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SECRET THOUGHTS OOZE OUT.

Topographical Notes

The Count of Monte Cristo,by Alexandre Dumas, père is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here: . Volume Two, Chapter 39: The Guests [LINK TO TABLE OF LINK] Chapter 39. The Guests In the house in the Rue du Helder, where Albert had invited the Count of Monte Cristo, everything was being prepared on the morning of the 21st of May to do honor to the occasion. Albert de Morcerf inhabited a pavilion situated at the corner of a large court, and directly opposite another building, in which were the servants’ apartments. Two windows only of the pavilion faced the street; three other windows looked into the court, and two at the back into the garden. Between the court and the garden, built in the heavy style of the imperial architecture, was the large and fashionable dwelling of the Count and Countess of Morcerf. A high wall surrounded the whole of the property, surmounted at intervals by vases filled with flowers, and broken in the centre by a large gate of gilded iron, which served as the carriage entrance. A small door, close to the lodge of the concierge, gave ingress and egress to the servants and masters when they were on foot. It was easy to discover that the delicate care of a mother, unwilling to part from her son, and yet aware that a young man of the viscount’s age required the full exercise of his liberty, had chosen this habitation for Albert. There were not lacking, however, evidences of what we may call the intelligent egoism of a youth who is charmed with the indolent, careless life of an only son, and who lives as it were in a gilded cage. By means of the two windows looking into the street, Albert could see all that passed; the sight of what is going on is necessary to young men, who always want to see the world traverse their horizon, even if that horizon is only a public thoroughfare. Then, should anything appear to merit a more minute examination, Albert de Morcerf could follow up his researches by means of a small gate, similar to that close to the concierge’s door, and which merits a particular description. It was a little entrance that seemed never to have been opened since the house was built, so entirely was it covered with dust and dirt; but the well-oiled hinges and locks told quite another story. This door was a mockery to the concierge, from whose vigilance and jurisdiction it was free, and, like that famous portal in the Arabian Nights, opening at the “Sesame” of Ali Baba, it was wont to swing backward at a cabalistic word or a concerted tap from without from the sweetest voices or whitest fingers in the world. At the end of a long corridor, with which the door communicated, and which formed the antechamber, was, on the right, Albert’s breakfast-room, looking into the court, and on the left the salon, looking into the garden. Shrubs and creeping plants covered the windows, and hid from the garden and court these two apartments, the only rooms into which, as they were on the ground floor, the prying eyes of the curious could penetrate. On the floor above were similar rooms, with the addition of a third, formed out of the antechamber; these three rooms were a salon, a boudoir, and a bedroom. The salon downstairs was only an Algerian divan, for the use of smokers. The boudoir upstairs communicated with the bedchamber by an invisible door on the staircase; it was evident that every precaution had been taken. Above this floor was a large atelier, which had been increased in size by pulling down the partitions—a pandemonium, in which the artist and the dandy strove for pre-eminence. There were collected and piled up all Albert’s successive caprices, hunting-horns, bass-viols, flutes—a whole orchestra, for Albert had had not a taste but a fancy for music; easels, palettes, brushes, pencils—for music had been succeeded by painting; foils, boxing-gloves, broadswords, and single-sticks—for, following the example of the fashionable young men of the time, Albert de Morcerf cultivated, with far more perseverance than music and drawing, the three arts that complete a dandy’s education, i.e., fencing, boxing, and single-stick; and it was here that he received Grisier, Cooks, and Charles Leboucher. The rest of the furniture of this privileged apartment consisted of old cabinets, filled with Chinese porcelain and Japanese vases, Lucca della Robbia faïences, and Palissy platters; of old armchairs, in which perhaps had sat Henry IV. or Sully, Louis XIII. or Richelieu—for two of these armchairs, adorned with a carved shield, on which were engraved the fleur-de-lis of France on an azure field, evidently came from the Louvre, or, at least, some royal residence. Over these dark and sombre chairs were thrown splendid stuffs, dyed beneath Persia’s sun, or woven by the fingers of the women of Calcutta or of Chandernagor. What these stuffs did there, it was impossible to say; they awaited, while