite all melancholy prognostications, when the people of Paris will dictate abdication to the king of the barricades, from the top of the barricades, the people's throne! Nor will that event tarry long!"

"I doubt it not, I doubt it not, Ledru!" exclaimed Louis Blanc, rejoiced that one of the youngest and least stable of their number appeared free from the apprehensions of one of the most influential and seemingly most reliable. "I accept the omen indicated by your enthusiasm. But I accounted for the vacillation and distrust of our lamented friend, Armand Carrel, by reverting to the fact that he relied entirely on regular troops, military skill, scientific tactics and severe subordination. Now, all of these belonged to our oppressors and none of them to us; and, inasmuch as he could not perceive that enthusiasm, passion for freedom, love of country and family, and the very wrath and rage of desperation itself sometimes not only supply the place of discipline, arms and the knowledge requisite to use them, but even enable vast masses to break down and crush beneath their heel the serried ranks of veteran troops, he could only despair at the prospects apparently before him. Besides, Armand Carrel, like all military men, was a man of action, not reflection—of execution, not contrivance—a soldier, not a conspirator. At the head of ten thousand veteran troops, he would have charged on thrice their number without discipline, with the confident assurance of sweeping them from his path as the chaff of the threshing floor is swept before the blast; but, with an undisciplined mob, as he contemptuously called the masses, he would have moved not a step. The larger the multitude, the less effective and the more impossible to manage he would have deemed it. A revolution accomplished by means of the three arms of the military service—artillery, cavalry and infantry—horse, foot and dragoons, he could readily conceive; but a revolution conducted to a successful issue only by means of pikes, axes, muskets and barricades, never, to the hour of his death, despite the victory of the Three Days, could Carrel comprehend."

"Besides," said Flocon, "it must not be forgotten that Armand Carrel, though a most devoted friend to Republicanism, was never a member of the Société des Droits de l'Homme—was never, as we all now are—a Communist, a Socialist, a Fourierist, a friend to the laborer. No wonder he hoped so little for the people, and trusted to accomplish so little through them."

"There can be no doubt that the social principle which Republicanism is now unconsciously assuming all over France," mildly remarked Louis Blanc, "is lending to the cause incalculable strength. How terribly impressed with a conviction of the justice of the cause in which they perished must have been the unhappy insurgents of Lyons, when, with this motto on their banner: 'To live toiling or die fighting,' they marched firmly up to the cannon's mouth and fought, and, thus fighting, fell. Yet this conviction is not peculiar to the workmen of Lyons. It pervades all Paris, all France, and needs only to be roused to act with an energy which no human power can resist. Social Republican will be the type of the next revolution in France—it must be. The French people have been dazzled by the mirage of liberty ever since '89,—but it has been only a mirage. On the last three days of July, '30, the people of Paris drove out one Bourbon to enthrone another. True, 'The State is myself,' was not the despotic motto he assumed, as did one of his successors, but it was 'Me and my family,' which has proved equally selfish, if not so absolute, and far more dangerous to freedom. With Lafayette and Benjamin Constant, the Citizen King they had made, quarreled as soon as on his throne, and Lafitte and Dupont de l'Eure, his supporters, were banished from the Court. Casimir Perier was called to crush the Liberals. Armand Carrel assailed the act, and urged a republic. 'Le National' was prosecuted, and insurrections followed. Thus was the Revolution of the Three Days won by the people to be seized and enjoyed by the Bourgeoisie. The next revolution will be won by the people, too, but the people will enjoy it!"

"And how progresses our principles, Louis, among the people?" asked Marrast, who had listened attentively to every word that had been uttered.

"Never so gloriously as now, Armand, never! Never has there been such a diffusion of information upon the subject of the rights of labor as now. Pagnerre tells me every day that volumes, tracts and pamphlets on this topic disappear like magic from his shelves."

"Has not the Minister a hand in this mysterious disappearance of Communist literature?" asked Rollin. "We all know he is quite frantic on the topic of popular education."

"Oh! yes, we all understand Guizot's love for the people! His system of education promulgated in 1833 was so very beautiful that it was almost a pity it was utterly impracticable. But Guizot has very little to do with Pagnerre's book-shelves, or with Pagnerre in any way, except to prosecute him from time to time for publishing Cormenin's withering tracts designed for the Minister himself, and yet it would almost seem there was a design to exhaust the market of the publications of our friends; only the great mass of them go to the provinces and large quantities abroad. My own little brochure, 'The Organization of Work,' after having fallen stillborn from the press, died a natural death and been laid out in state for a year or two on Pagnerre's shelves, all at once is resurrected, runs through half a dozen large editions, and is translated into half a dozen languages. The same is true of Lamartine's 'Vision of the Future,' and the same of Cormenin's tracts, and of the ten thousand brochures on this same subject of Communism in all its different shades and phrases, and in every variety of size, form and style of writing and appearance. These publications are adapted to every taste and comprehension. The workman is suited as well as the savant. All this savors of magic. Even my most sanguine anticipations are surpassed by reality. There will never long lack a supply for a demand, be that demand what it may. A demand for Fourier literature has turned all the pens in Paris hard at work upon it—novelists, essayists, pamphleteers—while the Porte St. Antoine, the Porte St. Martin and all the minor theatres, where are found the masses, swarm with melodramas, farces and vaudevilles on the same subject, and none of you have forgotten the powerful play, entitled 'The Laborer of Lyons,' attributed to M. Dantès, recently produced with such success on the boards of the Français itself."

"And who is this M. Dantès," asked Ledru Rollin, "if you will suffer me to interrupt?"

"Decidedly the most remarkable man in the French Chamber of Deputies," replied Marrast. "In powers of natural eloquence I never saw his rival."

"Nor is that all," added Louis Blanc. "Unlike most men noted as mere orators, he is a sound logician, as well as a polished rhetorician. As a political economist he has few equals. To that subject he seems to have devoted much study, while his familiarity with the political history of France and of the times generally all over Christendom seems boundless. In debate, you observe he is never at a loss for fact or argument, let the discussion take what direction it may."

"And he has celebrity also as a writer, has he not?" asked Ledru Rollin.

"The author of 'The Laborer of Lyons' must be a man of distinguished literary genius," was the reply.

"Better than all," said Flocon, "he is devoted heart and soul to the good cause."

"Such devotedness to a cause I never witnessed," said Marrast. "He puts us all to the blush. With him it appears a matter of direct individual interest. He is perfectly untiring. He is like one impelled by his fate. Love or vengeance could not force onward a man to the attainment of an object more irresistibly than he seems forced, and that, too, without the slightest apparent stain of personal interest or ambition. That man appears to me a miracle—a pure philanthropist. He strives, struggles, suffers, sacrifices, and all with the sole object of ameliorating the condition of his race."

"It is, indeed, wonderful," said Rollin, thoughtfully. "Do you know, Marrast, anything of his past history?"

"Little, if anything. Of himself he never speaks, and I can gather nothing from others. Even his constituents had known nothing of him but a few months before he became their representative in the Chamber. His popularity with them he owes to his efforts to ameliorate their condition. At his own expense he established among them a Phalanstrie, which is now in most successful operation."

"He is rich, then?" asked Flocon.

"Seemingly not, to judge from his habits of life," replied Marrast. "Not a man in the Chamber is more Republican in garb, manner, equipage or residence than he, and yet he may be rich."

"Is he married?" asked Rollin.

"He has been, I am told," said Marrast. "But we interrupt you, Louis. You were alluding to the unusual influences now at work for our cause."

"I was about speaking of the newspaper press," said Louis Blanc. "Never has there been known such a revolution in favor of Reform and Communist journals, and to none is this better known than to some of ourselves. There's Flocon's new journal, 'La Réforme,' that has leaped at once into a circulation never before achieved but by long years of toil and enterprise. The old 'National,' we need but to look around us to be sure, was never more prosperous than now, while I am free to confess that my journal, 'Le Bon Sens,' which has been a sickly child ever since its birth, has, within three months, tripled its number of readers, or, at least, its payers. The same is in the main true of 'Le Monde,' by La Croix, 'Le Journal du Peuple,' by Dubose, 'Le Courier Français,' by Chatelain, 'La Commerce,' by Bert, 'La Minerve,' by Lemaine, 'La Presse,' by Girardin, and all the journals in Paris which diffuse true ideas upon labor and the rights of the people, be they in other respects what they may. Even the 'Charivari,' which views the old King and his Ministers as fair butts of ridicule, perceives a marked increase in its patronage since it commenced that course, which sudden popularity naturally excites it to increase of zeal in the same path. Besides all this, an army of new papers, aiming to aid the great cause, have not only sprung up of late, like mushrooms, in Paris, but all over France, and even all over Europe; and so far appear they from interfering with each other's prospects that the more there are the better they seem sustained and the more ably conducted. A swarm of new and unknown writers for the press on this great subject seems all at once to have appeared from unseen hiding-places."

"This is very strange, Louis," said Marrast, "and yet it is, doubtless, very true. I had observed what you remark myself, although I have viewed the movement less hopefully for the cause of the Republic than you."

