Excerpt
CHAPTER I. MONTE-CRISTO AND THE PRIMA DONNA.
The Count of Monte-Cristo was in Rome. He had hired one of the numerous private palaces, the Palazzo Costi, situated on a broad thoroughfare near the point where the Ponte St. Angelo connects Rome proper with that transtiberine suburb known as the Leonine City or Trastavere. The impecunious Roman nobility were ever ready to let their palaces to titled foreigners of wealth, and Ali, acting for the Count, had experienced no difficulty in procuring for his master an abode that even a potentate might have envied him. It was a lofty, commodious edifice, built of white marble in antique architectural design, and commanded from its ample balconies a fine view of the Tiber and its western shore, upon which loomed up that vast prison and citadel, the Castle of St. Angelo, and the largest palace in the world, the Vatican.
The Count of Monte-Cristo had always liked Rome because of its picturesque, mysterious antiquity, but his present mission there had nothing whatever to do with his individual tastes. He had fixed himself for a time in the Eternal City that his daughter Zuleika, Haydée's child, might finish her education at a famous convent school conducted under the auspices of the Sisterhood of the Sacred Heart.
Zuleika was fifteen years of age, but looked much older, having the early maturity of the Greeks, whose ardent blood, on her dead mother's side, flowed in her youthful veins. She had attained her full height, and was tall and well-developed. She strongly resembled her mother, possessing brilliant beauty of the dreamy, voluptuous oriental type. Her hair was abundant and black as night. She had dark, flashing eyes, pearly teeth, full ruby lips and feet and hands that were of fairylike diminutiveness, as well as miracles of grace and dainty shapeliness. In temperament she was more like Haydée than the Count, though she possessed her father's quick decision and firmness, with the addition of much of his enthusiasm.
The Palazzo Costi was magnificently furnished, so the Count had made no alterations in that respect, bringing with him only the family wardrobe and a portion of his library, consisting mainly of oriental manuscripts written in weird, cabalistic characters and intelligible to no one but himself.
The household was made up solely of the Count, his son Espérance, his daughter Zuleika, the faithful Nubian mute Ali and five or six male and female domestics. Having no other object than his daughter's education, the Count wished to live in as thorough retirement as he could, but it was impossible for him to keep his presence a secret, and no sooner had it become known that he was in Rome than he was besieged by hosts of callers belonging to the highest nobility, mingled with whom came numerous patriots, disciples of the unfortunate Savonarola, distinguished for their firm devotion to the cause of Italian liberty.
At an early hour of the morning upon which this narrative opens the Count of Monte-Cristo sat alone in a small apartment of the Palazzo Costi, which had been arranged as his study and in which his precious manuscripts were stored in closely locked cabinets. The Count had a copy of a Roman newspaper before him, and his eyes were fixed on a paragraph that seemed to have fascinated him as the serpent fascinates the bird. The paragraph read as follows:
"Mlle. Louise d' Armilly, the famous prima donna, who will sing to-night at the Apollo Theatre her great rôle of Lucrezia Borgia, has, it appears, a deep impenetrable mystery surrounding her. She is French by birth, and is said to be the daughter of a banker, who vanished under peculiar circumstances, but, as she positively declines to speak of her history, we can only give the rumors concerning her for what they are worth....