“You see my position, madame,” said Morrel, bestowing a grateful smile on Monte Cristo.
“It seems to me,” said Danglars, in his coarse tone, ill-concealed by a forced smile, “that you have already got horses enough.”
Madame Danglars seldom allowed remarks of this kind to pass unnoticed, but, to the surprise of the young people, she pretended not to hear it, and said nothing.
Monte Cristo smiled at her unusual humility, and showed her two immense porcelain jars, over which wound marine plants, of a size and delicacy that nature alone could produce. The baroness was astonished.
“Why,” said she, “you could plant one of the chestnut-trees in the Tuileries inside! How can such enormous jars have been manufactured?”
“Ah! madame,” replied Monte Cristo, “you must not ask of us, the manufacturers of fine porcelain, such a question. It is the work of another age, constructed by the genii of earth and water.”
“How so?—at what period can that have been?”
“I do not know; I have only heard that an emperor of China had an oven built expressly, and that in this oven twelve jars like this were successively baked. Two broke, from the heat of the fire; the other ten were sunk three hundred fathoms deep into the sea. The sea, knowing what was required of her, threw over them her weeds, encircled them with coral, and encrusted them with shells; the whole was cemented by two hundred years beneath these almost impervious depths, for a revolution carried