"Depend upon it, Armand," said Louis Blanc, smiling, "that Republicanism and Socialism are identical terms, as much so as Communism and despotism are antagonistic terms."

"But how do you account for this wonderful change, this unprecedented fever for Fourierism?" asked Flocon.

"I don't pretend to account for it at all. The merits of the cause have, perhaps, begun to be properly appreciated. Unusual efforts have been made by our friends of late. Whole nations and epochs are sometimes seized with a contagious mania for peculiar species of literature, as for everything else. But I will hint to you a suspicion which I have recently entertained, namely, that, after all, the rapid sale and ready market for every species of Fourier literature is not an unerring indication of the amount of reading of such literature, or the demand that actually exists of buyers as well as readers—individual ones at least. As for the journalistic literature, that I have learned is, without doubt, gratuitously distributed, to a great extent, among the masses."

"But can the masses read the papers?" asked Marrast.

"Each family, house, neighborhood, café or cabaret, at any rate, has, at least one reader," said Rollin; "and all the men, women and children have ears to hear, if not power to comprehend. But some of these papers, which I have seen, come down in style to the very humblest comprehension."

"Can it be," asked Flocon, "that there is such a club as a society for the diffusion of social knowledge in Paris, after the form of that in London, instituted by Lord Henry Brougham and his Whig coadjutors, for the diffusion of general information, and so opposed by the Tories."

"If there be such an association," said Louis Blanc, "it has managed to elude all my vigilance thus far, and that of the Government, too, for Guizot can perceive, if no one else can, the inevitable effect of all this, and he has no idea that the dear people of France shall be educated by any one save himself. But, actually, there seems to me to exist too much unity of purpose and action in this enterprise for it to be the work of an association. I should rather suppose one powerful and philanthropic mind at the head of the movement, were there not two things so plainly opposed to it as to forbid the idea—the first being that there is no one man in Europe who is rich enough to expend such immense sums upon such an enterprise, if he would, and the second that there is no man who has the subject sufficiently at heart to do it, if he could."

CHAPTER XI.

"WAIT AND HOPE."

Just then a light rap was heard at the private door, which Marrast immediately hastened to open, as if in anticipation of the arrival of a friend.

A brief and rapid colloquy ensued; then M. Dantès, the Deputy from Marseilles, was introduced. He seemed acquainted with, and to be held in high regard by all present. His dress, as usual, was black, with a white cravat, and his manner and bearing had all that magnetism and dignity which so deeply impressed those he met.

"I find you in private conference, do I not, Messieurs?" asked he, glancing around with a smile. "I pray you let me not interrupt. I have called but for a moment to speak with M. Marrast respecting a measure in the Chamber, and have consented to enter only at his solicitation."

"You are right, M. Dantès," replied Marrast, "in supposing us engaged in a private conference, and upon matters of deep import, though conferences in this office can never be so private or so important as not to derive benefit from the presence and counsel of the Deputy from Marseilles."

"Most true," observed Louis Blanc; "and so far from intrusion do we view your arrival that we can but consider it most opportune that we have the privilege of referring to you a question on which, between us, especially between our friend Marrast and myself, there seems some little diversity of sentiment."

"It would, I fear," said M. Dantès, "be unpardonable arrogance in one so young as I am in the great cause of human liberty to offer counsel to you, who are all veterans, and most of you little less than martyrs to your enthusiasm. But no good citizen will shrink from the responsibility of declaring the results of his reflections on all topics which have reference to the general weal."

"We differ mainly in this," said Marrast: "Louis Blanc attributes the Republican failures of the past ten years to prematurity and want of preparation in our attempts, and contends that all those reverses may be retrieved by patience and prudence in future, while, to my mind, there is nothing to indicate for the future, from the same causes, different results than those experienced in the past."

"Concert of action," said M. Dantès, mildly, "is always an indispensable requisite in the accomplishment of every enterprise which relies for its success on association, or the combined efforts of individuals laboring for a common end; yet, with all the concert of action which can possibly be attained, the best arranged and best digested scheme in the world may be ruined by premature movement. Of this we surely have sad proof in the history of the past ten years alluded to. There is something of truth in the declaration so frequently made that the French people are not yet prepared for freedom. If this be so, then it is the duty of their friends to prepare them. It is folly to suppose that the masses should, at first, intuitively know all their rights and the best mode of vindicating them. This they must be taught; and, to this end, the press should be unceasingly at work, not only all over France, but all over Europe, in diffusing correct views upon life and labor, and political rights and powers. There should be, also, concert of action among the friends of freedom, and clubs should at once be instituted in every city, town and village in France, which should be in private and intimate correspondence with similar clubs at Paris and in all the capitals of Christendom. There should, likewise, be unity of action introduced among the masses themselves. In a city like Paris, and among a people like the French, secret signals can easily be arranged, by which, at any hour of the night, or of the day, fifty thousand laborers in their blouses might be concentrated at any point where their presence is required, and that, too, with arms in their hands furnished from secret arsenals; and thus would those pitiable slaughters of helpless insurgents, like those of sheep in the shambles, we have so often witnessed, be avoided, if nothing besides were gained. The people are ever but too ready to pour out their blood, and the most difficult and delicate task in our enterprise is, after all, to restrain them—to impress upon them the all important maxim, without which nothing great, good or enduring is achieved, those three words in which all human wisdom is contained, 'Wait and hope.'"

"And for what are we to wait and hope, for which we have not already in vain waited and hoped the past ten years?" asked Marrast.

"The true hour to strike!" was the firm answer.

"And that hour, when will it come?"

"It may come quickly, as it will come surely, soon or late! It cannot be that the Revolution of July should continue much longer to result in the solemn mockery it has. It cannot be that its friends should much longer be withheld from those by whom it was achieved, only to aggrandize one old man and his sons. It cannot be that the unmitigated and disgusting selfism of Louis Philippe, and his efforts to ally himself with every crowned head in Europe—not for the glory of France, but for his own—will much longer be overlooked or their perils masked. The appanages grasped by himself—the dotation and bridal outfit of the Duke of Orléans—the dotation sought for the Duke of Nemours, and his appointment as Regent during the minority of the Count of Paris—the Governorship of Algeria bestowed on the youthful and inexperienced Aumale, to the insult of so many brave and victorious generals—the naval supremacy, to which has been exalted the ambitious Joinville, and his union to the opulent Brazilian Princess—the effort to unite the young Montpensier with the Infanta of Spain—the environment of Paris with Bastilles, with the avowed purpose of fortifying order by turning the ordnance which should protect into enginery of destruction—an immense standing army—the notorious corruption of officials, and the audacious dabbling of Ministers in the stocks, if not the King himself, by means of information obtained by the Government telegraph, and withheld from the people, or of information manufactured by the telegraph designed to affect the Bourse—the unprecedented number of placemen occupying seats in the Chamber of Deputies, yet receiving exorbitant salaries as incumbents of civil offices, one man being often in receipt of the salaries of several offices, though performing the duties of none—the fact that Ministers have maintained majorities by unblushing bribery in elections—that hardly one man in two hundred is an elector—the profligate arts of corruption by which every able man is bought by the Court—the disgraceful censorship of the press and the drama—the enormous appropriations for the civil list, wrung out by grinding taxes from the toil and sweat of millions—the absurd assumption, yet the monstrous power, over the press and its conductors, of that conclave of hoary dotards called the Chamber of Peers—the utter and most impious disregard of the deprivation and misery of the operative and laborer, although arrayed side by side with the insolence and wealth pampered by the taxes torn from themselves—the total forgetfulness of the self-evident truth of the right of all men to labor, unrestricted by the baleful influences of the competition of capitalists—these facts, properly urged and set forth by the press, from the tribune and in the clubs, in connection with due enlightenment of the masses upon their rights as to labor and its reward and the duty of government thereupon could not fail to prepare the popular mind, all over France, and all over Europe, for reform—for revolution."

"Unquestionably," cried Louis Blanc, "such would be the effect; and it would not only prepare the people for reform, and stimulate them to obtain it, but it would make them Republicans—true Republicans—American Republicans! The Americans do not plume themselves on the title citizen, but they work; they dispute little about words, but clear their lands; they do not talk of exterminating anybody, but they cover the sea with their ships, they construct immense canals, roads and steamers without jabbering at every stroke of the spade about the rights of man. With them, labor, merit, talent and honest opulence are honored and rewarded aristocracies. Such Republicans would furnish France more Washingtons, Jeffersons and Madisons, and fewer Robespierres, Dantons and Marats!"

"There can be no doubt," remarked Flocon, "that the paramount interest in a republic is that of those who work, that the labor question is of supreme importance, that the profound problem now submitted to the industrial nations of Christendom demands satisfactory solution, and that the long-enduring and most iniquitous miseries of those who toil must cease. Reform, revolution and government which achieve not these, achieve nothing! They would be worse than useless. The measures suggested by our distinguished friend seem to me eminently calculated to attain the consummation we desire."

