t
now, and I now again warn you."

"Then you yourself are one of these marked beings?"

"Yes, monsieur, I believe so; for until now, no man has found himself in
a position similar to mine. The dominions of kings are limited either
by mountains or rivers, or a change of manners, or an alteration of
language. My kingdom is bounded only by the world, for I am not an
Italian, or a Frenchman, or a Hindu, or an American, or a Spaniard--I am
a cosmopolite. No country can say it saw my birth. God alone knows what
country will see me die. I adopt all customs, speak all languages. You
believe me to be a Frenchman, for I speak French with the same facility
and purity as yourself. Well, Ali, my Nubian, believes me to be an Arab;
Bertuccio, my steward, takes me for a Roman; Haidee, my slave, thinks
me a Greek. You may, therefore, comprehend, that being of no country,
asking no protection from any government, acknowledging no man as
my brother, not one of the scruples that arrest the powerful, or the
obstacles which paralyze the weak, paralyzes or arrests me. I have only
two adversaries--I will not say two conquerors, for with perseverance I
subdue even them,--they are time and distance. There is a third, and the
most terrible--that is my condition as a mortal being. This alone can
stop me in my onward career, before I have attained the goal at which
I aim, for all the rest I have reduced to mathematical terms. What men
call the chances of fate--namely, ruin, change, circumstances--I have
fully anticipated, and if any of these should overtake me, yet it
will not overwhelm me. Unless I die, I shall always be what I am, and
therefore it is that I utter the things you have never heard, even from
the mouths of kings--for kings have need, and other persons have fear
of you. For who is there who does not say to himself, in a society as
incongruously organized as ours, 'Perhaps some day I shall have to do
with the king's attorney'?"

"But can you not say that, sir? The moment you become an inhabitant of
France, you are naturally subjected to the French law."

"I know it sir," replied Monte Cristo; "but when I visit a country I
begin to study, by all the means which are available, the men from whom
I may have anything to hope or to fear, till I know them as well as,
perhaps better than, they know themselves. It follows from this, that
the king's attorney, be he who he may, with whom I should have to deal,
would assuredly be more embarras