so you will, M. le Cointe, and continue this coversation at my house, any day you may be willing to see an adversary capable of understand ing and anxious to refute you, and I will show you my father, M. Noirtier de Villefort, one of the most fiery Jacobins of the French Revolution; that is to say, the most remarkable audacity, seconded by a most powerful organization—a man who, perhaps, has not, like yourself, seen all the kingdoms of the earth, but who has helped to overturn one of the most powerful; in fact, a man who, like you, believed himself 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, laughing at the cannon, laughing at 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, so redoubted, was the next morning poor M. Noirtier, the helpless old man, at the tender mercies of the weak est creature in the household,—that is, his grandchild, Valentine: a dumb and frozen carcass, in fact, who only lives without suffering, that time may be given to his frame to decompose without his consciousness of his 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. Augustin, and G-all have made, in verse and prose, the compari son 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 spread so much sorrow throughout your house."
"It would have done so unquestionably, had not God given me so large a compensation. In presence of 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
