CHAPTER XC
THE MEETING
FTER Mercédès had left Monte-Cristo, a gloomy shadow seemed to overspread everything. Around him and within a him thought appeared stopped; his energetic mind slumbered, as does the body after extreme fatigue.
"What," said he to himself, while the lamp and the wax lights were nearly burned out, and the servants were waiting impatiently in the anteroom; "what! this edifice which I have been so long preparing—which I have reared with so much care and toil, is to be crumbled by a single touch, a word, even a slight breath! Yes, this self, of whom I thought so much, of whom I was so proud, who had appeared so worthless in the dungeons of the Château-d'If, and whom I had succeeded in making so great, will be but a lump of clay to-morrow. Alas, it is not the death of the body I regret; for that destruction of the vital principle is it not the rest to which everything is tending, to which every unhappy being aspires, the repose of matter after which I so long sighed, and which I was seeking to obtain by the painful process of starvation when Faria appeared in my dungeon? What is death for me but one step more toward repose? No, it is not existence, then, that I regret, but the ruin of our projects, so slowly carried out, so laboriously framed. Providence is now opposed to them, when I most thought it would be propitious. It is not God's will they should be accomplished. This burden, almost as heavy as a world, which I had raised, and I had thought to bear to the end, was too great for my strength, and I was compelled to lay it down in the middle of my career.
"Oh! shall I then again become a fatalist, whom fourteen years of despair and ten of hope had rendered a believer in Providence? And all this—all this, because my heart, which I thought dead, was only
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