The Count of Monte Cristo

Back Forward Menu

fortress was his post as king's attorney, all the advantages of which
he exploited with marvellous skill, and which he would not have resigned
but to be made deputy, and thus to replace neutrality by opposition.
Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife
visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the
weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as
an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of
professed superiority--in fact, the application of the axiom, "Pretend
to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you," an
axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the
Greeks, "Know thyself," a knowledge for which, in our days, we have
substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of knowing
others.

To his friends M. de Villefort was a powerful protector; to his enemies,
he was a silent, but bitter opponent; for those who were neither the
one nor the other, he was a statue of the law-made man. He had a haughty