"Now, can you conceive any interest your heroic deputy procureur could by possibility have had in the destruction of that letter?"
"Why, he might have had, for he made me promise several times never to speak of that letter to any one; and, more than this, he insisted on my taking a solemn oath never to utter the name mentioned in the address."
"Noirtier!" repeated the abbé; "Noirtier! — I knew a person of that name at the court of the queen of Etruria, — a Noirtier, who had been a Girondin during the Revolution! What was your deputy called?"
"De Villefort!"
The abbé burst into a fit of laughter, while Dantès gazed on him in utter astonishment. "What ails you?" said he, at length.
"Do you see this ray of light?"
"I do."
"Well! I see my way more clearly than you discern that sunbeam. Poor fellow! poor young man! And this magistrate expressed sympathy for you?"
"He did!"
"And the worthy man destroyed your compromising letter?"
"He burned it before me!"
"And then this purveyor for the scaffold made you swear never to utter the name of Noirtier?"
"Certainly."
"Why, you poor, short-sighted simpleton! Can you not guess who this Noirtier was, whose very name he was so careful to keep concealed? This Noirtier was his father!"
Had a thunderbolt fallen at the feet of Dantès, or hell opened before him, he could not have been more completely transfixed with horror than at the words so wholly unexpected. Starting up, he clasped his hands around his head as though to prevent his very brain from bursting, and exclaimed:
"His father! oh, no! not his father, surely!"
"His own father, I assure you," replied the abbé; "his right name was Noirtier de Villefort!"
At this instant a bright light shot through the mind of Dantès, and cleared up all that had been dark and obscure before. The change that had come over Villefort during the examination; the destruction of the letter, the exacted promise, the almost supplicating tones of the magistrate, who seemed rather to implore mercy than denounce punishment, all returned to his memory. A cry of agony escaped his lips, and he staggered like a drunken man; then he hurried to the opening conducting from the abbé's cell to his own, and said:
