The Count of Monte Cristo. Alexandre Dumas

      “Well,” said Danglars, “did you see him?”

      “I have just left him,” answered Caderousse.

      “Did he allude to his hope of being captain?”

      “He spoke of it as a thing already decided.”

      “Patience!” said Danglars, “he is in too much hurry, it appears to me.”

      “Why, it seems M. Morrel has promised him the thing.”

      “So that he is quite elate about it.”

      “That is to say, he is actually insolent on the matter—has already offered me his patronage, as if he were a grand personage, and proffered me a loan of money, as though he were a banker.”

      “Which you refused.”

      “Most assuredly; although I might easily have accepted, for it was I who put into his hands the first silver he ever earned; but now M. Dantès has no longer any occasion for assistance—he is about to become a captain.”

      “Pooh!” said Danglars, “he is not one yet.”

      “Ma foi!—and it will be as well he never should be,” answered Caderousse; “for if he should be, there will be really no speaking to him.”

      “If we choose,” replied Danglars, “he will remain what he is, and, perhaps, become even less than he is.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Nothing—I was speaking to myself. And is he still in love with the Catalane?”

      “Over head and ears: but, unless I am much mistaken, there will be a storm in that quarter.”

      “Explain yourself.”

      “Why should I?”

      “It is more important than you think, perhaps. You do not love Dantès?”

      “I never like upstarts.”

      “Then tell me all you know relative to the Catalane.”

      “I know nothing for certain; only I have seen things which induce me to believe, as I told you, that the future captain will find some annoyance in the environs of the Vieilles Infirmeries.”

      “What do you know?—come, tell me!”

      “Well, every time I have seen Mercédès come into the city, she has been accompanied by a tall, strapping, black-eyed Catalan, with a red complexion, brown skin, and fierce air, whom she calls cousin.”

      “Really; and you think this cousin pays her attentions?”

      “I only suppose so. What else can a strapping chap of twenty-one mean with a fine wench of seventeen?”

      “And you say Dantès has gone to the Catalans?”

      “He went before I came down.”

      “Let us go the same way; we will stop at La Réserve, and we can drink a glass of La Malgue whilst we wait for news.”

      “Come along,” said Caderousse; “but mind you pay the shot.”

      “Certainly,” replied Danglars; and going quickly to the spot alluded to, they called for a bottle of wine and two glasses.

      Père Pamphile had seen Dantès pass not ten minutes before; and assured that he was at the Catalans, they sat down under the budding foliage of the planes and sycamores, in the branches of which the birds were joyously singing on a lovely day in early spring.

       3 The Catalans

      ABOUT A HUNDRED paces from the spot where the two friends were, with their looks fixed on the distance, and their ears attentive, whilst they imbibed the sparkling wine of La Malgue, behind a bare, and torn, and weather-worn wall, was the small village of the Catalans.

      One day a mysterious colony quitted Spain, and settled on the tongue of land on which it is to this day. It arrived from no one knew where, and spoke an unknown tongue. One of its chiefs, who understood Provençal, begged the commune of Marseilles to give them this bare and barren promontory, on which, like the sailors of the ancient times, they had run their boats ashore. The request was granted, and three months afterwards, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which had brought these gipsies of the sea, a small village sprung up.

      This village, constructed in a singular and picturesque manner, half Moorish, half Spanish, is that which we behold at the present day inhabited by the descendants of those men who speak the language of their fathers. For three or four centuries they remained faithful to this small promontory, on which they had settled like a flight of sea-birds, without mixing with the Marseillaise population, intermarrying, and preserving their original customs and the costume of their mother country, as they have preserved its language.

      Our readers will follow us along the only street of this little village, and enter with us into one of the houses, on the outside of which the sun had stamped that beautiful colour of the dead leaf peculiar to the buildings of the country, and within a coat of limewash, of that white tint which forms the only ornament of Spanish posadas.

      A young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the gazelle’s, was leaning with her back against the wainscot, rubbing in her slender fingers, moulded after the antique, a bunch of heath-blossoms, the flowers of which she was picking off, and strewing on the floor; her arms bare to the elbow, embrowned, and resembling those of the Venus at Arles, moved with a kind of restless impatience, and she tapped the earth with her pliant and well-formed foot so as to display the pure and full shape of her well-turned leg, in its red cotton stocking with gray and blue clocks.

      At three paces from her, seated in a chair which he balanced on two legs, leaning his elbow on an old worm-eaten table, was a tall young man of twenty or two-and-twenty, who was looking at her with an air in which vexation and uneasiness were mingled. He questioned her with his eyes, but the firm and steady gaze of the young girl controlled his look.

      “You see, Mercédès,” said the young man, “here is Easter come round again; tell me, is this the moment for a wedding?”

      “I have answered you a hundred times, Fernand, and really you must be your own enemy to ask me again.”

      “Well, repeat it,—repeat it, I beg of you, that I may at last believe it! Tell me for the hundredth time that you refuse my love, which had your mother’s sanction. Make me fully comprehend that you are trifling with my happiness, that my life or death are immaterial to you. Ah! to have dreamed for ten years of being your husband, Mercédès, and to lose that hope, which was the only stay of my existence!”

      “At least it was not I who ever encouraged you in that hope, Fernand,” replied Mercédès; “you cannot reproach me with the slightest coquetry. I have always said to you, I love you as a brother, but do not ask from me more than sisterly affection, for my heart is another’s. Is not this true, Fernand?”

      “Yes, I know it well, Mercédès,” replied the young man. “Yes, you have been cruelly frank with me; but do you forget that it is among the Catalans a sacred law to intermarry?”

      “You mistake, Fernand, it is not a law, but merely a custom; and, I pray of you, do not cite this custom in your favour. You are included in the conscription, Fernand, and are only at liberty on sufferance, liable at any moment to be called upon to take up arms. Once a soldier, what would you do with me, a poor orphan, forlorn, without fortune, with nothing but a hut, half in ruins, containing some ragged nets, a miserable inheritance left by my father to my mother, and by my mother to me? She has been dead a year, and you know, Fernand, I have subsisted almost entirely on public charity. Sometimes you pretend I am useful to you, and that is an excuse to share with me the produce of your fishing; and I accept it, Fernand, because you are the son of my father’s brother, because we were brought up together, and still