rcédès burst into tears. As Villefort tried to push past her, she grabbed his arm.
"At least tell where he is! I just need to know if he’s alive or dead!"
"I don’t know. He’s no longer my responsibility," Villefort lied.
Desperate to end this painful encounter, he shoved past her and slamd his door shut, as if he could lock out the guilt that was eating at him. But guilt isn’t so easily banished. Like a soldier carrying an arrow wound, he carried this pain with him as he returned to the salon, where he collapsed into a chair with a sigh that was almost a sob.
For the first ti in his life, the crushing weight of genuine remorse seized his heart. The innocent man he had sacrificed for his own ambition appeared in his mind’s eye, pale, accusing, leading his heartbroken fiancée by the hand.
This wasn’t the dramatic, mythical guilt he’d read about in books, but sothing far worse. A slow, consuming agony that would intensify with every passing hour until the day he died.
For a mont, he hesitated. Throughout his career, he had sent countless criminals to their deaths with his eloquent argunts, and he had never felt a mont’s regret because they had been guilty, or at least, he had believed they were guilty.
But this was different. This ti, he had destroyed an innocent man’s happiness. This ti, he wasn’t the judge, he was the executioner.
As these thoughts tornted him, he felt a new sensation rising in his chest, filling him with naless dread. It was like the way an injured person instinctively cringes when soone reaches toward their wound. But Villefort’s wound would never heal, or if it did, it would only reopen even more painfully than before.
If, at that mont, Renée had walked in and begged him to show rcy, or if the beautiful rcédès had appeared and said, "In God’s na, please give back my fiancé," his cold, trembling hands would have signed Dantès’ release imdiately. But no voice broke the silence of the chamber. The only interruption ca when Villefort’s servant entered to tell him his traveling carriage was ready.
Villefort sprang from his chair, hastily opened a desk drawer, and emptied all the gold it contained into his pockets. He stood motionless for an instant, pressing his hand to his head and muttering incoherently. Then, seeing that his servant had placed his traveling cloak on his shoulders, he rushed to the carriage and ordered the drivers to take him back to the Saint-Méran estate.
Poor Dantès’ fate was sealed.
As promised, Villefort found the marquise and Renée waiting for him. He was startled when he saw Renée, fearing she was about to plead for Dantès’s life. But her emotions were entirely personal, she was only thinking about Villefort’s departure.
She loved Villefort deeply, and he was leaving her just as they were about to be married. He had no idea when he would return, and Renée, far from wanting to help Dantès, actually hated the man whose supposed cri was separating her from her beloved.
anwhile, what of rcédès? After her encounter with Villefort, she had t her cousin Fernand at the corner of Loge Street. She had returned to her ho in the fishing village and thrown herself onto her bed in despair. Fernand knelt beside her, taking her hand and covering it with kisses that she didn’t even feel.
She spent the entire night this way. The oil lamp burned out, but she didn’t notice the darkness. Dawn ca, but she didn’t realize it was morning. Grief had blinded her to everything except thoughts of Edmond.
"Oh, you’re there," she said finally, turning toward Fernand.
"I haven’t left your side since yesterday," Fernand replied sadly.
Monsieur Morrel, Dantès’s employer, hadn’t given up the fight easily. When he learned that Dantès had been arrested and imprisoned, he had gone to all his friends and every influential person in the city. But word had already spread that Dantès was arrested as a supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Since even the most optimistic people considered Napoleon’s return to power impossible, Morrel t with nothing but refusals. He had returned ho in despair, declaring that the situation was hopeless and nothing more could be done.
Caderousse was equally restless and worried, but instead of trying to help Dantès like Morrel had, he shut himself up at ho with two bottles of blackcurrant brandy, hoping to drown his troubled thoughts in alcohol. It didn’t work.
He beca too drunk to fetch more liquor, but not drunk enough to forget what had happened. With his elbows on the table, he sat between two empty bottles while horrific visions danced in the flickering candlelight, nightmarish phantoms like sothing out of a dark fairy tale.
Only Danglars was content and happy. He had eliminated a rival and secured his own position aboard the rchant ship Pharaon. Danglars was one of those n born with a calculator for a heart, who saw everything in terms of profit and loss.
A human life ant less to him than a number on a ledger, especially when destroying it could advance his own interests. He went to bed at his usual ti and slept peacefully.
After receiving Salvieux’s letter of introduction, Villefort embraced Renée, kissed the marquise’s hand, shook the marquis’s hand, and departed for Paris via the Aix road.
Old Dantès, Edmond’s father, was dying of anxiety, desperate to know what had happened to his son.
But we know exactly what had beco of Edmond.
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