gratifying the eyes, a destination unknown to their owner himself; in the meantime they filled the place with their golden and silky reflections. In the centre of the room was a Roller and Blanchet “baby grand” piano in rosewood, but holding the potentialities of an orchestra in its narrow and sonorous cavity, and groaning beneath the weight of the chefs-d’œuvre of Beethoven, Weber, Mozart, Haydn, Grétry, and Porpora. On the walls, over the doors, on the ceiling, were swords, daggers, Malay creeses, maces, battle-axes; gilded, damasked, and inlaid suits of armor; dried plants, minerals, and stuffed birds, their flame-colored wings outspread in motionless flight, and their beaks forever open. This was Albert’s favorite lounging place. However, the morning of the appointment, the young man had established himself in the small salon downstairs. There, on a table, surrounded at some distance by a large and luxurious divan, every species of tobacco known,—from the yellow tobacco of Petersburg to the black of Sinai, and so on along the scale from Maryland and Porto Rico, to Latakia,—was exposed in pots of crackled earthenware of which the Dutch are so fond; beside them, in boxes of fragrant wood, were ranged, according to their size and quality, puros, regalias, havanas, and manillas; and, in an open cabinet, a collection of German pipes, of chibouques, with their amber mouth-pieces ornamented with coral, and of narghiles, with their long tubes of morocco, awaiting the caprice or the sympathy of the smokers. Albert had himself presided at the arrangement, or, rather, the symmetrical derangement, which, after coffee, the guests at a breakfast of modern days love to contemplate through the vapor that escapes from their mouths, and ascends in long and fanciful wreaths to the ceiling. At a quarter to ten, a valet entered; he composed, with a little groom named John, and who only spoke English, all Albert’s establishment, although the cook of the hotel was always at his service, and on great occasions the count’s chasseur also. This valet, whose name was Germain, and who enjoyed the entire confidence of his young master, held in one hand a number of papers, and in the other a packet of letters, which he gave to Albert. Albert glanced carelessly at the different missives, selected two written in a small and delicate hand, and enclosed in scented envelopes, opened them and perused their contents with some attention. “How did these letters come?” said he. “One by the post, Madame Danglars’ footman left the other.” “Let Madame Danglars know that I accept the place she offers me in her box. Wait; then, during the day, tell Rosa that when I leave the Opera I will sup with her as she wishes. Take her six bottles of different wine—Cyprus, sherry, and Malaga, and a barrel of Ostend oysters; get them at Borel’s, and be sure you say they are for me.” “At what o’clock, sir, do you breakfast?” “What time is it now?” “A quarter to ten.” “Very well, at half past ten. Debray will, perhaps, be obliged to go to the minister—and besides” (Albert looked at his tablets), “it is the hour I told the count, 21st May, at half past ten; and though I do not much rely upon his promise, I wish to be punctual. Is the countess up yet?” “If you wish, I will inquire.” “Yes, ask her for one of her liqueur cellarets, mine is incomplete; and tell her I shall have the honor of seeing her about three o’clock, and that I request permission to introduce someone to her.” The valet left the room. Albert threw himself on the divan, tore off the cover of two or three of the papers, looked at the theatre announcements, made a face seeing they gave an opera, and not a ballet; hunted vainly amongst the advertisements for a new tooth-powder of which he had heard, and threw down, one after the other, the three leading papers of Paris, muttering, “These papers become more and more stupid every day.” A moment after, a carriage stopped before the door, and the servant announced M. Lucien Debray. A tall young man, with light hair, clear gray eyes, and thin and compressed lips, dressed in a blue coat with beautifully carved gold buttons, a white neckcloth, and a tortoiseshell eye-glass suspended by a silken thread, and which, by an effort of the superciliary and zygomatic muscles, he fixed in his eye, entered, with a half-official air, without smiling or speaking. “Good-morning, Lucien, good-morning,” said Albert; “your punctuality really alarms me. What do I say? punctuality! You, whom I expected last, you arrive at five minutes to ten, when the time fixed was half-past! Has the ministry resigned?” “No, my dear fellow,” returned the young man, seating himself on the divan; “reassure yourself; we are tottering always, but we never fall, and I begin to believe that we shall pass into a state of immobility, and then the affairs of the Peninsula will completely consolidate us.” “Ah, true; you drive Don Carlos out of Spain.” “No, no, my dear fellow, do not