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Count's Garden Strategy

21:33 recording · EN · 3 speakers

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Brief overview

Monte Cristo buys a telegraph clerk's honesty for 25,000 francs and ruins Danglars with a false signal.

  1. A man with no ambition is the obstacleMonte Cristo asks himself whether he has met a man with no ambition, one who would spoil his plans — then finds the man's passion is horticulture.
  2. The pension is the lever, not the wageA thousand francs a year and fifteen years already served toward a hundred-crown pension make twenty-five thousand francs irresistible.
  3. One repeated sign moves six million francsThree signs the clerk does not understand become the flight of Don Carlos, the sale of Danglars' Spanish bonds, and a million-franc loss.
Executive Summary AI
  • Monte Cristo rides to the Tower of Montalherry on the plain of that name, climbs an eighteen-inch path and lets himself through a willow-hinged gate into a twenty-by-twelve-foot garden kept without a slug, an aphis or a weed.
  • Behind a wheelbarrow he finds the telegraph man gathering strawberries, who counts eleven against sixteen last year, accuses Mary Simon's son of stealing three, and blames the dormice that took an apricot and half his only nectarine.
  • The man explains he is paid a thousand francs and lodged, likes not understanding the signals because then he carries no responsibility, has served fifteen of the twenty-five years needed for a pension of a hundred crowns, and takes his holidays only when there is fog.
  • Monte Cristo offers fifteen thousand francs, then forces ten thousand more on him — twenty-five thousand, enough for a house with two acres and a thousand francs a year — to repeat three signs drawn on a paper from his pocket.
  • The false message reaches the minister of the interior; Debray drives to the Danglars house, the baroness has her husband sell six millions' worth of Spanish bonds at any price, and the next morning Le Monteur blames a fog-garbled signal, leaving Danglars a million worse off.
Key Quote
“Ah, the young rascal! Stealing in a garden!”
— The gardener
Key Quote
“Every man has a devouring passion in his heart, as every fruit has its worm.”
— Narrator
Key Quote
“Because then I have no responsibility.”
— The gardener

Transcript

0:00 CHAPTER 61.
0:18 How a Gardener May Get Rid of the Dormice that eat his peaches not on the same night as he had intended but the Count reached the Tower of Montalherry,
0:46 situated, as every one knows, upon the highest point of the plain of that name.
0:52 At the foot of the hill the Count dismounted and began to ascend by a little winding path,
0:57 about eighteen inches wide. When he had reached the summit he found himself stopped by a hedge,
1:04 upon which green fruit had seceded to red and white flowers.
1:10 Monte Cristo looked for the entrance to the enclosure,
1:14 and was not long in finding a little wooden gate,
1:17 working on willow hinges, and fastened with a nail and string.
1:21 The Count soon mastered the mechanism, the gate opened,
1:25 and he then found himself in a
1:26 little garden, about twenty feet long by twelve wide, bounded on one side by part of the hedge,
1:33 which contained the ingenious contrivance we have called a gate. On the other, by the old tower,
1:40 covered with ivy and studded with wall-flowers, no one would have thought, in looking at this old,
1:46 weather-beaten, floral-decked tower, which might be likened to an elderly dame dressed up to receive
1:53 her grandchildren at a birthday feast, that it would have been capable of telling strange things,
1:58 if, in addition to the menacing ears which the Proverbs say all walls are provided with it had also a voice the garden was crossed by a path of red gravel edged by a border of thick box of many years growth and of a tone and color that would have delighted the shape of the figure of eight, thus, in its windings, making a walk of sixty feet in a garden of only twenty.
2:31 Never had Flora, the fresh and smiling goddess of gardeners, been honored with a purer or more scrupulous worship than that which was paid to her in this little enclosure. In fact, of the twenty rose-trees which formed the partire,
2:47 not one bore the mark of the slug, nor were there evidences anywhere of the clustering aphis which
2:54 is so destructive to plants growing in a damp soil. And yet it was not because the damp had
3:00 been excluded from the garden. The earth, black as soot, the thick foliage of the trees
3:06 betrayed its presence.
3:08 Besides, had natural humidity been wanting, it could have been immediately supplied by
3:14 artificial means, thanks to a tank of water, sunk in one of the corners of the garden,
3:20 and upon which were stationed a frog and a toad who from antipathy no doubt always remained on the two opposite sides of the basin
3:31 there was not a blade of grass to be seen in the paths or a weed in the flower-beds no fine lady ever trained and watered her geraniums her cacti and her rhodendrons, with more pains than this hitherto unseen gardener
3:46 bestowed upon his little enclosure. Monte Cristo stopped after having closed the gate,
3:52 and fastened the string to the nail, and cast a look around.
3:57 The man at the telegraph, said he, must either engage a gardener, or devote himself passionately
4:04 to agriculture. Suddenly he struck against something crouching behind a wheel-barrel filled with leaves the something rose uttering an exclamation of astonishment plucking strawberries, which he was placing upon grape-leaves. He had twelve leaves, and about as
4:26 many strawberries, which, on rising suddenly, he let fall from his hand.
4:32 "'You are gathering your crops, sir?' said Monte Cristo, smiling.
4:36 "'Excuse me, sir,' replied the man, raising his hand to his cap.
4:40 "'I am not up there, I know, but I have only just come down.'
4:45 "'Do not let me interfere with you in anything, my friend, said the Count.
4:50 Gather your strawberries, if, indeed, there are any left.
4:54 I have ten left, said the man, for here are eleven, and I had twenty-one, five more than last year.
5:02 But I am not surprised. The spring has been warm this year and strawberries require heat sir this is the reason that instead of the sixteen i had last year i have this year you see eleven already plucked twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen 17, 18. Ah, I missed three. They were here last night. Sir, I am sure they were here.
5:29 I counted them. It must be the Mary Simon's son who has stolen them. I saw him strolling
5:35 about here this morning. Ah, the young rascal! Stealing in a garden! He does not know where

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