“I saw Madame de Saint-Méran only last year at Marseilles, when I was coming back from Algiers,” said Château-Renaud; “she looked like a woman destined to live to be a hundred years old, from her apparent sound health and great activity of mind and body. How old was she?”
“Franz assured me,” replied Albert, “that she was sixty-six years old. But she has not died of old age, but of grief; it appears that since the death of the marquis, which affected her very deeply, she has not completely recovered her reason.”
“But of what disease, then, did she die?” asked Debray.
“It is said to have been a congestion of the brain, or apoplexy, which is the same thing, is it not?”
“Nearly.”
“It is difficult to believe that it was apoplexy,” said Beauchamp. “Madame de Saint-Méran, whom I once saw, was short, of slender form, and of a much more nervous than sanguine temperament; grief could hardly produce apoplexy in such a constitution as that of Madame de Saint-Méran.”
“At any rate,” said Albert, “whatever disease or doctor may have killed her, M. de Villefort, or rather, Mademoiselle Valentine,—or, still rather, our friend Franz, inherits a magnificent fortune, amounting, I believe, to 80,000 livres per annum.”
“And this fortune will be doubled at the death of the old Jacobin, Noirtier.”
“That is a tenacious old grandfather,” said Beauchamp. “Tenacem propositi virum. I think he must have made an agreement with death to outlive all his heirs, and he appears likely to succeed. He resembles the old Conventionalist of ’93, who said to Napoleon, in 1814, ‘You bend because your empire is a young stem, weakened by rapid growth. Take the Republic for a tutor; let us return with renewed strength to the battle-field, and I promise you 500,000 soldiers, another Marengo, and a second Austerlitz. Ideas do not become extinct, sire; they slumber sometimes, but only revive the stronger before they sleep entirely.’”
“Ideas and men appeared the same to him,” said Albert. “One thing only puzzles me, namely, how Franz d’Épinay will like a grandfather who cannot be separated from his wife. But where is Franz?”