Peppino had plenty of time, however. He played morra3 with some porters, lost three écus and in consolation drank a flagon of Orvieto.
The next day, Danglars woke late, even though he had gone to bed early. For the previous five or six nights he had slept badly, if at all. He had an ample breakfast and not being, as he had said, much inclined to enjoy the beauty of the Eternal City, he asked for his post-horses to be brought at noon.
However, Danglars had not counted on the formalities of the police and the idleness of the postmaster. The horses arrived only at two o’clock and the guide did not bring back the passport, with its visa, until three.
All these preparations had drawn a fair crowd of onlookers to the door of Signor Pastrini’s, and there was no lack of descendants of the Gracchi and Marius among them. The baron walked in triumph through these groups of idlers who called him ‘Excellency’, to get a baiocco.
Danglars, who was a very democratic fellow as we know, had up to then been content to be addressed as ‘Baron’, and had not yet been called ‘Excellency’; he found the title flattering and threw a few pauls to the mob, which was quite ready, for a further dozen or so of the same, to nominate him ‘Your Royal Highness’.
‘What road?’ the postilion asked in Italian.
‘To Ancona,’ the baron replied.
Signor Pastrini translated the request and the reply, and the carriage set off at a gallop.
Danglars intended to go to Venice and draw out part of his fortune, then from Venice to Vienna, where he would withdraw the rest. Then his idea was to settle in the latter city which, he had been assured, was one offering many pleasures.
Hardly had they done three leagues through the Roman campagna than night began to fall. Danglars had not realized that they were leaving so late; otherwise he would have stayed in Rome. He asked the postilion how long it would be before they arrived in the next town.
‘Non capisco,’ the man replied.
Danglars nodded, to indicate ‘Very good’, and the carriage drove on.
‘I can stop at the first post,’ Danglars thought.
He still felt some traces of that well-being which he had experienced on the previous day and which had given him such a good night’s sleep. He was comfortably installed in a solid English coach with double springs. He felt himself being pulled forward at a gallop by two strong horses, and he knew that the relay was seven leagues on. What is one to do when one is a banker and one has successfully gone bankrupt?
For ten minutes he thought of his wife, who was still in Paris; and for another ten minutes he considered his daughter, who was running round the globe with Mlle d’Armilly. He devoted a further ten minutes to his creditors and how he would spend their money. Then, having nothing left to think about, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
From time to time, however, shaken by a jolt which was harder than the rest, Danglars would momentarily re-open his eyes and feel himself carried along at the same speed through the same Roman campagna, among a scattering of broken aqueducts which looked like granite giants petrified as they ran. But the night was cold, dark and rainy, and it was far better for a man who was half asleep to stay at the back of the coach, with his eyes closed, than to put his head out of the door and ask where he was – from a postilion whose only answer would be: ‘Non capisco.’ So Danglars went on sleeping, thinking that it would be time enough to wake up when they arrived at the relay.
The carriage stopped. Danglars thought he had at last reached his much-desired goal.
He opened his eyes and looked through the glass, expecting to find himself in the middle of some town, or at least of some village. But he could see nothing except a kind of isolated hovel, with three or four men coming and going like shadows.
He waited for a moment, expecting the postilion who had finished his relay to come and ask him for his pay. He thought he could take advantage of the opportunity to ask for some information from his new driver. But the horses were unharnessed and replaced without anyone coming to ask the traveller for money. Astonished, Danglars opened the door, but a firm hand immediately slammed it shut, and the carriage set off again.
The baron woke up completely at this, and in some astonishment.
‘Hey!’ he called to the postilion. ‘Hey, mio caro!’
This was more bel canto Italian that he had learnt when his daughter used to sing duos with Prince Cavalcanti. But mio caro did not reply. So Danglars opened the window.
‘I say, my good friend! Where are we going?’ he said, putting his head out.
‘Dentro la testa!’ cried a serious and commanding voice, accompanied by a threatening gesture.
Danglars understood dentro la testa: ‘put your head in!’ As we can see, he was making rapid progress in Italian. He obeyed, but with some misgivings. And, since his anxiety was increasing minute by minute, after a few moments his mind, instead of the void that it had contained on setting out, which had brought sleep… his mind, as we say, filled with a large quantity of thoughts, each more likely than the previous one to keep a traveller on his toes, especially one finding himself in Danglars’ situation.
In the darkness his eyes took on that degree of acuity that strong emotions tend to give them at first, only for the effect to be reversed later through overuse. Before one is afraid, one sees clearly; while one is afraid, one sees double; and after being afraid, one sees dimly.
Danglars saw a man wrapped in a cloak galloping beside the right-hand door.
‘Some gendarme,’ he said. ‘Have I been denounced to the pontifical authorities by the French telegraph?’
He decided to resolve his uncertainties. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked.
‘Dentro la testa!’ the same voice repeated, in the same threatening tone.
Danglars looked over at the left-hand door. Another man on horseback was galloping alongside it.
‘Definitely,’ said Danglars. ‘I have definitely been arrested.’ And he slumped back into the seat, this time not to sleep but to think.
A moment later the moon rose.
