The Count of Monte Cristo — Layout Demo

In the salted harbor of Marseille, beneath a February sky the color of pewter, the merchant brig Pharaon crawled home without her master. Captain Leclère had died of brain fever on the return voyage, and the crew, hollow-eyed and short-handed, had looked to the first mate — a nineteen-year-old of no birth and considerable nerve — to nurse the ship into port. That young man was Edmond Dantès, and he performed the work as if it had been rehearsed: the sounding leads tossed at every breath of wind, the topsails reefed in good time, the tallow-greased cables paid out without a syllable wasted. He mourned his captain with the same clean restraint he brought to the rigging. To those who watched from the quay he seemed to step ashore already halfway up the ladder, for the ship's owner, Morrel, was known to reward steady hands, and rumor had it that Dantès was to be given the Pharaon's wheel. As though that were not enough sunlight for one afternoon, the young sailor carried a second promise in his pocket: in three weeks he would marry the Catalan beauty Mercédès, who had been answering yes to his letters since they were both children. Marseille, which is a city that eats its young with great affection, prepared to applaud.

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.