Hardly had de Villefort left the dining-room than he put off his joyful mask to take on the serious mien of one called upon to exercise the supreme office of pronouncing on the life of his fellow man. However, despite the mobility of his expression, something which the deputy had studied more than once, as a skilled actor does, in front of his mirror, on this occasion it was an effort for him to lower his brow and darken his features. In reality, apart from the memory of his father's choice of political allegiance (which, if he did not himself completely renounce it, might affect his own career), Gérard de Villefort was at that moment as happy as it is possible for a man to be. At the age of twenty-six, already wealthy in his own right, he held a high office in the legal profession; and he was to marry a beautiful young woman whom he loved, not with passion, but reasonably, as a deputy crown prosecutor may love. Apart from her beauty, which was exceptional, his fiancée, Mlle de Saint-Méran, belonged to a family which was among those most highly thought of at court in this time; and, besides the influence of her mother and father (who, having no other children, could reserve it entirely for their son-in-law), she was in addition bringing her husband a dowry of fifty thousand écus which, thanks to her "expectations" -- that dreadful word invented by marriage brokers -- might one day be increased by a legacy of half a million.

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