The Betrayal (Chapters 1–7)

On the 24th of February 1815, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste and Naples. As usual, a pilot put off immediately and rounded the Château d'If, and the quays of Marseilles filled with people, for the arrival of a ship is always an event there, especially a ship like the Pharaon, built and fitted out in the yards of old Phocaea, and belonging to a shipowner of the city.

At the helm stood a young man of eighteen or nineteen, tall, slim, with fine black eyes and hair as dark as ebony: Edmond Dantès, the first mate. The captain, Leclère, had died of a fever at sea, and Dantès had brought the ship home. The owner, Monsieur Morrel, a good, honest man, came on board, and was so pleased with him that he promised to make him captain. Dantès was happy: he would be captain at nineteen, and he would marry his beloved, Mercédès, a beautiful Catalan girl, and care for his old father.

Not everyone was pleased. The ship's supercargo, Danglars, a sly, envious man of twenty-five, hated Dantès for his luck. And Dantès told Morrel one thing that Danglars noted: that, as the dying captain had asked him, he had put in at the island of Elba, where the Emperor Napoleon was in exile, and delivered a parcel to the Grand Marshal, and been given a letter to carry to a certain person in Paris.

Dantès went home first, to his old father, in a little room on the Allées de Meilhan; and found him pale and weak. He had left him two hundred francs when he sailed, three months before; and the old man had given most of it to their neighbour Caderousse, to pay a debt Edmond owed him, and had lived since on almost nothing. Edmond poured his wages onto the table, and wept, and promised him that now that he would be captain, everything would change. Then Caderousse came in, all smiles and congratulations, and envy in his eyes.

Then Edmond ran to the Catalan village, a little settlement of fishermen outside the city, to Mercédès; and found Fernand there, sitting sullenly in the corner, his hand on his knife. Mercédès laughed and took Edmond's hand and said to her cousin: "Fernand, this is Edmond, whom I love — my friend, my betrothed. If any misfortune happened to Edmond I would fling myself into the sea from the highest rock." Fernand rushed out of the house.

Mercédès had another suitor: her cousin Fernand Mondego, a young Catalan fisherman, who loved her desperately. She told him she would never love anyone but Edmond: "If Edmond dies, I will die too." Fernand, in despair, sat drinking at the tavern of La Réserve with Danglars and a neighbour of the Dantès family, the tailor Caderousse, a coarse, weak, envious man. And there Danglars, with a pen and ink, wrote with his left hand, so as to disguise his writing, an anonymous letter to the Crown prosecutor:

The Crown prosecutor is informed by a friend of the throne and of religion that one Edmond Dantès, first mate of the ship Pharaon*, arrived this morning from Smyrna, after having touched at Naples and Porto Ferrajo, has been entrusted by Murat with a letter for the usurper, and by the usurper with a letter for the Bonapartist committee in Paris. Proof of this crime will be found on arresting him, for the letter will be found upon him, or at his father's, or in his cabin on board the* Pharaon.

Then, laughing, he crumpled it up and threw it into a corner — "it was only a joke." Caderousse was too drunk to protest. And when they had gone, Fernand picked up the letter and took it to the post.

The next day was the betrothal feast of Edmond and Mercédès, at La Réserve, with all their friends. In the middle of the meal there was a knock at the door, and a police commissary came in with soldiers: "I arrest you in the name of the law." Dantès was taken away. He was not afraid; there had been some mistake.

The deputy Crown prosecutor of Marseilles, Gérard de Villefort, was at his own betrothal party that day, to Mademoiselle Renée de Saint-Méran, the daughter of a royalist marquis; he was ambitious, cold and twenty-seven. He questioned Dantès, and liked him; the young man was clearly innocent, honest, ignorant of politics. Villefort was about to set him free — when he read the address on the letter from Elba: it was addressed to Monsieur Noirtier, in Paris. And Noirtier was Villefort's own father, a fierce Bonapartist conspirator, whose politics would ruin his son's career if they were known. Villefort turned pale. "Have you shown this letter to anyone?" "To no one." He burned the letter in the fire, before Dantès's eyes, and said kindly that he would keep him a little while longer, for form's sake. That night Dantès was put into a boat with four gendarmes, and rowed out across the harbour, and saw ahead of him the black rock of the Château d'If, the state prison. "Is that where we are going?" He struggled; they held him. He was thrown into a dungeon.

At the Saint-Mérans' table the talk was all of the royal cause and the "usurper" on Elba; the old Marquise reminded Villefort that his father had been a Jacobin and a regicide, and Villefort declared, to please her, that he had renounced his father's opinions and his name. Renée, his young bride, begged him, as he left to examine the prisoner, to be merciful. "Be indulgent on this day of our betrothal." He promised, laughing.