Ali and his master lifted the wounded man and carried him inside. There, Monte Cristo signed to Ali to undress him and they found the three dreadful wounds that had struck him down.

"Help," said Caderousse. "I've been murdered."

Ali looked at his master, as if to ask what should be done.

Ali obeyed and left the false abbé alone with Caderousse, who was still unconscious.

"Go and find the crown prosecutor, Villefort, who lives in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and bring him here. On the way, wake up the porter and tell him to go and fetch a doctor."

"Oh, God," said Monte Cristo, "your vengeance may sometimes be slow in coming, but I think that then it is all the more complete."

When the unfortunate man re-opened his eyes, the count, seated a short distance away from him, was giving him a sombre, pious look, his lips moving, apparently muttering a prayer.

"We're here. Don't worry."

"What's the matter?" asked Monte Cristo.

Caderousse continued to cry out in a pitiful voice: "Monsieur l'Abbé, help me! Help me!"

"No, it's all over. You've come too late, in time only to see me die. What wounds! What blood!" And he passed out.

"I know that it is too late to save my life, but he might perhaps give me the strength to make my statement."

"Wait," said Monte Cristo. He left then returned, five minutes later, with a flask. While he was away, the dying man, his eyes staring horribly, had not taken them off the door through which he instinctively guessed that help would come. "Hurry, father, hurry!" he said. "I feel myself fainting again."

"Of course I do! Yes, I know him: it was Benedetto."

"Yes. After giving me plans of the count's house, no doubt expecting that I would kill him and so allow Benedetto to inherit, or else that he would kill me and Benedetto would be rid of me, he waited for me in the street and killed me himself."

"The same."

"Someone has already gone for one," said the abbé.

"The young Corsican?"

"Do you know who it was?"

"As well as the doctor, I sent for the crown prosecutor."

"About my murderer."

"He will be too late, too late…" said Caderousse. "I can feel my life's blood running out."

"A doctor, Monsieur l'Abbé! Fetch a doctor!" said Caderousse.

"Your comrade?"

"About what?"

"Hurry, hurry!" said Caderousse. "Or I shall not be able to sign."

"If only someone would come so that I could denounce the wretch!"

"Would you like me to write out your statement?"

"Yes, yes," said Caderousse, his eyes shining at the idea of this posthumous revenge.

"Another two drops would kill you," the abbé replied.

Monte Cristo gave him the pen, and Caderousse gathered all his strength, signed it and fell back on the bed, saying: "You can tell them the rest, father. Say that he is calling himself Andrea Cavalcanti, that he is living at the Hôtel des Princes, that… Oh, God! Oh! I am dying!" And once more he fainted. The abbé made him breathe the scent from the flask, and the wounded man opened his eyes. The desire for revenge had not left him while he was unconscious.

Monte Cristo bent down and poured two or three drops of the liquid in the flask on to the wounded man's purple lips. Caderousse sighed. "Oh, that is life you are giving me. More, more…"

Monte Cristo wrote: "I die, murdered by the Corsican Benedetto, my fellow-prisoner in Toulon under the number 59."

"What more?"

"All that and much more."

"And he will be guillotined, won't he?" said Caderousse. "Promise me he will be guillotined. I die in that hope; it will help me to die."

"You will say all that, won't you, father?"

"I shall say," the count continued, "that he followed you here, that he watched you all the time and that when he saw you coming out, he ran up and hid behind a corner of the wall."

"Did you see all that, then?"

"I shall say that he doubtless gave you the plan of this house in the hope that the count would kill you. I will say that he sent a letter to the count to warn him, and I shall say that, in the count's absence, I received this letter and lay in wait for you."

"And you didn't warn me?" Caderousse cried, trying to lift himself on his elbow. "You knew that I would be killed when I left here, and you didn't warn me?"

"Remember what I said: 'If you return home safe and sound, I shall believe that God has pardoned you and I shall do the same.'"

"No, because I saw the hand of Benedetto as the justice of God, and I thought I should be committing a sacrilege if I were to interfere with Fate."

"Patience!" said the abbé, in a tone of voice that made the dying man shudder. "Be patient!" Caderousse looked at him in amazement.

"And then," the abbé continued, "God is full of mercy for everyone, as He has been towards you. He is a father before He is a judge."

"The justice of God! Don't speak to me of that, Monsieur l'Abbé. If there was any divine justice, you know as well as anyone that there are people who would be punished but who are not."

"Even if I were so unfortunate as not to have believed in Him up to now, I should do so on looking at you."

"Oh, so you believe in God, do you?" Caderousse asked.

Caderousse raised his clasped hands to heaven.

"Listen," the abbé went on, extending a hand above the wounded man as if ordering him to believe. "Here is what He did for you, this God whom you refuse to recognize even in your last hour. He gave you health, strength, secure work and even friends; in short, life as it must appear sweet to a man, offering an easy conscience and the satisfaction of his natural desires. But, instead of making use of these gifts of the Lord, which He so rarely grants in all their fullness, what did you do? You abandoned yourself to idleness and drunkenness, and in your drunkenness you betrayed one of your best friends."

"Listen," the abbé continued. "When you had betrayed your friend, God began, not by striking you down, but by warning you. You lapsed into poverty and you knew hunger. You had spent half a life in envy that you could have spent in profitable toil, and you were already thinking about crime when God offered you a miracle, when God, by my hands, sent you a fortune in the midst of your deprivation -- a fortune that was splendid for you, who had never possessed anything. But this unexpected, unhoped-for, unheard-of fortune was not enough for you, as soon as you owned it. You wanted to double it. How? By murder. You did double it, and God took it away from you by bringing you to human justice."

