Why Did Villefort Burn the Letter? Because It Named His Father

Spoilers for the first seventeen chapters of The Count of Monte Cristo, including what Dantès learns from the Abbé Faria in prison.

Most summaries say he destroys the evidence, which is true and misses the point. The book gives three scenes about that letter, and in each of them someone says out loud what he was protecting. The interview where it burns is a doorway in the playable Count of Monte Cristo, and the lines below are the ones the scene is built from.

🔥 What does Villefort say when he burns it?

He presents it as a favour. The deputy prosecutor has told Dantès that the letter is the main charge against him, and then, mid-sentence, he puts it in the fire.

“The principal charge against you is this letter, and you see——” Villefort approached the fire, cast it in, and waited until it was entirely consumed. “You see, I destroy it?”

Dantès calls him goodness itself. Villefort then tells him the letter is destroyed, that the two of them alone know it existed, and that he should deny it boldly if anyone asks. He makes the young man swear it was the only letter he carried.

✉️ Who is the letter addressed to?

To his father. Villefort asks the question almost as an afterthought, while Dantès is already picking up his hat and gloves, and the answer stops him cold.

“To Monsieur Noirtier, Rue Coq-Héron, Paris.” Had a thunderbolt fallen into the room, Villefort could not have been more stupefied.

Dantès asks whether he knows the man. Villefort says that a faithful servant of the king does not know conspirators. It is the first lie in the scene, and the reader does not yet know it is one, because the prosecutor goes by a different surname from his father.

😰 What is Villefort thinking while he reads?

Only about himself. He reads the letter for the third time, sweating, and the narrator lets us hear him.

“Oh, if he knows the contents of this!” murmured he, “and that Noirtier is the father of Villefort, I am lost!”

The moment Dantès is led out, Villefort half-faints into a chair and says it again in plainer words: if his superior had been in Marseilles, he would have been ruined, and his father’s past keeps interfering with his successes. Then a smile appears, and he decides that the letter which might have ruined him will make his fortune instead. He takes the news it carried to Paris himself, racing to be the first to warn the king.

👴 What does he tell his father?

The truth, and his father hears the part he leaves out. In Chapter 12, Father and Son, Noirtier turns up unannounced at Villefort’s rooms in Paris, and his son warns him that the letter could have had him shot. Noirtier laughs, asks whether the Restoration will adopt imperial methods so promptly, and wants to know where the letter is.

“I burnt it, for fear that even a fragment should remain; for that letter must have led to your condemnation.” “And the destruction of your future prospects,” replied Noirtier.

That reply is the book’s own answer to the question in the title. Villefort frames the burning as protecting his father. His father, who knows him well, finishes the sentence with the reason Villefort left out.

🕯️ How does Dantès find out?

From the Abbé Faria, years later, in a cell at the Château d’If. Dantès still thinks of the burning as the one kind act in his arrest. He tells Faria that Villefort burnt the sole evidence that could have convicted him, and quotes him from memory.

He did; saying at the same time, ‘You see I thus destroy the only proof existing against you.’

That is not quite what Villefort said. The words in Chapter 7 were only “You see, I destroy it?”, and Dantès has added the kindness in the years since. Faria asks one more question: whether the magistrate made him swear never to say the name on the address. When Dantès says yes, the abbé laughs and tells him: “This Noirtier was his father!”

⚖️ Was he protecting his father or himself?

Himself, by the book’s own account. Each time Villefort is alone or honest, the word is ruin, his ruin. The standard plot summary puts it the same way: his political career would be ruined if it were known that his father is a Bonapartist. The text supports that reading line by line. How the three men behind the arrest compare is laid out in the characters guide to Villefort, Danglars and Fernand, and every line quoted here can be checked in the Project Gutenberg text.