Chapter 72

CHAPTER 72
Madame de Saint-Meran.

A gloomy scene had indeed just passed at the house of M. de
Villefort. After the ladies had departed for the ball,
whither all the entreaties of Madame de Villefort had failed
in persuading him to accompany them, the procureur had shut
himself up in his study, according to his custom. with a
heap of papers calculated to alarm any one else, but which
generally scarcely satisfied his inordinate desires. But
this time the papers were a mere matter of form. Villefort
had secluded himself, not to study, but to reflect; and with
the door locked and orders given that he should not be
disturbed excepting for important business, he sat down in
his arm-chair and began to ponder over the events, the
remembrance of which had during the last eight days filled
his mind with so many gloomy thoughts and bitter
recollections. Then, instead of plunging into the mass of
documents piled before him, he opened the drawer of his
desk. touched a spring, and drew out a parcel of cherished
memoranda, amongst which he had carefully arranged, in
characters only known to himself, the names of all those
who, either in his political career, in money matters, at
the bar, or in his mysterious love affairs, had become his
enemies.

Their number was formidable, now that he had begun to fear,
and yet these names, powerful though they were, had often
caused him to smile with the same kind of satisfaction
experienced by a traveller who from the summit of a mountain
beholds at his feet the craggy eminences, the almost
impassable paths, and the fearful chasms, through which he
has so perilously climbed. When he had run over all these
names in his memory, again read and studied them, commenting
meanwhile upon his lists, he shook his head.

"No," he murmured, "none of my enemies would have waited so
patiently and laboriously for so long a space of time, that
they might now come and crush me with this secret.
Sometimes, as Hamlet says --

'Foul deeds will rise,
Tho, all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes;'

but, like a phosphoric light, they rise but to mislead. The
story has been told by the Corsican to some priest, who in
his turn has repeated it. M. de Monte Cristo may have heard
it, and to enlighten himself -- but why should he wish to
enlighten himself upon the subject?" asked Villefort, after
a moment's reflection, "what interest can this M. de Monte
Cristo or M. Zaccone, -- son of a shipowner of Malta,
discoverer of a mine in Thessaly, now visiting Paris for the
first time, -- what interest, I say, can he take in
discovering a gloomy, mysterious, and useless fact like
this? However, among all the incoherent details given to me