reatest; in fact, a man who believed himself,
like you, one of the envoys, not of God, but of a supreme being; not of
providence, but of fate. Well, sir, the rupture of a blood-vessel on the
lobe of the brain has destroyed all this, not in a day, not in an hour,
but in a second. M. Noirtier, who, on the previous night, was the old
Jacobin, the old senator, the old Carbonaro, laughing at the guillotine,
the cannon, and the dagger--M. Noirtier, playing with revolutions--M.
Noirtier, for whom France was a vast chess-board, from which pawns,
rooks, knights, and queens were to disappear, so that the king was
checkmated--M. Noirtier, the redoubtable, was the next morning 'poor M.
Noirtier,' the helpless old man, at the tender mercies of the weakest
creature in the household, that is, his grandchild, Valentine; a dumb
and frozen carcass, in fact, living painlessly on, that time may be
given for his frame to decompose without his consciousness of its
decay."

"Alas, sir," said Monte Cristo "this spectacle is neither strange to
my eye nor my thought. I am something of a physician, and have, like
my fellows, sought more than once for the soul in living and in dead
matter; yet, like providence, it has remained invisible to my eyes,
although present to my heart. A hundred writers since Socrates, Seneca,
St. Augustine, and Gall, have made, in verse and prose, the comparison
you have made, and yet I can well understand that a father's sufferings
may effect great changes in the mind of a son. I will call on you,
sir, since you bid me contemplate, for the advantage of my pride, this
terrible spectacle, which must have been so great a source of sorrow to
your family."

"It would have been so unquestionably, had not God given me so large a
compensation. In contrast with the old man, who is dragging his way
to the tomb, are two children just entering into life--Valentine,
the daughter by my first wife--Mademoiselle Renee de Saint-Meran--and
Edward, the boy whose life you have this day saved."

"And what is your deduction from this compensation, sir?" inquired Monte
Cristo.

"My deduction is," replied Villefort, "that my father, led away by his
passions, has committed some fault unknown to human justice, but marked
by the justice of God. That God, desirous in his mercy to punish but
one person, has visited this justice on him alone." Monte Cristo with a
smile on his lips, uttered in the depths of his soul a groan which would
have made