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103 4 Velocities: Precision, Overload (Dumas) In chapter 85 of Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de MonteCristo , Monte-Cristo embarks on a stagecoach trip to Normandy, where he has invited Albert de Morcerf to accompany him. His intention is to remove Albert from the increasingly tense situation in Paris that has been created by Monte-Cristo’s plot to exact methodical revenge on Albert’s father, Fernand (now count de Morcerf). Albert’s father was one of the coconspirators who plotted to have Monte-Cristo (when he was still Edmond Dantès) thrown into prison as a Bonaparte sympathizer at the beginning of the story recounted in Dumas’s novel. The passage describing the trip can serve as a reference point for any study of speed and communication that highlights the formation of a highly organized system to move messages and people more quickly during the first half of the nineteenth century in France. The narrator offers readers a veritable psychological analysis of speed and its effects on those who were encountering it for the first time: The journey began in a very somber mood, but it soon brightened because of the physical effect of its rapidity. Morcerf had never conceived of such speed. “Indeed,” said Monte-Cristo, “With your relay system averaging two leagues per hour [equivalent to eight kilometers per hour], with the stupid law preventing one traveler from passing another without asking his permission, which means that a sick or suffering traveler has the right to force lightly packed and healthy travelers to follow behind him, loco04 .103-130_Bell 9/11/03, 1:30 PM 103 104 Real Time motion becomes impossible. Personally, I avoid this inconvenience by traveling with my own postilion and my own horses. . . .” And the count, leaning out the door, made a sound that gave wings to the horses. They were no longer running, they were flying. The coach swept forward with a sound of thunder on the royal pavement, and passersby turned to watch the flaming meteor pass. Ali repeated the sound made by the count, smiled showing his white teeth, grasped the steaming reins in his strong hands, spurring on the horses, whose beautiful manes blew in the wind. In the dust raised by his efforts, Ali, child of the desert, finding himself back in his element, with his black face, his fiery eyes, his white burnoose, seemed to be the very genius of the simoom and the god of the tempest. “This is a voluptuousness that I have never known,” said Morcerf. “It’s the voluptuousness of speed.” And the last clouds on his forehead dissipated, as if the air rushing past had carried them away.1 Like Thomas De Quincey, who made a habit of riding on top of mail coaches to experience the feeling of speed as directly as possible, Albert, unfamiliar with the velocity that Monte-Cristo’s logistical support system is capable of generating, is overwhelmed by his experience in the coach. The trip described here is presented as frankly mood-altering. Albert, who begins the trip burdened by the effects of Monte-Cristo’s revenge, which was fast becoming a noose tightening around his family’s neck, involuntarily gives himself over to the unexpected pleasure of going fast.2 As this trip makes perfectly clear, speed is at the heart of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo. Such speed is new, it is exhilarating, it is addictive. In “The Informatics of Revenge,” a brief but suggestive article on the novel, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young makes the following statement: “The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the first novels to freely indulge in aestheticizing speed; it does so by depicting the physical exhilaration derived from swift motion and by celebrating Monte Cristo’s ‘marvelous rapidity ,’ be it the speed with which he travels or the ‘marvelous promptitude’ with which his servants execute orders.” Indeed, the novel makes it amply clear that Monte-Cristo is the fastest man alive (in his period), one who is never hindered by intervals, be they calculated in time or distance. Not only can he fly, almost literally, over distances, but the precision orchestration of his arrivals is unmatched by anyone in the novel (and doubtless by anyone—fictional or nonfictional—in the period). In Rome, he strikes up a friendship with Albert de Morcerf, whose identity MonteCristo knows well and whom he has specifically targeted as the best entry point to begin exacting revenge on Fernand’s family. Albert immediately reciprocates his...

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