"A good government must and always will systematically uphold the poor, and ever interpose to protect the weak against the strong," said Louis Blanc. "The state should be tutelary for the ignorant, the poor and the suffering of every description. We must have a guardian government—a government that will accord the aid of that mighty engine, credit, not to the rich only, but also to the poor. It must interpose likewise in the matter of industry, and exclude that antagonistical principle of competition—the poisoned fount of so much virulence, violence and ruin. Our maxim is, brothers, and in this do we all concur, 'Human Solidarity,' and our motto, 'Unity, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.' All men are of one family, and once thoroughly sensible of this kindred, discord, hate and selfism will no longer be possible."

"The views advanced," said Ledru Rollin, "so far as they tend to the elevation of the masses and to popular preparation for reform, Republicanism or revolution, have my most cordial approval; but I would beg to ask how long are the people to 'wait and hope?' When is to come the hour to strike?"

"Who can tell," said M. Dantès, in his low, clear and musical tones, "at what moment the breath will come which may hurl on its errand of devastation the avalanche which the snows and suns of centuries, perchance, have been preparing for its awful mission? In the stillness of the night-time, beneath the clear blue sky of summer, or amid the ravings of the midnight tempest, its dread march is ordered, and in resistless, crushing sublimity it begins to move on to accomplish its terrible errand. Who may predict the precise moment when the earthquake shall rock, the tornado sweep, the red lightning scathe, or the lava flood desolate? And who shall tell the day or the hour when the people, in their majesty and might, shall rise to avenge their wrongs? The snow-flake falls fleecily on the mountain's top through many a long and silent night; a land green as Eden smiles over the volcano; through many a calm and sunny day the electric flame gathers in the firmament! At length, when least expected, the avalanche sweeps, the volcano bursts, the red bolt strikes. France is the victim of many wrongs. Which one of them shall prove the last drop in her cup of bitterness we know not. France is divided into many political sects, and all but one aim at revolution. Which one of all shall it be to set the ball of revolution in motion? The Legitimists, who consider the Duke of Bordeaux the rightful heir, and Louis Philippe a usurper; the Bonapartists, who think they evoke the great shade of Napoleon in the person of his unworthy descendant; or the old Republicans? As for the Conservatives, let them with Guizot at their head, uphold themselves if they can, and let the dynasties under Barrot and Thiers overthrow and succeed their factional foes. Their petty quarrels we care not for. Nor shall we, the Communists, ever suffer ourselves to be deemed the revolutionary party; but the revolution once commenced, let us throw ourselves into its torrent, and with our thorough, perfect and secret organization, we cannot fail to shape it most successfully to our own, our righteous ends. The hour when revolution may commence we cannot predict, as it is not our policy to start or precipitate it; but that hour may come quickly. It must come on the demise of Louis Philippe, which event cannot be long delayed, and it may be precipitated before. Nor will France alone be convulsed. As the news of that old man's death, on the lightning's wing, spreads over Europe, the electric wire will prove but a train passing through repeated mines, which, one after the other, will explode with awful devastation. Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg, the strongholds of despotism in Europe, each will totter—all but the last will fall. The press is powerless on the Russian serf. Russia will be the tyrant's last citadel. Italy will throw off the Austrian yoke and be free. Gregory XVIII. will shortly die. A wise, far-seeing and benevolent priest, named Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti, born at Sinigaglia, and now a cardinal, with the title of SS. Peter and Marcellinus, will succeed to the Papal See, and Italy will be a republic; Genoa, Venice, Naples, Lombardy, Piedmont and Sardinia will be sister yet sovereign states, forming one union—the constellation of freedom, the favorite scheme of Napoleon's better days at last achieving reality. Switzerland, with her green hills and her field Morgarten, her priestly despots expelled, shall also be free. But I weary you, Messieurs."

"By no means," cried Marrast, cordially clasping M. Dantès by the hand. "I have listened in silence to your earnest exposition of the policy you suggest, and so truly do I subscribe to it that, henceforth, I am your disciple and adopt your motto, 'Wait and hope' for my own. But it is nearly two o'clock. In an hour the Chamber sits."

"And, meanwhile, Messieurs," interrupted M. Dantès, "I know not that we can better employ ourselves, after so protracted a séance, than to repair to Véfour's. This talking is hungry work, and listening and thinking, which are by far more tedious, are still more so. So to Véfour's."

"The séance 'National' is closed!" cried Ledru Rollin, laughing, as the whole company descended the gloomy stairs.

CHAPTER XII.

THE MYSTERIOUS PRIMA DONNA.

All fashionable Paris was excited over the announcement of a new prima donna, whose wonderful achievements in Italian opera had set even the exacting critics of Italy wild with enthusiasm and delight.

This great artiste was no other than the renowned Louise d'Armilly. She had never before sung in the presence of a Parisian audience, but her fame had preceded her, and it was accepted as certain that her triumph at the Académie Royale would be both instantaneous and overwhelming.

She was to assume the rôle of Lucrezia Borgia, in Donizetti's brilliant opera of that name, a rôle in which the enterprising director of the Académie Royale assured the expectant public that she possessed no equal.

For weeks every Parisian journal had been sounding her praises with unremitting zeal, and now her name was as familiar as a household word in all the high society salons, where the ladies and their gallants could talk of nothing but the approaching operatic event, while in the cafés and on the boulevards an equal degree of interest was exhibited.

Even the masses, notwithstanding the political agitation in which they were involved, had caught the prevailing excitement, and the leaders of the contending parties themselves paused amid their heated discussions to talk of Louise d'Armilly.

The career of this young and beautiful artiste had been remarkable. Her début had been made at Brussels, about two years before, in company with her brother, M. Léon d'Armilly, and there, as well as at all the theatres of Italy, La Scala, Argentina and Valle, they had roused a perfect storm of operatic enthusiasm.

The origin of this young artiste was veiled in the deepest mystery. Rumor ascribed to her descent from one of the oldest and most respectable families of France; and domestic trials, among which was a matrimonial misadventure, no less than the arrest of an Italian Prince whom she was about to wed, on the bridal night, as an escaped galley slave, were assigned as the cause which had given her splendid powers to the stage.

At an earlier hour than usual—for Parisian fashion never fills the opera-house until the curtain falls on the second act—the Rue Lepelletier was crowded with carriages, La Pinon with fiacres, and the Grande Batelière and the passages to the Boulevard des Italiens with persons on foot, all hastening toward that magnificent edifice, constructed within the space of a single year by Debret, to replace the building in the Rue de Richelieu ordered to be razed by the Government because of the assassination at its door of the Duke of Berri, in 1820—that magnificent structure which accommodates two thousand spectators with seats.

Among the first in the orchestra stalls were Beauchamp and Debray, whose attention was divided between the stage and the arrivals of splendidly attired elégantes in the different loges, during the overture. All the élite of Paris seemed on the qui vive.

"It will be a splendid house," observed Debray.

"The débutante, be she whom she may, should feel flattered by such an unexampled assemblage of all the ton of Paris."

Orchestra, balcony, galleries, amphitheatres, lobbies and parterre were packed; every portion of the vast edifice, in short, was thronged except a few of the loges and baignoires, into which every moment brilliant companies were entering.

"Who is that tall, dark military man, with the heavy moustache, now making his way into the Minister's box?" asked Beauchamp, after a pause.

"That man is no less a personage than the Governor of Algeria, Eugène Cavaignac, Marshal of Camp," said Debray. "He reported himself at the War Office this morning, and is the lion of the house."

"Ah!" cried the journalist; "and that is the hero of Constantine! What a frank, open countenance, and what a distingué bearing and manner!"

"You would not suppose all that man's life passed in a camp, would you?"

"His career has, I understand, been remarkable," said Beauchamp.

"Very. His father was a Conventionist of '92, a famous old fellow, who, among other terrible things laid at his door, is said to have pawned an old man's life, old Labodère, for his daughter's honor; somewhat, you remember, as Francis I. spared St. Valliar's life for the favor of the lovely Diana of Poitiers, his only child. His aged mother is yet living, a woman of strong mind, though seventy, and he does nothing without her advice. His brother Godefroi's name was notorious as that of a powerful Republican leader for years before his decease. At eighteen Eugène entered the Polytechnic School. At twenty-two he was a sub-lieutenant in the engineer corps of the second regiment. In '28 he was first lieutenant in France; in '29 he was captain; in '34 he was in Algeria; and, in '39, his cool, bold, decided but discreet conduct had made him chef de bataillon, despite the fact that he had incurred the Royal displeasure some years before by a disloyal toast at a banquet. In '40 he was lieutenant-colonel; in '41 marshal of camp, and first commander of division of Tlemeen; in '43, he was conqueror of Constantine, at the first siege of which I so nearly lost my own valuable head, and he is now Governor of Algeria, after service there of fourteen years."

"And the tall and sinewy man beside him, presenting such a contrast to Cavaignac, with his light complexion, gray hair, and sullen and not very intelligent expression?"

"Oh! that is General Bugeaud, by some deemed the real conqueror of Algeria. But he's not at all popular with the army. His manners are simple and excessively blunt. He is a perfect despot with his staff, 'tis said; yet he is quite a wag when in good-humor, and, at Ministerial dinners, can unbend and make himself as agreeable as need be wished. His voice is as harsh as a Cossack's, and in perfect contrast to that of Cavaignac, which is the richest and most musical you ever heard, yet distinct, emphatic and impressive."