"You are mortally wounded, and so much so that, without the three drops of liquid which I gave you just now, you would already be dead. So listen."

"Oh!" groaned Caderousse. "What a strange priest you are, who puts despair instead of comfort into a dying man's heart."

"Help!" cried Caderousse. "It's not a priest I need, but a doctor. Perhaps I am not mortally wounded, perhaps I am not yet going to die, perhaps I can be saved!"

"Yes," Monte Cristo replied. "So God, who is always -- I shall not say 'just' this time, because His justice would have awarded you death; but God, who is always merciful, allowed your judges to be touched by your words and let you live."

"I didn't want to kill the Jew," said Caderousse. "It was La Carconte."

"You wretch: you did at least consider it a pardon when it was given. Your cowardly heart, trembling at the prospect of death, leapt with joy at the announcement of your perpetual shame because, like all convicts, you said to yourself: prisons have doors, the tomb has none. You were right, because the door to your prison opened unexpectedly. An Englishman, visiting Toulon, has made a vow to free two men from infamy. He chooses you and your companion. A second fortune drops on you from heaven, you regain both money and ease, and you can once more live the life of other men, after having been condemned to live that of a convict. And at this, you wretch, you begin to tempt God for a third time. "I haven't got enough," you say, when you have more than you ever possessed, and you commit a third crime, motiveless, inexcusable. But God had grown tired; He has punished you."

"Huh! To condemn me to prison for life! A fine pardon that was!"

Monte Cristo gave him a glass of water.

Caderousse was weakening visibly. "Water," he said. "I'm thirsty, I'm burning."

"I don't believe in God!" Caderousse shouted. "Nor do you… You are lying… lying…!"

"That scoundrel Benedetto," Caderousse said, giving back the glass, "he'll get away with it, even so!"

"Be quiet," said the abbé. "You are urging the last drops of blood out of your body. Oh, so you don't believe in God -- yet you are dying at His hand! Oh, so you don't believe in God; yet God only asks for a single prayer, a single word, a single tear to forgive you. God could have guided the murderer's dagger so that you would die immediately, yet He gave you a quarter of an hour to reconsider. So look in your heart, you wretch, and repent!"

"Then you too will be punished," said Caderousse. "Because you did not do your duty as a priest. You should have stopped Benedetto killing me."

"No one will escape: I am telling you that, Caderousse. Benedetto will be punished."

"I!" said the count, with a smile that made the dying man shudder with fear. "I, stop Benedetto killing you, just after you had broken your dagger on the mail-coat protecting my chest! Yes, perhaps, if I had found you humble and repentant, then I should have stopped Benedetto killing you. But I found you arrogant and bloodthirsty, so I let God's will be done!"

"Look carefully at me," Monte Cristo said, taking the candle and putting it next to his face.

"But who are you then?" asked Caderousse, turning his dying eyes towards the count.

"There is both Providence and God," said Monte Cristo. "The proof is that you are lying there, desperate, denying God, and I am standing before you, rich, happy, healthy and safe, clasping my hands before the God in whom you try not to believe and in whom, even so, you do believe in the depths of your heart."

"No," said Caderousse. "No, I do not repent. There is no God, there is no Providence. There is only chance."

"Well: the Abbé… Busoni."

"Oh!" Caderousse exclaimed in terror. "If it were not for that black hair, I would take you for the Englishman, I would take you for Lord Wilmore."

"I am not Abbé Busoni, or Lord Wilmore," said Monte Cristo. "Look more carefully; go back further; look into your earliest memories." These words were spoken by the count with such a magnetic vibrancy that the man's exhausted senses were awakened for one last time.

Monte Cristo took off the wig that was disguising his features and let down the fine black hair that so harmoniously framed his pale face.

"Who are you then? And, if you saw me, if you knew me, why are you letting me die?"

"Yes, Caderousse, you saw me. Yes, you did know me."

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I think I did see you, I did know you once."

"On your father's grave!" said Caderousse, fired by one last flickering spark of life and raising himself to look more closely at this man who had just made an oath sacred to all men. "Who are you, then?"

"Because nothing can save you, Caderousse: your wounds are mortal. If you could have been saved, I would have seen that as one last act of God's mercy and, I swear it on my father's grave, I should have tried to bring you back to life and to repentance."

The count had watched every stage of Caderousse's agony. He realized that this burst of life was the last. He bent over the dying man and, with a look that was both calm and sad, he said, whispering in his ear: "I am…" And his lips, barely parting, let fall a name spoken so low that the count himself seemed to fear the sound of it.

Caderousse, who had pulled himself up to his knees, reached out his arms, made an effort to shrink back, then clasped his hands and raised them in one supreme final effort: "Oh, God," he said. "Oh, God, forgive me for denying You. You do indeed exist, You are the father of men in heaven and their judge on earth. Oh, my Lord, I have long mistaken You! My Lord God, forgive me! My God, my Lord, receive my soul!" And, closing his eyes, Caderousse fell backwards with a last cry and a final gasp.

At once the blood stopped on his lips and ceased to flow from his wounds. He was dead.

Ten minutes later the doctor and the crown prosecutor arrived, the first with the concierge, the other with Ali. They found Abbé Busoni praying beside the body.

"One!" the count said, mysteriously, staring at the corpse already disfigured by its awful death.