MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESSeven years of captivity within the Fort of Fenestrelle, the longest rampart in Europe, clinging to the high Alpine crests. It is here that everything turns: the legacy of the Italian prelate, the secret of the hidden treasure, the birth of the avenger. The fortress is the very crucible of the myth—and it figures, too, in Maquet’s The Prisons of Europe. Here, reality and romance collide.
How seven winters of hoarfrost and the agony of a martyr forged, in the bowels of Fenestrelle, the true Count of Monte Cristo.
On May 7, 1807, a canvas-covered cart groaned up the dizzying switchbacks of the Val Chisone, cleaving the flurries of a tardy mountain snow. Within, his ankles shackled in irons and his sinews stiffened by three weeks of nocturnal transfers, a man lay suffocating in rotting straw. His name was François Picaud. Barely a few months earlier, in Nîmes, he was preparing his nuptials with the lovely Marguerite Pothier; yet an anonymous denunciation, concocted by the envy of his tavern comrades, had flung him into the maw of the Imperial High Police as a spy in the pay of England. There had been no hearing, no trial. Nothing had transpired save a silent order scribbled in Fouché’s ministry and oblivion sealed by imperial decree.
When the canvas was at last drawn back beneath the postern gate of Fort San Carlo, the captive lifted bruised eyes toward a spectacle of grim grandeur. Clinging to the Alpine ridges until it grazed the sky, the fortress of Fenestrelle unfurled its four thousand granite stairs—a monstrous spine of stone flung along the mountain’s flank. The turnkey sergeant opened the great red-edged registry, dipped his goose quill, and measured the newcomer with that cold, metallic gaze peculiar to the jailers of the Empire:
“Number 105. Accused of machinations against the security of the State. Utter secrecy. Cast him beneath the second traverse.”
The bolts slammed shut with the dry, hollow crack of a falling blade. To the world of the living, François Picaud had ceased to be. He was henceforth nothing more than a shivering breath beneath a vault of slate oozing with saltpetre—a solitary wretch caged in the most formidable redoubt of Continental Europe.
For two years, the man of Nîmes rotted by slow degrees to the rhythm of black bread tossed through the hatch and brackish water poured into an oak tub. Solitude and the biting frost of the heights would have unhinged his reason, just as each winter they crushed the chests of refractory conscripts and carbonari entombed higher up in the bastions of the upper batteries. Picaud spoke to the spiders, counted the drops weeping from the stone, and cursed the hour when his pretended friends—Loupian, Solari, Chaubard—had raised their glasses to his ruined betrothal.
It was at the onset of the third winter that an unfamiliar sound broke through his weeping. A rhythmic scratching, almost timid, rose from the depths of the party wall, where the dampness had gnawed through the old Piedmontese mortar. Armed with an iron rod pried from his pallet, Picaud burrowed with bleeding fingers, driven by the frantic fever of a galley slave. For weeks, the stone yielded grain by grain. One night at last, a fragment of masonry tumbled into the hollow darkness beyond, and a warm breath brushed the captive’s face. A frail voice, worn thin yet of an infinite gentleness, murmured in Italian: “Chi vive? Sei un cristiano?”
In the adjacent subterranean vault languished Father Torri. A dignitary of the papal court, a prelate of profound piety and master of a colossal patrimony in Lombardy, he had refused to bend the knee before Napoleon’s coronation in Milan. Deported by order of the occupying power and forgotten amid the Alpine snows, the venerable churchman wore naught but shredded homespun, his sole crown the white locks stiffened with frost.
From that moment, the dungeon ceased to be a tomb and became a sanctuary. Through the narrow duct concealed beneath a heap of straw, the two recluses instructed one another, warmed each other’s souls, and united their solitudes. For four years, the aged scholar unlocked for the unlettered artisan the treasures of history, languages, philosophy, and the subtle mastery of men. Yet above all, Picaud watched over his companion with filial devotion, sharing his meager ration of grease and onion when phthisis began to consume the old man’s throat.
In the winter of 1813, Father Torri’s cough darkened with blood. Knowing his strength was forsaking him, the dying man motioned Picaud to widen the breach once more so that he might slip his wasted arm through. In his trembling palm lay a minute cylinder of tarred canvas, stitched together with horsehair from his mattress.
“My child,” gasped the priest as his breath failed him upon the frozen flagstone, “God has not willed that I should ever look upon the Duomo of Milan again. Take this paper. It reveals the hiding place of an immense fortune, deposited with a banker in Amsterdam and buried beneath the ruins of a vineyard east of Rome. It is the heritage of my entire line. You shall be rich as an Oriental prince. But swear to me before the Virgin that you will employ this bounty to ransom the captive, to make mercy flourish…”
Picaud wept over the prelate’s cold hand, repeating the sacred oaths. Yet in the hollows of his sunken eyes, as he watched the guards bear away the corpse at dawn wrapped in coarse sacking to be flung into the ravines, another resolve had ignited—fierce, unyielding, unquenchable: this gold would not serve to pardon, but to strike.
The Empire was fracturing at every seam. In the spring of 1814, the cannonades of the Allied armies echoed to the very bottom of the Piedmontese valleys. The Eagle abdicated at Fontainebleau; Napoleon’s throne collapsed beneath the weight of a risen Europe. One morning in April, the commandant of Fenestrelle sounded the assembly in the parade ground and ordered the iron doors of the secret state dungeons battered down.
When François Picaud crossed the outer drawbridge, he reeled beneath the blinding glare of the Alpine sun. Seven years of gloom had withered his youth, bleached his temples, and carved into his countenance the inexorable pallor of a phantom. The turnkeys no longer recognized him; his jailers did not even know his name, so thoroughly had the prison registers burned during the panic of the retreating garrisons.
Without casting a single backward glance toward the monstrous wall where Father Torri’s ashes lay, the former cobbler of Nîmes struck out along the road to Italy. Beneath his rags, pressed against his ribs, beat the parchment of untold fortune. He was no longer a hapless victim of arbitrary power. He was Nemesis incarnate, the master of invisible millions who would soon traverse the kingdom disguised under the vestments of the Abbé Baldini and the mantle of Prince Busoni, returning to Paris to claim—coin by coin, drop by drop—the blood debt owed to his stolen honor.
In the shadow of the Alps, the Count of Monte Cristo had uttered his first cry.