"Bugeaud incurred intense odium with the opposition for his unwarranted severity as jailor of the Duchess of Berri, in '34, and his killing Dulong in a duel, because of a deserved taunt on the subject."

"Bugeaud did his duty," said the Secretary, "though a man of his nature could hardly perform such a duty with gentleness. Bugeaud is not a gentleman; he knows it, and don't try to seem one. He is only a soldier. But there comes his very particular foe; General Lamoricière. That magnificent woman on his arm is his wife and the sister of the lady who follows, with her husband, the ex-Minister, Adolphe Thiers."

"What a contrast!" cried Beauchamp. "The tall and elegant figure of Lamoricière, in his brilliant uniform of the Spahis, half oriental, half French, with his lovely wife, and the low, swarthy little ex-Minister in complete black, with his huge round spectacles on his nose nearly twice the size of his eyes, and a wife on his arm nearly double his stature. Why, Thiers reminds me of a Ghoul gallanting a Peri."

"And yet that same dark little ex-Minister has perhaps, in many respects the most powerful mind—at all events, the most available mind—impelled as it is by his restless ambition, in all France. Do you observe how incessantly his keen black eye flashes around the house, beneath his huge glasses?"

"He seems perfectly aware that every eye in the house is directed toward his loge. But is it true that his brother-in-law owes his rapid rise to his influence at Court?"

"By no means," replied Debray. "If there is a man in the French army who has achieved his own fortunes, that man is Lamoricière. He went to Algeria a lieutenant, and bravely and gallantly has he attained his present brilliant position. It was he who proposed the creation of a corps of native Arab troops, like the Sepoys of British India; and he was appointed colonel of the first regiment of Spahis. Our quondam friend, Maximilian Morrel, has a command in this regiment, and is a protégé of his illustrious exemplar."

"The hostility between Lamoricière and Bugeaud arises, I suppose, from the latter's detestable disposition, his overbearing and dictatorial temper. Lamoricière is not a man, I take it, to be the slave of any one."

"Rivalry in Africa is thought to have originated the feud," remarked Debray, "and political differences in Paris to have inflamed it. Bugeaud is a Legitimist, and Lamoricière a Republican."

"Silence!" cried the musical connoisseurs in the orchestra. "The curtain rises."

As the curtain rose a hush of expectation reigned over the audience. The hum and bustle ceased, and silence most profound succeeded. The appearance of the fair cantatrice was the signal for such a reception as only a Parisian audience can give, and the first strains that issued from her lips assured them that their applause was not misplaced.

And surely never was the dark Duchess of Ferrara more faithfully personated than by the present artiste. This vraisemblance, which is so seldom witnessed in the opera, seemed to strike every eye. Her figure was tall and majestic, and voluptuously developed. Her air and bearing were haughty, dignified, and queen-like. Her complexion was very dark, but perfectly clear; her forehead broad and high; her brows heavy, but gracefully arched; her eyes large, black and flashing; her hair dark as night, and arranged with great simplicity in glossy bands; and her mouth large, but filled with teeth of pearl-like whiteness, contrasted by lips of coral wet with the spray. The entire outline of her face was Roman, and exhibited in its contour and lineaments even more than Roman sternness and decision; and its effect was still more heightened by a large mole at one corner of her mouth and the velvet robes in which she was appropriately costumed.

The scene between the Duchess and the Spaniard, Gubetta, was received with the utmost applause, and the pathos of that between the son and his unknown mother, which succeeded, touched the audience to tears; but when the maskers rushed in and her vizard was torn off, and her true name proclaimed, and, amid her heart-rending wailings, the curtain fell on the first act, the shouts were perfectly thunderous with enthusiasm. The rôle of Gennaro was performed by the brother of the cantatrice, Léon d'Armilly, a young man of twenty, of delicate and graceful figure, and as decidedly blonde as his sister was brunette. Nature seemed to have made a great mistake in sex when this brother and sister were fashioned. Indeed, it seemed hardly possible that they could be brother and sister, a remark constantly made by the audience, and the kindred announced on the bills was generally viewed as one of those convenient relationships often assumed on the stage, but having no more reality than those of the dramatis personæ themselves.

"A second Pasta!" cried Château-Renaud, entering the stalls immediately on the descent of the curtain. "Heard you ever such a magnificent contralto?"

"Saw you ever such a magnificent bust?" asked Beauchamp.

"Were it not for a few manifest impossibilities," thoughtfully remarked Debray, "I should swear that this same angelic Louise d'Armilly was no other than a certain very beautiful, very eccentric and very talented young lady whom we all once knew as a star of Parisian fashion, and who, the last time she was in this house, sat in the same loge where now sit the African generals."

"Whom can you mean, Debray?" cried Beauchamp.

"A certain haughty young lady, who was to have married an Italian Prince, but, on the night of the bridal, in the midst of the festivities, the house being thronged with guests, and even while the contract was receiving the signatures, the Prince was arrested as an escaped galley-slave, and at his trial proved to be the illegitimate son of the bride's mother and a certain high legal functionary, the Procureur du Roi, now at Charenton, through whose burning zeal for justice the horrible discovery transpired."

"Ha!" exclaimed Château-Renaud. "You cannot mean Eugénie Danglars, daughter of the bankrupt baron, whom our unhappy friend Morcerf was once to have wed?"

"The very same," quietly rejoined the Secretary; "but this lady cannot be Mlle. Danglars, I say absolutely, for many sufficient reasons," he quickly added; then, as if to turn the conversation, he hastily remarked: "Ah! there are M. Dantès and M. Lamartine, as usual, together."

"M. Dantès!" exclaimed the Count, in surprise, looking around. "Impossible!"

"And yet most true," observed Beauchamp; "in the third loge from the Minister's to the right. What a wonderful resemblance there is between those men—the poet and the Deputy! One would suppose them brothers. The same tall and elegant figure, the same white and capacious brow, the same dark, blazing eye, the same raven hair, and, above all, the same most unearthly and spiritual pallor of complexion."

"No wonder M. Dantès is pale," said the Count. "Have you not heard of the occurrence of this evening in the Chamber? M. Dantès was in the midst of one of his powerful harangues against the Government, when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped—coughed violently several times, and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; then taking a small vial from his vest pocket, he placed it to his lips, and instantaneously, as if new life had entered him, proceeded more eloquently than ever to the conclusion of his speech."

"I heard something of this," said Beauchamp.

"As he descended from the tribune his friends thronged around him, anxious about his health. He quieted their apprehensions with his peculiar smile of assurance, but I observed that his white handkerchief was spotted with blood, and he almost immediately left the Chamber."

"That man will kill himself in the cause he has espoused," remarked Debray. "See how ghastly he now looks. But so much the better for the Ministry. He is a formidable foe. Indeed, that loge contains the two most powerful opponents of the Government."

"And who are those men just entering the box?" asked Beauchamp.

"None other than the two rival astronomers of Europe," said Debray, "and yet most intimate friends. The taller and elder, the one with gray hair, a dark, sharp Bedouin countenance, and that large, wild, black eye, with a smile of mingled sarcasm and humor ever on his thin lip, is Emanuel Arago. The other, the short, robust man, with fair complexion, sandy hair, bright blue eye and vivacious expression, is Le Verrier, the most tireless star-gazer science has produced since Galileo. But hush! the curtain is up."

"Oh! it matters not," said the Count; "only Gennaro and the Spaniard appear in the second act, and I have neither eyes nor ears save for the Duchess to-night. But who are those, Beauchamp?"

"Where?"

"In the loge on the first tier, next to the Minister's and directly opposite to that of M. Dantès?"

"Ah! two officers of the Spahis and two most exquisite women!" exclaimed Debray. "They belong, doubtless, to the African party in the Minister's loge. Your lorgnette, Count. What a splendid woman!"

Hardly had the Secretary raised the glass to his eyes before he dropped it with the exclamation:

"A miracle! a miracle!"

"What?" cried both of the other young men, turning to the box at which Debray was gazing.

"Messieurs, do you remember the fair Valentine de Villefort, whose untimely and mysterious demise all the young people of Paris so much bewailed, some two or three years ago, and whose lovely remains, we, with our own eyes, saw deposited in the Saint-Méran and de Villefort vault at Père Lachaise, one bitter cold autumn evening, and there listened most patiently and piously to a whole breviary of mournful speeches, declarative of the said Valentine's most superlative excellence?"

"Undoubtedly, we remember it well," was the reply.

"Then behold, and never dare to doubt the reappearance of the dead again to the ocular organs of humanity."

"Valentine de Villefort!" exclaimed the Count, after a careful and scrutinizing survey, "by all that's supernatural; and more exquisitely lovely than ever!"

"Then it was true, after all, the strange story we heard," said Beauchamp, "of the young lady's resurrection and marriage to Maximilian Morrel, somewhere far away in parts unknown?"

