Wait and Hope

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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Mid-shot in a dim study: a solitary man in a dark formal coat stands at a walnut desk piled with stacked account books, sealed letters and iron keys, one gloved hand resting on a leather ledger opened to its last blank page, his face half in lamp-shadow under a single shaded lamp, gaze lowered. — He stands in the wreckage he himself has orchestrated, and feels nothing like a victor — only a clerk who has finished a long ledger and finds, turning to the final blank page, that there is nothing further to enter.

Wide seascape: a lone dark-coated man stands at the stern rail of a sailing yacht, a woman just behind him, watching the distant French coast fade to a pale smudge on the horizon under cool grey-blue morning light. — The revenge machine powers down. The man, emptied and quieted, is finally free.

The machine powers down. That is the only way to describe what becomes of the Count of Monte Cristo in those final days, when the gears he has so patiently engaged begin to release their hold on the lives around him. For months—years, if you count the silent years of incubation—he has been the unseen hand behind a series of domestic catastrophes that have stripped Fernand of his honor and his name, broken Danglars under the weight of debts he cannot discharge, and driven Villefort so deep into the corner of his own corruption that he can no longer tell where the law ends and his private madness begins. Each ruin was calculated. Each was deserved. And each, the Count now discovers, has cost him something he did not think to budget for: not the wealth he scattered like seed, and not the calm he borrowed from a borrowed name, but something quieter and far less replaceable—the simple conviction that the destruction of his enemies would leave him, at last, at peace. It does not. He stands in the wreckage he himself has orchestrated, and he feels nothing like a victor. He feels like a clerk who has finished a long ledger and finds, turning to the final blank page, that there is nothing further to enter.

The proofs of what this campaign has cost arrive in small, terrible shapes. There is the boy, Maximilian Morrel, the son of the only man who ever showed the imprisoned Edmond Dantès an unmerited kindness, and there is the girl, Valentine Villefort, who has been marked for death by a stepmother's greed and saved only because the Count, at the last hour, chose to apply his old pharmaceutical knowledge to the wrong cup rather than the right one. There is also, in the end, Haydée—the woman whose testimony opened the long indictment against Fernand, and who has loved the Count in the strange, unspeaking way of someone who understands that the man she loves is, in some essential corner of himself, already dead. For Haydée he leaves a fortune. For Maximilian and Valentine he leaves a wedding, a name, a future he will not be present to witness. He writes out his instructions with the same meticulous hand he once used to write the false notices that began his revenge; the penmanship is steady, the arithmetic exact, and the man holding the pen feels less and less as the ink dries.

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And then the departure. A yacht, a calm sea, the slow diminishing of the French coast until it is only a smudge on the horizon and then nothing at all. The Count goes as he came: a cipher, an absence, a question the world will continue to ask without answer. He leaves behind, for those who will receive it, a single sheet of paper on which is set down the entire moral of his life—the years in the Château d'If, the long apprenticeship to Abbé Faria, the years of wealth and disguise, the patient architecture of ruin—and it is all, when compressed, only two words. Wait, and hope. Not forgive; the Count never quite arrives at forgiveness, and one suspects he considers it a slackness he cannot afford. Not forget; the entire edifice of his existence is built on the refusal to forget. But wait, because every wound the world inflicts is also a clock the world must run out. And hope, because without it even the patient man is only a corpse in a suit, gesturing. He sails into whatever weather comes next with Haydée beside him, and if the reader looks closely at the figure standing at the taffrail, they will see that he is smiling now for the first time in the entire book—not with joy, exactly, but with the weary, hard-won recognition of a man who has finally set down a weight he had forgotten he was carrying. The revenge machine powers down. The man, emptied and quieted, is finally free.