Bertuccio's Vendetta

The novel reveals, in one of its most gripping digressions, that Bertuccio swore a Corsican vendetta against the prosecutor Villefort after his brother's murderer went free on a technicality Villefort himself engineered, and that Bertuccio's stabbing of Villefort years later, followed by his theft of a newborn infant from the prosecutor's own garden, sets several of the novel's other plots in motion. This two-chapter story expands the vendetta's origins and its aftermath — what an oath like that actually costs the man who swears it, long after the knife has done its work.