"No doubt," replied the Count, "for, if I mistake not—and I'm sure I don't mistake, now that I look more closely—that stalwart, splendid fellow, with the broad forehead, black eyes and moustache, and the order of the Legion of Honor on his breast, to set off his rich uniform of the Spahis, and on whose arm the fair apparition is leaning, is no other than Maximilian Morrel himself—the identical man who saved my worthless neck from a yataghan in Algeria."

"How dark he's grown!" said Debray.

"No more so than all these African heroes—for instance, Cavaignac and Lamoricière."

"But what a splendid contrast there is between the young Colonel of the Spahis and his lovely bride, if such she be! He, dark as a Corsican; she, fair as an Englishwoman—he, upright as a poplar; she, drooping like a willow—his hair and eyes black as midnight, while her soft, languishing orbs are as blue as the summer sky, and her glossy ringlets as brown as a chestnut!"

"On my word," said Beauchamp, "the Count grows poetical! Morrel had better keep his beautiful wife out of the way! But have you discovered who are the other couple in the box?" he added to the Secretary, who had his lorgnette in most vigilant requisition. "Any more discoveries, Debray?"

A sigh might have been heard as the Secretary took his glass from his eye, and replied simply:

"Yes."

"And who now?" asked Château-Renaud. "There seems no end to discoveries to-night."

"The young man who, by his decorations, seems a chef de bataillon of the Spahis," replied Debray, "I cannot make out. But, be he whom he may, he is effectually disguised from his most intimate friends by his luxuriant beard and moustache. As for the lady—there is but one woman in the world I have ever had the good fortune to behold who could be mistaken for her."

"And that is?" said Beauchamp.

"Herself."

"And who is herself, Lucien?" asked Château-Renaud.

"Have you forgotten the Countess de Morcerf?"

"The Countess de Morcerf?—the wife of the general who was convicted by the peers of felony, treason and outrage in the matter of Ali Tebelen, Pacha of Yanina?" said Beauchamp.

"And who blew his brains out in despair?" added the Count.

"The same," said Debray. "She returned to Marseilles with her son Albert. You remember Albert and his strange conduct in the duel with the Count of Monte-Cristo?"

"One could hardly forget such chivalric generosity, such magnificent magnanimity and such sublime self-control as were exhibited by the young man on that occasion!" said Beauchamp. "It is to be hoped he was not equally forbearing toward the Arabs in his African campaigns, although, as his name has never been seen or heard since he entered the army, in all probability he was."

"Well, well," cried the Secretary, impatiently, "the Countess retired to Marseilles, and there she is said to have resided in utter seclusion, in company only with Morrel's beautiful wife, devoting the vast wealth of the deceased Count to philanthropic objects, having received it, as his widow, only with the understanding it should be thus bestowed."

"But the rumor was," said Beauchamp, "and indeed I was so assured by M. de Boville himself, Receiver-General of the Hospitals, at the time, that the Countess gave all the Count's fortune to the hospitals, and that he himself registered the deed of gift."

"Oh! that was only some twelve or thirteen hundred thousand francs," said Debray. "Three months after her settlement at Marseilles, in a small house in the Allées de Meillan, said to be her own by maternal inheritance, a letter came to her from Thomson and French, of Rome, stating that there was a deposit in their house, to the credit of the estate of the late Count, of the enormous sum of two millions of francs, subject to her sole control and order, as the Count's only heir, in the absence of his son."

"Two millions of francs!" cried the two young men in a breath.

"Even so, Messieurs," said Debray. "The story does sound rather oriental; but I have reason to know that it is entirely true, for I made diligent inquiry about it when last at Marseilles."

"And what took you to Marseilles, Lucien?" asked the Count significantly.

"The Ministry," replied Debray, with evident confusion, coloring deeply.

"But why does not the Countess marry again?" asked Château-Renaud, surveying her faultless form and face through his glass. "In the prime of life, rich, and, despite her past troubles, most exquisitely beautiful, it is strange she don't make herself and some one else happy!"

"Especially as no one could ever accuse her of having very desperately loved her dear first husband," added the journalist. "Why don't she marry, Lucien?"

"How the devil should I know!" replied the Secretary in great confusion. "You don't suppose I ever asked her the question, do you?"

"Upon my word," exclaimed the Count, laughing, "I shall begin to think you have, if you take it so warmly. But, hist! the bell! The curtain rises. We mustn't lose the third act of Donizetti's chef d'œuvre, with such a Lucrezia, for any woman living."

But it was very evident that much of the magnificent performance of the débutante and her companion, in the thrilling scene between the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara and the young Captain Gennaro, was lost to the Secretary.

"Do you observe, Beauchamp, how strangely fascinated with the new cantatrice seems the young officer of the Spahis who accompanies the Countess?" he whispered. "Do but look. He sits like one transfixed."

"And the Countess seems transfixed also, though not by the same object," was the reply. "How excessively pale, yet how beautiful she is! That plain black dress, without ornament or jewel, and her raven hair, parted simply on her forehead, enhance her voluptuous charms infinitely more than could the most gorgeous costume. Heavens! what a happy man will he be who can call her his!"

"Amen!" said Debray, and the word seemed to rise from the very depths of his heart. "But she will never marry. Some early disappointment, even before her union with Morcerf, has withered her heart, and the terrible divorce which parted her from him, although she never loved him, will keep her single forever. Her first and only love is either dead or—worse—married to another."

"See, see, Lucien!" cried Beauchamp, hurriedly; "at whom does she gaze so intently, and yet so sadly? It cannot be Lamartine, for there sits his lovely young English wife at his side; nor can it be old Arago, nor young Le Verrier; and yet some one in that box it surely is."

"M. Dantès?" cried Debray.

"Impossible! That man seems hardly conscious that there are such beings as women. His whole soul is in affairs of state."

"His whole soul seems somewhere else just at present," exclaimed the Secretary, bitterly. "Look!"

"How dreadfully pale he is!" said Beauchamp; "and yet his eyes fairly blaze. Is it the Countess he gazes at?"

"Is it M. Dantès she gazes at?"

At that moment, amid the wild farewell of the mother to her son, upon the stage, the curtain came down, and at the same instant, M. Dantès hastily pressed his white handkerchief to his lips, and, leaning on the arms of Lamartine and Arago, hastily left the box.

"Ha! the Countess faints!" cried Debray, as the door closed on M. Dantès. "Do they know each other, then?"

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ITALIAN LOVER.

It was early in the evening succeeding the day on which M. Dantès had answered Giovanni Massetti's letter. Zuleika was seated in the vast, sumptuously-furnished salon of the magnificent Morcerf mansion, now, as the reader already knows, the residence of the famous and mysterious Deputy from Marseilles. She sat upon a superb green velvet-covered sofa, half reclining in an indolent, picturesque attitude; behind the sofa and leaning over its back stood a young Italian, a perfect model of manly beauty; his ardent black eyes were riveted on Zuleika's blushing countenance with a look of the most profound and enthusiastic adoration, while his hand held the young girl's with a gentle, loving pressure, which was returned with unmistakable warmth. The apartment was dimly lighted and huge, sombre patches of shadow lay everywhere. Zuleika and her lover were alone together; for some time they seemed too full of happiness to speak, but finally Giovanni said, in a soft, flutelike whisper, as if unwilling to break with loudly uttered words the delicious spell of his love-dream:

"Zuleika, darling Zuleika, so you did not once forget me during our long, cruel separation?"

"Never for a single instant, Giovanni," answered the young girl, the flush upon her cheek deepening as she spoke, her hand tightening about her lover's and her lovely eyes filling with a soft fire. "But I sometimes feared you had forgotten me!"

"You were always present in my mind and in my heart," replied the Italian in a tone that thrilled her through and through. Stooping, he placed his lips to her forehead and imprinted upon it a long and silent kiss; then, flushing in his turn, he added, still holding his head against hers: "From the very moment of our first meeting you have reigned in my bosom, my own, my love, the queen of my destiny and my life!"

"Oh! Giovanni, Giovanni," murmured the young girl, "I am happy, so happy!"

He kissed her again, this time upon her upturned lips that with a slight movement almost imperceptibly returned the kiss, sending his blood tingling through his veins and causing him to tremble with delight from head to foot. No longer able to restrain himself, he hastily quitted the back of the sofa, threw himself down beside her and clasping her in his arms drew her unresistingly upon his bosom. Once there she did not offer to stir, but even nestled closer to him and pillowed her head on his broad shoulder. The tumultuous beating of both their hearts was audible amid the unbroken silence that ensued. With one hand the Viscount tenderly smoothed her silken tresses, and his arm tightened around her waist as if he had determined never to release her again.

"Your father, in his letter of this morning," said Giovanni finally, "told me there was hope, that you did not look upon my addresses with aversion, and that I had his leave to pay court to you and ascertain your wishes from your own dear lips. I hastened here this evening, and M. Dantès himself bade me seek you in this salon. I came on the wings of love and found all my fondest hopes realized; that I possessed your heart as you possessed mine. Oh! tell me, Zuleika, that this is not all a dream, for it seems too delicious to be true!"

"It is reality, Giovanni, blessed reality," answered the young girl in a low voice.

"And do you really love me with all your soul?"

"With all my soul, Giovanni!"

