The Count of Monte Cristo

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the attempt, and M. de Monte Cristo would lose the opportunity of
discovering an enemy whom chance has revealed to him who now sends this
warning to the count,--a warning he might not be able to send another
time, if this first attempt should fail and another be made."

The count's first idea was that this was an artifice--a gross deception,
to draw his attention from a minor danger in order to expose him to a
greater. He was on the point of sending the letter to the commissary of
police, notwithstanding the advice of his anonymous friend, or perhaps
because of that advice, when suddenly the idea occurred to him that it
might be some personal enemy, whom he alone should recognize and over
whom, if such were the case, he alone would gain any advantage, as
Fiesco [*] had done over the Moor who would have killed him. We know the
Count's vigorous and daring mind, denying anything to be impossible,
with that energy which marks the great man. From his past life, from
his resolution to shrink from nothing, the count had acquired an
inconceivable relish for the contests in which he had engaged, sometimes