The Pharaon Comes Home

But sunlight, in Dumas's Marseille as in ours, is a thing that burns in proportion to the eye that watches it. By the time Dantès had kissed Morrel's hand and thanked him for the prospective promotion, three men had already begun to count his blessings as a theft from themselves. The first was Danglars, the purser — a lean, sallow accountant of a man whose ledgers had never once lied in his favor, and who had assumed the dead captain's chair would be his by right of age and paperwork. The second was Fernand Mondego, a soldier of fortune with the long jaw and shorter temper of his Catalan hills, who had loved Mercédès with the silent, gluttonous patience of a man who expects to inherit whatever he covets. The third was Caderousse, the tailor next door, a soft and sweating ruin of a fellow whose only constant companion was the bottle, and who nursed a grievance against the world precisely because the world would not nurse him. None of them, separately, was capable of much. Together, sitting on Caderousse's bench with the wine going round, they became something else: a small working conspiracy, each contributing the talent the others lacked. Danglars brought the method; Fernand brought the legs to carry it out; Caderousse — who in any other tale would have warned the bridegroom — supplied the cowardly nod that lets treason feel like consensus.

The betrothal feast was held that very night in the back room of Caderousse's shop, because the tailor's wife had laid the table and because, in such neighborhoods, a man's treachery is not thought to contradict a man's hospitality. They drank to the dead captain. They drank to the new captain. They drank to Mercédès, who sat at Dantès's right hand with her black hair loose on her shoulders and her eyes on no one but him. The young man, who had never in his life spoken an ill word of any of the men at that table, rose repeatedly to clink glasses and propose toasts, each one a small gold coin dropped into the velvet purse of his own good fortune. Somewhere between the third bottle and the fourth, Danglars let the subject drift, as a man drifts a fishing line, toward the cargo and the stop at Elba. Fernand leaned forward. Caderousse did not lean back. By the time the candles guttered in their own grease, the three had agreed, in voices soft enough to be mistaken for friendship, that an unsigned letter should travel to the King's prosecutor that very night, denouncing Edmond Dantès as a courier of Bonaparte, entrusted by the exiled Emperor with a secret dispatch to a Bonapartist committee in Paris. The package Dantès had carried ashore — a few trinkets for an old friend of his dead captain — would be repainted, in the letter, as state treason.

Fernand carried the letter to the post. Caderousse, who would later claim he had been drunk, kept his mouth shut. Danglars returned to his cabin and his ledger, and the night closed over the conspiracy like water. Within hours the law would come for the bridegroom — not at his lodgings, not at the docks, but at the door of his own celebration, with Mercédès still in her veil and the fiddler still tuning. The machine, built that evening out of nothing stronger than envy, was already turning. It would turn for nineteen years.