Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 5).djvu/200

 

HE recent events formed the theme of conversation throughout all Paris. Emmanuel and his wife conversed with natural astonishment in their little apartment in the Rue Meslay upon the three successive, sudden, and most unexpected catastrophes of Morcerf, Danglars, and Villefort. Maximilian, who was paying them a visit, listened to their conversation, or rather, was present at it, plunged in his accustomed state of apathy.

"Indeed," said Julie, "might we not almost fancy, Emmanuel, that those people, so rich, so happy but yesterday, had forgotten, in the calculations on which they based their prosperity, that an evil genius hovered over them, who, like the wicked fairies in Perrault's stories, presenting themselves, unbidden, at some wedding or baptism, has appeared all at once, to revenge himself for their fatal neglect?"

"What misfortunes!" said Emmanuel, thinking of Morcerf and Danglars.

"What sufferings!" said Julie, remembering Valentine, but whom, with a delicacy natural to women, she did not name before her brother.

"If the Supreme Being has directed the fatal blow," said Emmanuel, "it must be that he, in his great goodness, has perceived nothing in the past lives of these people to merit mitigation of their awful punishment."

"Do you not form a very rash judgment, Emmanuel?" said Julie. "When my father, with a pistol in his hand, was once on the point of committing suicide, had any one then said, 'This man deserves his misery,' would not that person have been deceived?"

"Yes; but your father was not allowed to fall, nor Abraham to sacrifice his son. A being was commissioned to arrest the fatal hand of death in his case as in the patriarch's."

Emmanuel had scarcely uttered these words, when the sound of the bell was heard, the well-known signal given by the porter that a visitor