The ardent Italian showered a flood of burning kisses upon her forehead, cheeks and lips, and she quivered like a leaf in his embrace. Then he said, with a shade of anxiety in his tone:

"And your brother Espérance, is he disposed to look upon me with approval? You know that in Rome he did not see fit to include me in the number of his friends. We had a little difference, you will remember, and ever afterwards he was cold toward me."

Zuleika shuddered as she recalled the fact that the little difference alluded to had been a violent quarrel that had nearly resulted in a duel between the two young men. She had never known the details, for both her brother and Giovanni had studiously concealed them from her; indeed, Espérance had carefully avoided all mention of the Viscount's name ever since the day they had become embroiled. Was M. Dantès aware of the trouble between his son and the youthful Italian? She did not know, but, at the same time, felt firmly persuaded that her father had fully investigated the doings, character and family of her suitor, and would not have sanctioned a renewal of his addresses to her had he not been perfectly satisfied in every respect. She, therefore, answered:

"I am altogether ignorant as to what Espérance thinks of you, and cannot say whether he still harbors resentment against you or not; but, whatever may be his opinion and feelings, rest assured that he will never interfere to cause his sister an instant of unhappiness, more especially as he knows that my father looks upon you with a favoring eye."

"But how about the coldness existing between us?"

"Does it still exist on both sides?"

"Not on mine, Zuleika, not on mine. I forgave and forgot all long ago."

"Forgave and forgot! Then Espérance must have wronged you!"

"He did, Zuleika, and with the proverbial hot blood and headlong impulses of the Roman youth I resented that wrong. But I could not remain at enmity with the brother of the girl I loved, so when I became cooler I sought him out and endeavored to apologize."

"And he accepted your apology?"

"He did not accept it, but turned on his heel and left me without a word. He evidently thought me a coward and attributed my efforts toward effecting a reconciliation to a desire to escape fighting him."

"But why did you quarrel in the first place? What was the cause of the difference between you?"

The young Italian hung his head and did not answer. Zuleika saw that he had grown deadly pale, and she felt his hand tremble nervously.

Freeing herself from his embrace, the young girl sprang to her feet and faced him.

"Giovanni," said she, firmly, "tell me the whole story of this painful affair. It is imperative that I should know it!"

"Do you doubt me, Zuleika, do you doubt me?" he asked, bitterly, and he buried his face in his hands.

"Do I doubt you, Giovanni? No. But, if you love me, tell me all the details of the trouble between my brother and yourself!"

"I cannot, I cannot, Zuleika!" he cried. "Command me to shed the last drop of blood in my veins for you and I will do it without an instant's hesitation, but I cannot tell you that terrible tale of deceit, treachery and bloodshed!"

He had arisen and was walking excitedly about the salon; his pallor had increased and he trembled in every limb.

Zuleika stood with folded arms and gazed at him; she was calm and her eyes had a look of determination the young man had never before beheld in them; it filled him with dismay. A few moments ago she had been all love and tenderness, a yielding, trusting maiden in her lover's arms; now, she resembled a beautiful Amazon bent on achieving a victory, whom nothing but unconditional surrender would satisfy.

"The story, the story," she repeated, "tell me the story!"

Her face was as white as marble and her faultless lips seemed chiseled from stone. She looked so beautiful and tempting as she stood there, her surpassing loveliness enhanced by the picturesque half-oriental, half-Parisian dress she wore, that the Viscount felt his passion for her redoubled. He flung himself at her feet and seizing the hem of her superb robe kissed it rapturously.

"Oh! Zuleika, Zuleika," he cried, utterly unable to restrain himself, "I am your slave! Place your tiny foot upon my neck and crush me where I lie! I shall expire adoring you!"

"Giovanni," replied Zuleika, greatly moved by this display of devotion, "rise and be a man!"

The Italian sprang up as if he had been struck by a thunderbolt; then he endeavored to clasp her in his arms, but she quietly repulsed him.

"Zuleika," cried he, sadly, "you do not love me; you never loved me; I have been the victim of a cruel deception!"

"If you think so," answered the young girl, quietly, "there is but one course you can pursue as a man of honor—spurn the deceiver from you and never look upon her face again!"

The young man gazed at her reproachfully.

"What have I done to turn you thus against me?" he asked, his tone suddenly becoming humble.

"What have you done? You refuse to reveal this mystery to me, which, as you yourself admit, involves deceit, treachery and bloodshed, and which, for aught I know, has set an indelible stain upon your life! I love you truly, love you with all the passion of a woman's nature, but I must know this history that I may judge whether you are worthy of my love!"

"I assure you, Zuleika, that there is no stain upon my life, that there is nothing in this history that tends in the least to dishonor me, but still I cannot speak."

"Then we must separate."

"Oh! Zuleika, Zuleika, do not be pitiless! You will drive me mad!"

The young girl touched a bell and Ali, the Nubian, appeared.

"Monsieur is about taking his departure," said she to the faithful servant. "I leave him in your hands."

And without a word of farewell to Giovanni, she swept from the salon like a queen.

The Viscount gazed after her with indescribable sadness pictured upon his handsome countenance. Then he followed Ali, put on his overcoat and hat and regretfully left the house.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MINUTE VIALS.

Even to the Communists, with whom he had come into such close contact, M. Dantès, the Deputy from Marseilles, remained as much of a mystery as ever. Marrast, though now devotedly attached to him, admitted that he was totally unable to fathom either his designs, or his methods of accomplishing them, while Lamartine, who was in his company a large portion of the time, when questioned concerning him, replied that all he knew of M. Dantès was that he was a firm friend of the cause and an untiring worker in the interest of the weary and oppressed masses.

Debray, though he had no tangible foundation for it, could not get rid of the idea that the dangerous Deputy and the Count of Monte-Cristo were one and the same individual, but Beauchamp, with the usual incredulity of journalists, scoffed at the notion, and Château-Renaud derided it whenever it was mentioned in his presence.

That M. Dantès had great wealth was, however, generally admitted, though whence it was derived or in what manner it was invested no one could tell. It was now no longer a secret that he had purchased and resided in the magnificent mansion formerly owned by the Count de Morcerf, in the Rue du Helder, and this circumstance, while it vastly augmented the interest attaching to him, did not in the least detract from the enthusiasm felt for him by the working classes.

It was night. In a large chamber, richly furnished, but dimly lighted, in the mansion in the Rue du Helder, the same apartment once inhabited by the Countess de Morcerf, motionless, and seemingly lifeless, with a countenance as pale as alabaster, and as still, lay M. Dantès, the Deputy from Marseilles. Although, in the ashy pallor of the lips and brow, and the fixed, serene, almost stern aspect of the immovable face, might be read unmistakable evidence of an exhausting and dangerous constitutional shock to the system, yet none of that emaciation, over which broods the shadow of the angel of death, resulting from protracted illness, was there to be seen. The broad white forehead—the raven hair, sparsely sprinkled with silver—the round temples—the delicately penciled brow, encircling, like a sable arch, the large and almond-formed eye—the full calm lip, and the chiseled chin and nostril—all these were as perfect now as when last before the reader. The cheek was, perhaps, slightly sunken, but it could not be more pallid than when last beheld; and but for that nameless quietude—that "rapture of repose," as Lord Byron well expresses it—that placid languor which sleeps on the features, which illness always creates and which spiritualizes and intellectualizes the most common features, the invalid might be supposed to be enjoying the most quiet slumber.

Excepting the invalid, there was no one in that chamber save the faithful Ali, who moved noiselessly about, from time to time, or sat immovably upon the floor and gazed on his master's pallid face.

As the silvery tones of the chamber clock tinkled forth the third quarter after ten, the door opened, and a small, dark, thin man, with large whiskers, keen, penetrating eyes, broad, bald forehead, thinly covered with gray hair, and apparently about fifty years of age, briskly entered. It was Dr. Orfila, a name somewhat known in medical science. Approaching the bed, he placed his fingers upon the sick man's pulse, and gazed earnestly on his face for some time in silence.

"Strange!" he at length muttered; "the most powerful drugs in the most unheard-of quantities are powerless! Who, then, is this man, whose nature so differs from that of every one else? Can he so have accustomed his system to poisons, that, as with the King of Pontus, they are ineffectual to help or to harm him? His constitution must be iron! The vitality of a dozen men is in him, or he'd have been dead a month ago. Well, it's plain he's no worse, if he's no better. Drugs are useless, and he must be left to nature and his amazing constitution. This stupor, this utter death of all the faculties and senses for so long a time, is wonderful. Fever, delirium, anything but this death-like trance. It seems as if this man had been sleepless all his life before, and that now his overwrought brain and heart were compensating themselves for the toil and wakefulness of years. Could I but excite the nerves!"

For some time the physician gazed in deep thought at the pale face of the unconscious slumberer. Suddenly turning to the Nubian, he said to him:

"Ali, where does your master keep the drugs he has been for years accustomed to take?"

The Nubian stared in mute amazement, but moved not from his rug.

"Ali," said Dr. Orfila, sternly, "unless I see and know those drugs, this night your master dies."

