The Count of Monte Cristo

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"No, it is not existence, then, that I regret, but the ruin of projects
so slowly carried out, so laboriously framed. Providence is now opposed
to them, when I most thought it would be propitious. It is not God's
will that they should be accomplished. This burden, almost as heavy as a
world, which I had raised, and I had thought to bear to the end, was too
great for my strength, and I was compelled to lay it down in the middle
of my career. Oh, shall I then, again become a fatalist, whom fourteen
years of despair and ten of hope had rendered a believer in providence?
And all this--all this, because my heart, which I thought dead, was only
sleeping; because it has awakened and has begun to beat again, because
I have yielded to the pain of the emotion excited in my breast by a
woman's voice. Yet," continued the count, becoming each moment more
absorbed in the anticipation of the dreadful sacrifice for the morrow,
which Mercedes had accepted, "yet, it is impossible that so noble-minded
a woman should thus through selfishness consent to my death when I am in
the prime of life and strength; it is impossible that she can carry to
such a point maternal love, or rather delirium. There are virtues which