From the back of the carriage he looked out at the countryside and saw the huge aqueducts, stone phantoms which he had noticed in passing; but now, instead of being on his right, they were on the left.
He realized that the carriage had turned round and that he was being taken back to Rome.
‘Oh, wretch that I am,’ he muttered. ‘They must have obtained an order for my extradition.’
The carriage continued to dash forward at a terrifying speed. A dreadful hour went by, because every new indication that appeared proved beyond doubt that the fugitive was being taken back the way he had come. Finally, he saw a dark mass against which it seemed that the carriage was about to crash; but it turned aside and continued parallel to the dark shape, which was nothing other than the ring of ramparts encircling Rome.
‘Oh, oh!’ Danglars muttered. ‘We’re not going into the city, so I am not being arrested after all. Good heavens, I’ve just thought: could it be…’
His hair stood on end, because he recalled those interesting stories of Roman bandits which were taken with such a large pinch of salt in Paris. Albert de Morcerf had told some of them to Mme Danglars and Eugénie when it had been a matter of the young viscount becoming the son-in-law of the first and the husband of the latter.
‘Perhaps they are thieves!’ he thought.
Suddenly the carriage was running over something harder than a sanded roadway. Danglars ventured to look out on both sides of the road and saw oddly shaped monuments. Thinking about Morcerf’s story, which was now coming back to him in every detail, he thought that he must be on the Appian Way.
On the left of the carriage, in a sort of dip, could be seen a circular excavation. It was the Circus of Caracalla.4
At a word from the man who was galloping by the right-hand door the carriage stopped. At the same time the left-hand door opened and a voice ordered: ‘Scendi!’
Danglars got down without further
ado. He could still not yet speak Italian, but he was already understanding the language. More dead than alive, he looked around him. He was surrounded by four men, apart from the postilion.
‘Di quà,’ one of the four said, going down a little path that led from the Appian Way to the middle of the irregular mounds that break up the topography of the Roman campagna. Danglars followed his guide without debate, and did not need to turn around to confirm that the other three men were following him. But it seemed to him that these men were stopping like sentries at more or less equal distances.
After they had walked for some ten minutes, in which Danglars did not exchange a single word with his guide, he found himself standing between a small hillock and a tall bush. Three silent men standing around him formed a triangle, with himself at its centre. He tried to speak, but his tongue refused to obey.
‘Avanti,’ said the same sharp and commanding voice.
This time Danglars doubly understood. He understood both by word and by gesture, because the man who was walking behind him pushed him forward so roughly that he nearly collided with his guide. The guide was our friend Peppino, who advanced into the high bushes along a winding track that only the ants and the lizards could have recognized as a pathway.
Peppino stopped in front of a rock surmounted by a thick bush. This rock, half open like an eyelid, swallowed up the young man, who disappeared into it like a devil into the pit in one of our fairy tales.
The voice and gestures of the man behind Danglars ordered him to do the same. There could be no further doubt: the French bankrupt was in the hands of Roman bandits.
Danglars did as he was told like a man caught between two frightful perils, made brave by fear. Despite his stomach, which was not built for wriggling through cracks in the Roman campagna, he slipped in behind Peppino and, letting himself drop with his eyes closed, he fell on his feet. As he did so, he re-opened his eyes.
The track was wide but dark. Peppino, making no effort to conceal himself now that he was at home, struck a flame from a tinder box and lit a torch. Two other men came down behind Danglars, taking up the rear, and, pushing Danglars if he ever happened to stop, drove him down a gentle slope to the centre of a sinister-looking crossroads.
Here were white stone walls, hollowed out to make coffins, superimposed one above the other, which seemed like the deep black eyes of a skull. A sentry was tapping the barrel of his carbine against his left hand. ‘Friend or foe?’ he asked.
‘Friend,’ said Peppino. ‘Where is the captain?’
‘There,’ the sentry said, indicating over his shoulder a sort of large room hollowed out of the rock, its light shining into the corridor through wide arched openings.
‘Good prey, Captain, good prey,’ Peppino said in Italian, seizing Danglars by the collar of his frock-coat and dragging him towards an opening like a door, through which one could gain access to the room in which the captain appeared to have made his lodging.
‘Is this the man?’ he asked, looking up from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander which he had been reading attentively.
‘That’s him, Captain, that’s him.’
‘Very well. Show him to me.’
On this rather impertinent order, Peppino brought his torch so sharply up to Danglars’ face that he leapt back, afraid of having his eyelashes burned. His face, pale and distraught, showed all the signs of frightful terror.
‘This man is tired,’ the captain said. ‘Let him be shown to his bed.’
‘Oh!’ Danglars murmured. ‘This bed is probably one of the coffins around the walls, and that sleep is the sleep of death that one of the daggers I can see shining in the darkness will bring me.’
Indeed, in the black depths of the vast hall, rising off their beds of dry grass or wolf’s skin, one could see the companions of the man whom Albert de Morcerf had found reading Caesar’s Commentaries and whom Danglars found reading The Life of Alexander.
The banker emitted a dull groan and followed his guide. He did not try either to pray or to cry out. He was without strength, will, power or feeling. He went because he was taken.