The Nubian looked anxiously into the face of the physician, and then, as if satisfied with the scrutiny, rose, and, with noiseless steps, left the room. In a few moments he re-entered and placed in the physician's hands a small casket of ebony, exquisitely worked and studded with gems. Taking it hastily to the shaded lamp upon a table at the extremity of the chamber, he attempted to open it, but his attempts were vain. Indeed, to all appearances, it was a solid block of ebony, and its extreme heaviness, compared with its dimensions, seemed to favor the idea.

"Well?" said the doctor, returning the casket, after a close scrutiny, to the Nubian, who had followed him.

Ali took the casket, and instantly a portion of the top flew up, disclosing within the centre of the cube of ebony a cavity lined with crimson velvet, and a dazzling array of minute vials of crystal, each filled with a fluid—pink, blue, green and yellow in hue, while the contents of several were colorless. The Nubian had touched a spring concealed in the carving, and known only to his master and himself.

The physician removed the minute vials one after another from their receptacles, and held them up to the light; on each was a cipher, and on no two was the same. Most of them were quite filled with the fluid contained, but some were only half full, while one was nearly empty. Dr. Orfila looked closely at the cipher upon each vial as he removed it from the casket. He then held it to the light to determine its particular hue or shade, and sometimes withdrew the crystal stopper ground into the deep mouth, touching it cautiously and quickly to his nostril or the tip of his tongue. "Morphia, cinchonia, quinia, lobelia, belladonna, narcotina, bromine, arsenicum, strychnos colubrina, brucœa ferruginea," muttered the savant, as he examined one vial after the other and replaced it. "Brucœa ferruginea—ha! brucine! I thought as much," exclaimed he, holding up the vial, which showed, by being nearly empty, that its contents had been used more frequently than those of any of the others.

"How many drops of this is the greatest number your master has ever taken?" asked Dr. Orfila.

The Nubian, who, it will be remembered, was a mute, held up both hands with the fingers outspread, and then two other fingers of one of his hands.

"Twelve drops!" cried the astonished physician. "Impossible!"

Ali insisted on the assertion.

"And yet it must be so," the doctor added. "That would explain all."

Taking the vial and a minute crystal vessel, which he found in the casket, he hastily but carefully dropped into the latter thirteen drops. Then filling the vessel with water, he approached the patient, who still slumbered heavily on, and placed it to his lips. For an instant he seemed conscious of the wish of the physician, and with an effort the mixture was swallowed. Then he lay as still and motionless as before.

Returning the vials and the vessel to their places, Dr. Orfila closed the casket and gave it to the Nubian. He then gazed long and anxiously at the torpid slumberer, standing at the bedside and watching that marble face.

At length the clock struck eleven. Dr. Orfila started and hastily glanced at his repeater; then, turning to the Nubian, who had carried away the casket, and, having noiselessly returned, stood silently beside him, he said:

"Ali, in one hour your master will be in high fever; in two hours he will, probably, be delirious. He will then sleep soundly, and toward morning will wake, I hope, in his right mind, but terribly exhausted and profusely perspiring. At daylight I shall be here. You must not leave him for a single instant as you value his life."

The Nubian clasped his hands above his head and bent his forehead almost to the floor.

"If you think necessary, however, Ali, send for me before morning."

The physician gave one more look at his patient, pressed his fingers on his pulse, placed his palm on his forehead, and then, taking his hat and cane, left the chamber.

CHAPTER XV.

THE UNKNOWN NURSE.

When the rumor that M. Dantès had been taken seriously ill was first circulated throughout Paris, it caused excitement in every quarter of the city, filling the Communists and workmen with dismay and greatly elating their opponents.

In the midst of the excitement a strange lady, very plainly attired, but whose language and bearing gave unmistakable evidence of refinement and aristocratic associations, made her appearance one morning at the office of Dr. Orfila and humbly asked permission to nurse his distinguished patient. The physician, somewhat surprised at such a request from such a woman, immediately grew suspicious and demanded an explanation, when the lady informed him that she had known the sick man in his youth and was still deeply interested in his welfare. She refused to give her name, but solemnly assured the doctor that, should he grant her petition, M. Dantès on his recovery would be ready to thank him on bended knees.

Convinced at length that no harm was intended, the physician gave his permission and the unknown lady was duly installed as nurse. She discharged her duties with unflagging devotion and energy, satisfying even the exacting Nubian, with whom she divided the watch at the bedside of the unconscious deputy. Dr. Orfila was delighted, while Espérance and Zuleika were overjoyed.

On—on—the sleeper still slumbered on! One—two—three—four quarters after eleven tinkled in silvery numbers upon the delicate bell of the clock, yet the closed eyelids and fixed lips moved not, gave no sign; but for the light, though regular undulation of the chest, life itself might seem to have fled forever. Yet life was still there!

How strange the bond which connects vitality with consciousness—the body with the soul! And yet more strange is that phase of existence in which the one moves on without the other. The mind sometimes is all life when the body is dead, and oftener still is the body all life when the mind seems gone. Mind, too, may frequently act independently, not only of the body, as in dreams, but, also, of consciousness and of the heart; while the body, as in somnambulism, may act altogether alone.

On—on—the slumberer breathed on, but he thought not, felt not, perceived not. A revolution, an earthquake might heave around him, but the convulsive throes of man or of nature would have been as nothing to him. The brow would have remained as calm and as cold, and the cheek as pale and as still, while, in all human probability, the faithful Nubian would have sat as immovable upon his rug at the bedside of his beloved master, and have gazed upon him as untiringly with his dark and sleepless eye.

As the last quarter after eleven sounded, followed immediately by the hour of midnight, a small door beside the bed noiselessly opened, and a female figure in white silently entered the room; but not so noiselessly was the entrance effected as to escape the ear of the vigilant Ali. He glanced hurriedly around; then, as if familiar with the apparition, and anticipating its approach, he rose, and, taking his rug to the further extremity of the chamber, again laid himself down, like a faithful dog, though not now to watch.

Meanwhile the lady, quietly approaching the bed, gazed long and mournfully at the slumberer's pale yet noble visage; then, kneeling, she buried her face in her hands amid the coverings.

She was, probably, forty; yet, in the full and faultless perfection of her form—in her graceful and yielding motions—in her statuesque bust, rounded cheek and night-black hair, she would, to the casual observer, have indicated hardly the half of that age. Her figure was tall and dignified, yet mobile as a willow; her eyes were dark and luminous, and, in their profound depths, slept a world of melancholy meaning. Her hair was simply parted on a broad forehead, and was gathered in heavy masses low on the neck. Her lips were full and red, and, when parted, exhibited teeth of dazzling whiteness, while her complexion, which was very dark, was yet clear and pure as the hue of the magnolia's petal. But that face was pale, very pale, almost as colorless as that of the quiet sleeper at its side, and upon it rested an expression of love unutterable, mingled with the sadness of death.

Such was the unknown nurse, the Countess de Morcerf, as she again was an inmate of that apartment of which she had once, under circumstances how different, been mistress; such was Mercédès, the Catalane of Marseilles, again at the side of the man whom all her life she had loved, with none to gainsay or forbid!

Upon that pale and motionless countenance she gazed long and deeply, and, oh! the world of memory that passed through her mind!—the world of thought and feeling that centred in that fixed gaze! At length, clasping her hands upon her forehead, her eyes streaming with tears, she bowed her face upon the bed, from which she had just raised it, and long seemed absorbed in prayer.

Roused from this position by some movement of the slumberer, she started up and watched him.

The shaded rays of the dim and distant lamp threw a faint glimmering of light upon the pale countenance, but the quick eye of love instantaneously detected a change. A slight flush was mounting the cheek, and gentle perspiration was distilling upon the brow, while a smile played on the mouth. Suddenly, as she gazed, those pallid lips moved. Astonished, she listened.

"Marseilles! beautiful Marseilles!" said the sleeper. "Home of my boyhood, home of my heart. I come!" Then quickly and sternly came the order, "Let go the anchor—furl the sails—mate, take charge of the ship!" Then the tones changed, and a joyful light shot over the face as the lips exclaimed, "Now for my father! now for my love! Mercédès! Mercédès!"

Amazed, the fair watcher retained her position, and gazed and listened so silently and breathlessly that the quick and audible beatings of her heart might have been numbered.

"Mine—mine at last!" continued the dreamer. "The marriage-feast—the marriage-feast!" But instantly the expression of the voice and the countenance altered. The light of joy was shrouded in clouds. "Arrest—arrest me?" was the exclamation—"me! at my marriage-feast! A dungeon for me! Mercédès! Mercédès! My love—my wife! Oh! God! it is the Château d'If! Despair—despair!"

Shocked, terrified at the terrible energy of these words, and the expression of unutterable woe that rested on the countenance of the sleeper, the affrighted woman, who comprehended but too well the fearful significance of the abrupt and disjointed syllables, hastily arose as if to rouse the slumberer from his dream or to call on the Nubian for aid.

But, before she could carry the purpose into execution, the aspect of the Deputy's visage again had changed. A dark frown settled on the brow, a spirit of fixed resolve contracted the firm lip and dilated the nostril, and the word, "Vengeance—vengeance!" in whispers scarcely audible, but repeatedly and rapidly pronounced, was heard.

