The Deputy Prosecutor

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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Gendarmes in blue-and-silver coats filing into a lamplit Marseilles inn where a young sailor is seized at his own engagement table while guests step back in silence. — The toasts were still ringing in the rafters when the door opened to admit not guests but the law.

Close of a young prosecutor's steady hand holding a letter into a candle flame on a mahogany desk while a freshly signed warrant and a red wax seal lie beside it. — All political grace, in the end, requires a corpse to dress it — and this time, the corpse would have to be a living man.

Wide night seascape in 19th-century etching style: a small chained figure led along a lamplit Marseilles quay toward a rowing boat by two gendarmes, with the black fortress of Château d'If rising from the Mediterranean across dark water, a single lantern glowing on its keep. — A boy had walked out of a feast in the morning; a number walked into stone in the evening.

The toasts were still ringing in the rafters of the inn at the Catalans when the door opened to admit not guests but the law. Gendarmes in their blue-and-silver coats filed through the threshold, and the laughter in the room curdled into the bright, brittle silence of a people who knew the taste of sudden authority. Edmond Dantès, flushed with wine and the first joy of a young man who had just won a captaincy, a woman, and the future in a single afternoon, was seized at his own engagement table. The warrant named him as the bearer of a conspiracy in his pocket — a letter, it was said, intended for Paris and the Bonaparte committee. He had not read the letter; he had merely agreed, in the idiotic politeness of a sailor who knew the sender, to deliver what he had not been allowed to examine. The guests, one by one, rose and stepped back from the long table. The bride-to-be went white; her kin, who had moments before offered their embraces, found reasons to look elsewhere. So begins, in the count of any honest ledger, the long arithmetic of injustice: a man may love sincerely, work diligently, plan honestly — and still, when the state needs a body to fill a cell, that body will do.

ImaRead2

Down in the marble corridors of the Palais de Justice, the file was placed before a man who was still in the first bloom of his ambition. Gérard de Villefort, deputy crown prosecutor, had only that morning sealed his alliance with the winning side of French politics by wedding into a royalist house. He sat beneath the republican seal he had inherited from his father's office and reviewed the evidence as one reviews a crossword — neatly, swiftly, with the satisfaction of an intellect that loves to fit things into boxes. The facts, as presented, were almost offensively simple. A young sailor had been entrusted with a document destined for the exiled Bonapartist committee in Paris. He was to be prosecuted not for what he had done but for what he might have done, and perhaps more importantly, for what his prosecution would demonstrate to the new regime about the prosecutor's zeal. Villefort's pen hovered, ready to dismiss the affair as the small foolishness of a boy used by older conspirators. There is always a path for the clever man who wishes to be merciful and seen to be so. He had nearly taken it.

Then his eye fell upon the name of the letter's intended recipient. The blood left his face in a single, silent wave, and what had been a young man's career became a choice between a father's life and his own. The addressee was Noirtier — that is to say, Noirtier de Villefort, his own father, a Bonapartist agent under active surveillance, the black sheep whose name the new magistrate had spent a season quietly erasing from public documents. To prosecute the letter, even secretly, was to send it upward through the bureaucracy until it reached a desk that would gladly use it to unmake his own marriage, his own office, his own neck. To bury it required burying the messenger. There is no political elegance that does not eventually demand a corpse to decorate it; in this case the corpse was to be a living one. Villefort read the letter once through, and his hand, very steadily, carried it to the candle. The paper blackened, curled, and was consumed. In its place he drew up, with the same elegant penmanship, the order committing Edmond Dantès to a fortress prison whose inmates were counted not by years of sentence but by the slow erosion of their names from every registry that mattered. He signed it without a tremor, and the signature was as courteous as a bow made to a lady at the opera.

That night, while the lamps of Marseilles threw their warm circles over the stones, the prisoner was conducted in chains toward the sea. The Chateau d'If rose from the water like a tooth of the Mediterranean, and behind its walls silence kept its own long ledger. He had been given no trial, no date of release, no crime but the convenient shape of one. A boy had walked out of a feast in the morning; a number walked into stone in the evening. Somewhere in the cold office of a courteous man, the machinery of a future vengeance had been oiled, though the courteous man did not yet know it, and the boy did not yet know he would one day become the thing that grinds the machine. The signature dried on the parchment. The candle burned out. And the count, not yet a count, not yet anything but a name in a ledger and a question in a cell, began.