Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/88

68 "Do you, indeed, think so?" inquired the marquise.

"I am, at least, fearful of it. Napoleon, in the island of Elba, is too near France, and his presence, almost in sight of our coasts, keeps up the hopes of his partisans. Marseilles is filled with half-pay officers, who are daily, under one frivolous pretext or other, getting up quarrels with the royalists; hence duels among the higher classes, and assassinations in the lower."

"You have heard, perhaps," said the Count de Salvieux, one of M. de Saint-Méran's oldest friends, and chamberlain to the Count d'Artois, "that the Holy Alliance purpose removing him from thence?"

"Ah!" they were talking about it when we left Paris," said M. de Saint-Méran; "and where is it decided to transfer him?"

"To Saint Helena."

"Saint Helena! where is that?" asked the marquise.

"An island situated on the other side of the equator, at least two thousand leagues from hence," replied the count.

"So much the better! As Villefort observes, it is a great act of folly to have left such a man between Corsica, where he was born, Naples, of which his brother-in-law is king, and Italy, the sovereignty of which he coveted for his son."

"Unfortunately," said Villefort, "there are the treaties of 1814, and without violating them Napoleon cannot be touched."

"They will be violated," said the Count de Salvieux. "Did he regard treaty-clauses when he shot the hapless Duc d'Enghien?"

"Well," said the marquise, "the Holy Alliance will free Europe of Napoleon, and, M, de Villefort, Marseilles of his partisans. The king either reigns or does not. If he reigns, his government must be strong, and his agents inflexible. This is the way to prevent mischief."

"Unfortunately, madame," answered Villefort, a deputy Procureur du Roi only appears when the mischief is done."

"Then all he has got to do is to endeavor to repair it."

Nay, madame, we cannot repair it; we can only avenge the wrong done."

"Oh! M. de Villefort," cried a beautiful young creature, daughter to Count Salvieux, and the cherished friend of Mademoiselle de Saint-Méran, "do try and get up some famous trial while we are at Marseilles. I never was in a law-court; I am told it is so very amusing!"

"Amusing, certainly," replied Villefort, "for, in place of a fictitious tragedy, you have a real drama; in place of theatrical woes, real woes; the man whom you see there, instead of going home when the curtain falls, and supping with his family, and sleeping peacefully to begin again another day, goes back to prison, where he finds the executioner.