Pont du Gard

The Pont du Gard inn stands on the left-hand side of the post road midway between Beaucaire and Bellegarde, backing onto the Rhone. Its sign is a sheet of tin bearing a grotesque representation of the ancient Roman aqueduct from which it takes its name. The establishment has a small, dusty garden with a few struggling olive and fig trees, a scanty supply of garlic, tomatoes, and eschalots, and a solitary pine. The surrounding plain resembles a dusty lake, scattered with miserable stalks of wheat that serve as perches for grasshoppers. A canal between Beaucaire and Aiguemortes, built some seven or eight years before the events of the novel, has ruined the inn's trade by substituting boats for carts and stagecoaches, leaving the innkeeper to watch a deserted road from morning till night.

The Innkeepers

The inn is kept by Gaspard Caderousse, a tall, strong, bony man of forty to fifty-five with dark, sparkling eyes, a hooked nose, and white teeth. He wears a red handkerchief twisted around his head like a Spanish muleteer. His wife, Madeleine Radelle, known as La Carconte, is pale, meagre, and sickly-looking, having lost the beauty for which the women of Arles are proverbial to the slow fever of the marshes. She remains nearly always in her second-floor chamber, shivering or stretched languidly on her bed, and breaks out into bitter invectives against fate whenever she sees her husband. Caderousse's standard reply is the philosophic phrase, "Hush, La Carconte. It is God's pleasure that things should be so." In his days of prosperity, Caderousse dressed in the picturesque costume of the south of France, but as his fortunes declined, his watch-chains, necklaces, embroidered bodices, and silver buckles all disappeared, and he gave up participating in the pomps and vanities of the local festivities.

The Visit of the Abbe Busoni

The inn's crucial scene occurs when a priest dressed in black, riding a Hungarian horse, arrives at the door. The priest, who speaks with a strong Italian accent, identifies himself as the Abbe Busoni and asks for Caderousse by name, recalling that he once lived in the Allees de Meillan and worked as a tailor. Over a bottle of Cahors wine, the abbe reveals that he was called to the deathbed of Edmond Dantes, who gave him a diamond worth fifty thousand francs to be sold and divided among his four faithful friends: Caderousse, Danglars, Fernand, and Mercedes, with a fifth share for his father. Caderousse, driven by cupidity and urged on by his wife, confesses the entire story of the conspiracy: that Danglars wrote the denunciation with his left hand and Fernand posted it. He also reveals the fates of the other conspirators—Danglars has become a millionaire baron, Fernand the Count of Morcerf, and Mercedes the Countess of Morcerf—and the ruin of the honest shipowner Morrel. The abbe, in exchange for the red silk purse that Morrel left on old Dantes' chimney-piece, gives Caderousse the diamond, which Caderousse later takes to the Beaucaire fair to have valued.

Narrative Significance

The Pont du Gard inn functions as the site of the first major revelation in Monte Cristo's campaign of vengeance. It is here that the count, in disguise, confirms the identities of his enemies and learns the full extent of their crimes and their subsequent prosperity. The inn's decay mirrors Caderousse's moral and material decline, and the scene establishes the pattern of the count's method: he approaches his victims in disguise, extracts their secrets through a combination of temptation and psychological pressure, and then leaves them to their fates. The inn itself, a place of hospitality and rest, becomes a stage for confession and judgment.