The Last Hope of Morrel & Son (The Count of Monte Cristo, Chapter 29 – Part 2)

Through every loss, Cocles alone remains steady — not from ignorance, but from faith built on twenty years of perfect balance sheets. To him, ruin is an impossibility; numbers do not lie, and M. Morrel has never failed to pay. Even as the other clerks abandon ship like rats sensing the storm, Cocles stays at his post, guided by arithmetic and devotion.

When he finds an extra fourteen sous in his ledger, he brings it to Morrel with pride. The shipowner smiles sadly and drops the coins into an almost empty drawer. “You are the pearl of cashiers,” he says — and Cocles leaves, heartened, blind to the truth behind that melancholy praise.

But outside the narrow walls of his faith, disaster gathers. To meet his debts, Morrel has already sold his wife’s and daughter’s jewels, along with part of his household silver, just to survive another month. Now every franc is gone, every credit exhausted, and only one fragile hope remains — the Pharaon, still at sea, carrying the fortune that might yet save his name.

 

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