The Count of Monte Cristo

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a cosmopolite. No country can say it saw my birth. God alone knows what
country will see me die. I adopt all customs, speak all languages. You
believe me to be a Frenchman, for I speak French with the same facility
and purity as yourself. Well, Ali, my Nubian, believes me to be an Arab;
Bertuccio, my steward, takes me for a Roman; Haidee, my slave, thinks
me a Greek. You may, therefore, comprehend, that being of no country,
asking no protection from any government, acknowledging no man as
my brother, not one of the scruples that arrest the powerful, or the
obstacles which paralyze the weak, paralyzes or arrests me. I have only
two adversaries--I will not say two conquerors, for with perseverance I
subdue even them,--they are time and distance. There is a third, and the
most terrible--that is my condition as a mortal being. This alone can
stop me in my onward career, before I have attained the goal at which
I aim, for all the rest I have reduced to mathematical terms. What men
call the chances of fate--namely, ruin, change, circumstances--I have
fully anticipated, and if any of these should overtake me, yet it
will not overwhelm me. Unless I die, I shall always be what I am, and