A longer silence than before succeeded. At length another change swept over the face, and the words, "Free—free—I am free!" burst from the lips; then they murmured, "Treasure untold! wondrous wealth!—diamonds—pearls—rubies—ingots of gold! The mad abbé's dream was reality!" Again the countenance darkened. "Fourteen years in a dungeon for no crime!—a father dead of starvation!—a bride the bride of the fiend who has done all this—and he a peer of France—and his friends a millionaire of Paris and the Procureur du Roi! Vengeance—vengeance—vengeance!" There was a pause, and the dreamer exultingly continued, "It is done! The peer of France is a disgraced suicide! The Procureur du Roi is a madman! The banker is a bankrupt!" The dreamer again paused, and his countenance once more changed. "Alas! alas! man is not God! 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord!' The innocent suffer with the guilty. To avenge a wrong has been sacrificed a life, and only misery has been the recompense! No more—no more—no more of this! Man and man's happiness be henceforth the aim! To that be devoted wealth untold!"

The lips ceased to move. Gradually the high excitement of the features passed away and was succeeded by an expression of sadness and love. "Haydée—gone—gone to a better world. Mercédès—Mercédès—oh! does she love me yet? The long lost idol of my heart!—the adored angel of my life!—come! come! come!"

As the dreamer spoke, he spread wide his arms; when his eyes opened, and his long slumbering senses returned, Mercédès, his own Mercédès, was, indeed, clasped to his breast.

"Mercédès! Mercédès?" he faintly whispered. "Ah! it was no dream, for you are, indeed, beside me and mine—mine forever!"

"Thine—thine—forever!" was the reply, and she clasped his feeble form to her heart as she would have clasped that of a child.

CHAPTER XVI.

A NOTABLE FÊTE.

On the night of Monday, February 21st, 1848, all Paris was at the house of M. Gaultier de Rumilly, in the Avenue des Champs Elysées. M. Gaultier de Rumilly was well known as one of the leaders of the extreme left, though the confidential friend of M. Odillon Barrot, and the fête was perfectly understood to be a political reunion, rather than a social one. All the accompaniments of the most splendid society events of the season were in requisition. Even the brilliant balls given by the opulent citizens of New York were eclipsed in luxury and splendor. There was the streaming of lamps and chandeliers, the swell of enchanting music, the whirl of the fascinating polka, redowa or mazurka, while throngs of richly attired and lovely women were constantly enhancing the magnificence of the scene by their arrival. The brilliancy of the occasion was also richly diversified by the presence of an unusually large number of officers of the Municipal and National Guards in full uniform, as well as of several belonging to the Line or the regiments of Algeria.

It was about ten o'clock. Within, all was light, life and loveliness; without, the winter wind moaned drearily through the leafless trees of the Boulevard, and the drifting sleet swept along the deserted streets. It was a wild night. Throughout all Paris seemed going forth a portentous murmur, like that mysterious moaning of the ocean, which, with mariners, is the prelude of a storm. An ominous whispering, as of many voices, seemed to sink and swell on the sweeping night blast; then all was still. Again, in the distance, would rise a sharp shout, or the stern, brief word of military command. At intervals, also, one might imagine he heard a deep rumbling, as of heavy ordnance and its tumbrels over the pavements, accompanied by the measured tread of armed men and the clattering hoofs of cavalry horses. Then these sounds died away, and along the narrow streets of Paris again the night wind only swept, the bitter blast howled and the ominous whispering, as of spirits, rose and fell.

It was a strange and stormy night—murky and chilly—while at intervals the cold rain dashed down in cutting blasts. But within the magnificent mansion of Gaultier de Rumilly all was light and loveliness, as has been said. The splendid salons were already thronged, yet crowds of richly-attired guests were constantly arriving.

"Ha! Beauchamp, just come?" cried Château-Renaud to his friend, as he entered.

"By the grace of God, yes!" said the journalist. "What a night!"

"What a throng of men and women say rather!" was the reply.

"Very true. Who's here?"

"Ask who's not here, and your question may be easily answered. All Paris is here! Women of every age and station, and men of all political creeds—Conservatives, Dynastics, Legitimists, Republicans and Communists. Indeed, this soirée seems to me, and I shouldn't wonder if it were designed so to be, a general reunion of the leaders of all the great parties in France, to compare notes and learn the news."

"And there is news enough to learn, it would seem. Is M. Dantès here?"

"He is, or was, and his beautiful wife, too, the most magnificent woman in Paris. Morrel also is here with his fair bride."

"And who is that dark, dignified man in the Turkish costume, around whom the ladies have clustered so inquisitively?" asked the Deputy.

"Why, that's the Emir of Algeria, the famous captive of the Duke d'Aumale," was the reply.

"What! Abd-el-Kader! How comes he here?"

"Oh! as a special favor, I suppose; he has a respite from his sad prison."

"What a splendid beard, and what keen black eyes!"

"No, his eyes are decidedly gray, but so shaded by his extraordinary lashes that they seem black. They say that he was more distinguished as a scholar, in Algeria, than as a soldier, statesman or priest. In fact, he is as erudite as an Arab can be, and his library, which is contained in two leathern trunks, accompanied him in all his wanderings prior to his submission."

"And what think you really induced him to surrender himself?"

"Policy of the deepest character, and worthy of Talleyrand, Metternich or Nesselrode, if we are to rely on the eloquent speech of Lamoricière in the Chamber, the other day."

"I remember. Bugeaud spoke first, and Lamoricière followed. He thought that the Arab Curtius leaped into the gulf because, by so doing, he was convinced he could injure French interests more than by his freedom. Well, perhaps he was right. He bids fair to be a hard bone of contention between the opposition and the Ministry."

"If I mistake not, Lamoricière disclaimed all responsibility for accepting the surrender, and placed it on the Governor-General, the young Duke, for whom the Ministry is liable?"

"Yes; and Guizot announced that he would send the Emir back to Alexandria, could security be given against his return to Algeria."

"As to the Emir's surrender, at which you wonder, the real cause is said to have been not policy, but the universal passion—love."

"He is an Antony, then, instead of a Curtius."

"So it seems. At the moment when, with incredible efforts, he had effected the passage of the Moorish camp, and was off like an ostrich for the desert, the firing of the French, who had reached his deira, struck his ear. Back he flew like the lamiel. Twice his horse fell under him dead—twice he was surrounded and seized, and twice, by his wonderful agility, he regained his freedom. At last, perceiving that all was lost, he turned his face again toward the desert, and, for two days and nights, continued his flight. But his heart was behind him. Certain of escape himself, he preferred hopeless captivity with her he loved, and he returned."

"Quite poetical, on my word! Worthy of Sadi, the Arab Petrarch, himself!" said Château-Renaud.

"He is decidedly a great man, that Abd-el-Kader. They say he bears his misfortunes like a philosopher—or, better, a Turk—unalterably mild and dignified, while his wives and his mother wail at his feet. Every morning he reads the Koran to them, and during the orisons all the windows are open, and a large fire blazes in the centre of the room."

"He is a decided godsend to the quidnuncs of Paris."

"So would be a Hottentot, or a North American savage," replied Beauchamp.

"Rather a different affair this from the Ministerial soirée a week ago, I fancy," remarked the editor.

"Rather. I will confess to you, Beauchamp, I attended that soirée from curiosity to see whether M. Guizot retained his habitual placidity of manner amid the clouds every day thickening around him."

"And what was the result?"

"Why, this. He was as polite and courteous as ever, and the same cold, imperturbable smile was on his thin lip; but he looked careworn, and upon his countenance was an expression of solicitude, when it was closely watched, which I never saw there before. Ah, Beauchamp, I envy not the Premier!"

"And the guests?" asked the journalist.

"Of guests there were but few; and the spacious salons of the Hôtel des Affaires Étrangères looked dismal and deserted."

"The lovely Countess Leven—"

"Even she was absent."

"And the Countess of Dino?"

"Absent, too."

"The soirée must have been, indeed, dull without those 'charming queens of intrigue,' as Louis Blanc courteously calls them. But tell me, Count, is the Minister really the husband of the beautiful Leven, or is she only his par amours?"

"No one knows. It is certain, however, that the great man devotes to the enchantress every moment he can steal from the State, though to look at him one would hardly suppose him a lover, in any meaning of the term. But who knows? To read his writings can one imagine a purer man? But, then, the affairs of Gisquet, Cubières, Teste, and, last and worst, Petit, whose case was before the Chamber, do they not betray deplorable lack of firmness or morality? But no more of this. Who is that dark, splendid woman to whom young Joliette seems so devoted? I have seen them together before!"

"Why, you surely have not forgotten Louise d'Armilly, the charming cantatrice! She has recently left the boards, to the irreparable loss of the opera, having come into possession of an immense inheritance—some millions, it is said, left by her father, who was once a banker of Paris. She is asserted to be very accomplished and very ambitious, and, as the young African paladin is thoroughly bewitched by her, and she by him, they will, doubtless, be matched as well as paired."