The Count Enters Paris

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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Wide engraving-style view of a lone pale gentleman stepping onto a parquet floor under a chandelier, a majordomo bowing, Paris guests turning to look. — He does not announce himself. He is announced.

Mid-shot 19th-century engraving of a pale gentleman toasting quietly at a candlelit dinner table, three well-dressed men around him and a small pale boy watching from a distant doorway. — He lets them think they are the ones using him.

Seven years is a long apprenticeship in hatred. The man who walks the parquet floors of Paris this season is not a sailor, not a prisoner, not the broken thing they pulled from the Mediterranean and forgot in a cell. He is, by every ledger and visiting card, the Count of Monte Cristo — a title no one can trace, a fortune no one can dim, a manner so lacquered in courtesy that the blade beneath it is invisible until the moment it lands. He speaks Italian to Italians, English to the English, and to the French, that older French — the French of salons, of measured silences, of smiles that arrive a heartbeat after the warmth has left the room. He does not announce himself. He is announced. He lets Parisians discover him the way one discovers a new comet: by the light he throws on everyone around him, and by the faint, unsettling sense that he was already there before anyone thought to look up.

His enemies, the men he has crossed an ocean and outlived a kingdom to find, are exactly where his patient arithmetic placed them. Danglars, once a quill-pusher with a smuggler's morals, is now Baron Danglars, a financier with a bank that swallows fortunes and belches rumors; he is growing fat on the public's trust and thin on sleep, and the Count watches him with the polite interest of a man reading a long-anticipated novel. Fernand Mondego has been laundered into Count de Morcerf, hero of the pavilion at Yanina, decorated, respectable, a senator's equal and Mercedes's husband — the very Mercedes, the fisherman's daughter, who once promised her life to another and received instead this glittering counterfeit. And Villefort, the crown prosecutor, has climbed so high on the ladder of other men's ruined lives that he has forgotten the rungs are still wet. Each of them has buried something. The Count has come to dig.

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The machine turns without sound. The Count does not storm the salons; he is received in them, by rank of purse and pallor of smile. He is introduced to Danglars' banker, to Morcerf's creditors, to Villefort's wife — a woman whose piety is a painted door over a furnace — and to her young, pale son by her first marriage, whose curious resemblance to no living man in the household the Count notes with the care of a notary. He is helpful. He is always helpful. He offers small, perfectly tailored kindnesses: a line of credit here, an introduction there, a question asked with such delicate art that the answer arrives before the listener realizes he has been opened like a letter. He dines in their houses and praises their wives. He compliments their children. He lets them think they are the ones using him, the way a man on a chessboard thinks he is using the clock. Every invitation he accepts is another gear engaged. Every glass of wine he lifts is a toast no one else can hear.

None of them knows him. That is the small, exquisite miracle at the heart of the work. The man they wronged was young, and dark, and shouted; this man is older, paler, quieter, and he has taught his eyes the courtesy of strangers. They pass him at the opera, they brush his sleeve at a reception, they read his name in the morning papers beside the kings and the railroad kings, and not one of them feels the floor tilt. They are rich now, and respected, and the past is a thing they have put away in a locked room. The Count is the key to that room. He turns it, for the moment, only a quarter — just enough to let a draft of cold air whisper under the door, just enough that someone, somewhere, might wake in the night and wonder why the candle flickers. He has all the time in the world. They, without knowing it, have none.