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Madame de Saint-Morin's Grief

29:31 recording · EN · 1 speaker

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Brief overview

A grandmother arrives with news of her husband's sudden death and demands Valentine's marriage be hastened.

  1. Villefort fears the hand, not the secretHe could deny the revelation itself; what terrified him was discovering whose hand had traced it.
  2. A sudden death on the road from MarseillesMonsieur de Saint-Morin took his usual lozenges, slept unnaturally, shrieked, and was a corpse on arrival.
  3. The spectre, the glass, and the orangeadeThe marchioness saw a white figure touch her glass; Valentine then poured her the orangeade from it.
Executive Summary AI
  • Joe Burbage reads Chapter 72, "Madame de Saint-Morin", of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas, opening on Villefort shut alone in his study while the women go to the ball.
  • Instead of working he opens a spring drawer and rereads the coded list of his enemies, concluding that none of them could have waited so long to crush him with his secret, and suspecting instead that a Corsican told a priest and that Monsieur de Monte Cristo, also called Zaccarone, may have heard it.
  • A carriage brings his mother-in-law, Madame de Saint-Morin, who announces that Monsieur de Saint-Morin died a week earlier: six leagues from Marseilles, after taking his usual lozenges, he fell into an unnatural sleep, cried out, and was dead of an apoplectic stroke by the time she reached X, so she had him put into a lead coffin for the family vault.
  • Villefort fetches Valentine from Madame de Morcef's ball, Barois carries the news to the paralysed Noirtier, who asks by eye signals to see his granddaughter, and Valentine sits with her grandmother, who is left a bottle of orangeade and a glass within reach.
  • The next morning the feverish marchioness insists the marriage to Monsieur Depinay, son of General Depinet, be hurried because she is going to die, describes a white figure entering from Madame de Villefort's dressing-room and touching her glass, calls for a notary to secure her property for Valentine, drinks the orangeade, and Valentine, hiding her love for the plebeian Maximilian Morel, goes dow
Key Quote
“none of my enemies would have waited so patiently and laboriously for so long a space of time that they might now come and crush me with this secret”
— Joe Burbage
Key Quote
“I shall die of it. Oh, yes, I shall certainly die of it.”
— Joe Burbage
Key Quote
“I applied my smelling salts, but all was over, and I arrived at X by the side of a corpse.”
— Joe Burbage

Transcript

0:00 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
0:06 For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.
0:13 Recorded by Joe Burbage from London, UK, in October 2006.
0:22 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas.
0:28 Chapter 72. Madame de Saint-Morin A gloomy scene had indeed just passed at the house of Monsieur de Villefort.
0:34 After the ladies had departed for the ball, whither all the entreaties of Madame de Villefort
0:40 had failed in persuading him to accompany them, The procureur had shut himself up in his study,
0:47 according to his custom,
0:48 with a heap of papers calculated to alarm anyone else,
0:52 but which generally scarcely satisfied his inordinate desires.
0:57 But this time the papers were a mere matter of form.
1:01 Vilfort had secluded himself,
1:03 not to study, but to reflect, and with the door locked and orders given that he should not be disturbed excepting for important business he sat down in his arm-chair and began to ponder over the events filled his mind with so many gloomy thoughts and bitter recollections.
1:29 Then, instead of plunging into the mass of documents piled before him,
1:33 he opened the drawer of his desk, touched a spring,
1:36 and drew out a parcel of cherished memoranda,
1:41 amongst which he had carefully arranged, in characters only known to himself,
1:45 the names of all those who, either in his political career, in money matters,
1:47 at the bar, or in his mysterious love affairs, had become his enemies.
1:53 Their number was formidable, now that he had begun to fear, and yet these names, powerful
2:00 though they were, had often caused him to smile with the same kind of satisfaction experienced by a
2:06 traveller who, from the summit of a mountain, beholds at his feet the craggy eminences,
2:13 the almost impassable paths, and the fearful chasms through which he has so perilously climbed.
2:20 When he had run over all these names in his memory again read and studied them commenting meanwhile upon his lists he shook his head
2:30 no he murmured none of my enemies would have waited so patiently and laboriously for so long a space of time that they might now come and crush me with this secret secret. Sometimes, as Hamlet says, foul deeds will rise, though all the earth overwhelm them to men's
2:49 eyes. But, like a phosphoric light, they rise but to mislead. The story has been told by the Corsican
2:59 to some priest, who, in his turn, has repeated it. Monsieur de Monte Cristo may have heard it,
3:07 and, to enlighten himself...
3:09 But why should he wish to enlighten himself upon the subject?
3:12 asked Phil Fort, after a moment's reflection.
3:16 What interest can this Monsieur de Monte Cristo,
3:19 or Monsieur Zaccarone, son of a shipowner of Malta,
3:23 discoverer of a mine in Thessaly,
3:24 now visiting Paris for the first time,
3:27 what interest, I say, can he take in discovering a gloomy, mysterious, and useless fact like this?
3:35 However, among all the incoherent details given to me by the Abbasini and by Lord Wilmore,
3:42 by that friend and that enemy, one thing appears certain and clear in my
3:47 opinion, that in no period, in no case, in no circumstance could there have been any contact
3:54 between him and me. But Vilfort uttered words which even he himself did not believe. He dreaded not so much the revelation,
4:08 for he could reply to or deny its truth.

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