Chapter 47: Unlimited Credit
Monte Cristo now engages in a clever, complex ruse to
win the good graces of the Danglars and Villefort families. He instructs
Bertuccio to purchase Danglars’s two most beautiful horses for twice
their asking price, knowing that these horses actually belong to
Madame Danglars. With these two horses attached to his coach, Monte Cristo
then visits Danglars at home in order to open an unlimited credit
account with him, an act that astonishes and humbles Danglars.
Chapter 48: The Dapper Grays
While Monte Cristo is still at the Danglars residence,
Madame Danglars is told that her horses have been sold, and she
sees them attached to Monte Cristo’s carriage. She becomes enraged
with her husband for selling them. Monte Cristo excuses himself
from the scene, as does Madame Danglars’s lover, Lucien Debray.
Later that evening, Monte Cristo, in a gallant gesture, returns
the horses as a gift.
Knowing that Madame de Villefort will be borrowing these horses
the next day, Monte Cristo arranges for the horses to become wild
while they pass by his house. As the runaway horses go by, bearing
the panic-stricken Madame de Villefort and her son, Edward, Ali,
Monte Cristo’s servant, lassos them easily, saving mother and son.
Edward passes out from fear, and Monte Cristo uses a special potent
elixir to revive him.
Chapter 49: Ideology
I wish to be Providence myself, for I
feel that the most beautiful, noblest, most sublime thing in the
world, is to recompense and punish.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Villefort visits Monte Cristo in order to thank him for
saving his wife and son. Monte Cristo engages Villefort in a conversation
in which they compare civilized criminal justice systems to natural
justice. Villefort reveals that his father, Noirtier, once one of
the most powerful Jacobins and senators in France, has been paralyzed
by a stroke.
Chapter 50: Haydée
Monte Cristo goes to visit his beautiful Greek
slave, Haydée, in her separate apartments, which are decorated in
the most sumptuous Oriental style. He tells Haydée that she is free
to do whatever she pleases and is free to leave him or stay with
him. She pledges Monte Cristo her undying loyalty, but he reminds
her that she is still only a child, twenty years old, and has the
right to go off and live her own life whenever she chooses. The
only thing Monte Cristo asks of Haydée is that she not reveal the
“secret of her birth” to anyone in Paris.
Chapter 51: The Morrel Family
Monte Cristo pays a visit to Maximilian Morrel, who is
staying with his sister, Julie. Julie is now married to Emmanuel
Herbaut, the young clerk who remains loyal to Julie’s father out
of love for her. Their house is filled with a sense of bliss, love,
and serenity that overwhelms Monte Cristo with emotion. When he
comments on the uncommon happiness of this household, Emmanuel and
Julie tell him of the angelic benefactor who once saved them. They
show Monte Cristo the relics of this angel—the red silk purse and
the diamond—and lament that they have never identified their benefactor.