He tripped against a step and, realizing that there was a stairway in front of him, he bent down instinctively so as not to strike his head and found himself in a cell cut out of the sheer rock. It was clean, if bare, and dry, even though situated an immeasurable depth below the surface of the ground. A bed of dry grass, covered with goatskins, was not standing, but spread out in a corner of this cell. Seeing it, Danglars thought he saw the glowing symbol of his salvation.
‘Oh, God be praised!’ he murmured. ‘It’s a real bed!’
This was the second time in the last hour that he had called on the name of God, something that had not happened to him for ten years.
‘Ecco,’ the guide said. And, pushing Danglars into the cell, he shut the door behind him. A bolt grated and Danglars was a prisoner.
In any case, even if there had been no lock, it would have taken Saint Peter, guided by a heavenly angel, to pass through the midst of the garrison which guarded the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian, camped around its leader, in whom the reader will surely have recognized the celebrated Luigi Vampa.
Danglars had most certainly recognized the bandit, though he had not wanted to believe in the man’s existence when Morcerf had tried to introduce him in France. He had recognized not only him but also the cell in which Morcerf had been imprisoned and which, in all probability, was a lodging reserved for foreigners.
These memories which, as it happened, Danglars recalled with some joy brought back a feeling of calm. Since they had not killed him at once, the bandits did not intend to kill him at all. They had captured him in order to rob him, and since he had only a few louis on him, he would be ransomed.
He recalled that Morcerf had been taxed at around 4,000 écus. As he considered himself a good deal more important than Morcerf, he mentally settled his own price at 8,000 écus. And 8,000 écus was equivalent to 48,000 livres.
He would still be left with something in the region of 5,050,000 francs. With that, he could manage anywhere.
So, feeling more or less sure that he would survive the adventure, especially since there was no case in which a man had ever been held for a ransom of 5,050,000 livres, Danglars lay down on his bed and, after turning around two or three times, fell asleep, as easy in his mind as the hero whose story Luigi Vampa was reading.
CXV
LUIGI VAMPA’S BILL OF FARE
Every sleep – apart from the one that Danglars feared – ends with an awakening.
Danglars woke up. For a Parisian who was accustomed to silk curtains, velvet hangings on the walls and the scent that rises from wood whitening in the chimney-piece or is wafted back from a ceiling lined in satin, to wake up in a chalky stone grotto must be like a dream in the worst possible taste. As he touched the goatskin curtains, Danglars must have thought he was dreaming about the Samoyeds or the Lapps. But in such circumstances it is only a second before the most intractable doubt becomes certainty.
‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘Yes, I’m in the hands of the bandits about whom Albert de Morcerf was telling us.’
His first impulse was to breathe, to make sure that he was not wounded: this was something that he had come across in Don Quixote, not perhaps the only book he had read, but the only one of which he could remember something.
‘No,’ he said. ‘They have not killed me or wounded me, but they may perhaps have robbed me…’
He quickly felt in his pocket. It had not been touched. The hundred louis that he had put aside for his journey from Rome to Venice were still in his trouser pocket, and the pocket-book with the letter of credit for five million, fifty thousand francs was still in the pocket of his frock-coat.
‘These are strange bandits,’ he thought, ‘to have left me my purse and my pocket-book. As I said yesterday when I went to bed, they will try to ransom me. Well, well! I still have my watch. Let’s see what time it is.’
Danglars’ watch, a ma
sterpiece by Breguet which he had carefully wound up the previous day before setting out, sounded half-past five in the morning. Without it, Danglars would have had no idea of the time, since there was no daylight in his cell.
Should he ask the bandits to explain themselves? Should he wait patiently until they asked for him? The second alternative seemed the wiser, so Danglars waited.
He waited until noon.
Throughout this time a sentry had been stationed at his door. At eight in the morning, the guard was changed; and at this moment, Danglars felt a desire to find out who was guarding him.
He had noticed that rays of light – lamplight, not daylight – were managing to make their way through the ill-fitting planks of the door. He went across to one of these openings just at the moment when the bandit took a few gulps of brandy which, because of the leather bottle that contained it, exuded an odour that Danglars found quite repellent. ‘Ugh!’ he exclaimed, retreating to the far corner of the cell.
At noon the man with the brandy was replaced by another operative. Danglars was curious to see his new keeper, so he once more crept over to the gap in the boards. The new man was an athletic bandit, a Goliath with large eyes, thick lips, a broken nose and red hair which hung over his shoulders in twisted locks like vipers.
‘Oh, my God!’ Danglars said. ‘This one is more like an ogre than a human being. In any case, I am old and quite gristly: a fat white, not good to eat.’
As we may see, Danglars still had enough wits about him to joke.
At the same moment, as if to prove that he was no ogre, his guard sat down in front of the cell door, took a loaf of black bread out of his haversack, with some onions and cheese, which he forthwith began to devour.
‘Devil take me,’ Danglars said, observing the bandit’s dinner through the gaps in his door. ‘Devil take me if I can understand how anyone could eat such filth.’ He went and sat down on the goatskin, which reminded him of the smell of the first sentry’s brandy.