confound our plans. We take him to the other side of the French frontier, and offer him hospitality at Bourges.” “At Bourges?” “Yes, he has not much to complain of; Bourges is the capital of Charles VII. Do you not know that all Paris knew it yesterday, and the day before it had already transpired on the Bourse, and M. Danglars (I do not know by what means that man contrives to obtain intelligence as soon as we do) made a million!” “And you another order, for I see you have a blue ribbon at your button-hole.” “Yes; they sent me the order of Charles III.,” returned Debray carelessly. “Come, do not affect indifference, but confess you were pleased to have it.” “Oh, it is very well as a finish to the toilet. It looks very neat on a black coat buttoned up.” “And makes you resemble the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Reichstadt.” “It is for that reason you see me so early.” “Because you have the order of Charles III., and you wish to announce the good news to me?” “No, because I passed the night writing letters,—five-and-twenty despatches. I returned home at daybreak, and strove to sleep; but my head ached and I got up to have a ride for an hour. At the Bois de Boulogne, ennui and hunger attacked me at once,—two enemies who rarely accompany each other, and who are yet leagued against me, a sort of Carlo-republican alliance. I then recollected you gave a breakfast this morning, and here I am. I am hungry, feed me; I am bored, amuse me.” “It is my duty as your host,” returned Albert, ringing the bell, while Lucien turned over, with his gold-mounted cane, the papers that lay on the table. “Germain, a glass of sherry and a biscuit. In the meantime, my dear Lucien, here are cigars—contraband, of course—try them, and persuade the minister to sell us such instead of poisoning us with cabbage leaves.” “Peste! I will do nothing of the kind; the moment they come from government you would find them execrable. Besides, that does not concern the home but the financial department. Address yourself to M. Humann, section of the indirect contributions, corridor A., No. 26.” “On my word,” said Albert, “you astonish me by the extent of your knowledge. Take a cigar.” “Really, my dear Albert,” replied Lucien, lighting a manilla at a rose-colored taper that burnt in a beautifully enamelled stand—“how happy you are to have nothing to do. You do not know your own good fortune!” “And what would you do, my dear diplomatist,” replied Morcerf, with a slight degree of irony in his voice, “if you did nothing? What? private secretary to a minister, plunged at once into European cabals and Parisian intrigues; having kings, and, better still, queens, to protect, parties to unite, elections to direct; making more use of your cabinet with your pen and your telegraph than Napoleon did of his battle-fields with his sword and his victories; possessing five-and-twenty thousand francs a year, besides your place; a horse, for which Château-Renaud offered you four hundred louis, and which you would not part with; a tailor who never disappoints you; with the opera, the jockey-club, and other diversions, can you not amuse yourself? Well, I will amuse you.” “How?” “By introducing to you a new acquaintance.” “A man or a woman?” “A man.” “I know so many men already.” “But you do not know this man.” “Where does he come from—the end of the world?” “Farther still, perhaps.” “The deuce! I hope he does not bring our breakfast with him.” “Oh, no; our breakfast comes from my father’s kitchen. Are you hungry?” “Humiliating as such a confession is, I am. But I dined at M. de Villefort’s, and lawyers always give you very bad dinners. You would think they felt some remorse; did you ever remark that?” “Ah, depreciate other persons’ dinners; you ministers give such splendid ones.” “Yes; but we do not invite people of fashion. If we were not forced to entertain a parcel of country boobies because they think and vote with us, we should never dream of dining at home, I assure you.” “Well, take another glass of sherry and another biscuit.” “Willingly. Your Spanish wine is excellent. You see we were quite right to pacify that country.” “Yes; but Don Carlos?” “Well, Don Carlos will drink Bordeaux, and in ten years we will marry his son to the little queen.” “You will then obtain the Golden Fleece, if you are still in the ministry.” “I think, Albert, you have adopted the system of feeding me on smoke this morning.” “Well, you must allow it is the best thing for the stomach; but I hear Beauchamp in the next room; you can dispute together, and that will pass away the time.” “About what?” “About the papers.” “My dear friend,” said Lucien with an air of sovereign contempt, “do I ever read the papers?” “Then you will dispute the more.” “M. Beauchamp,” announced the servant. “Come in, come in,” said Albert, rising and advancing to meet the young man. “Here is Debray, who detests you without reading you, so he says.” “He is quite right,” returned Beauchamp; “for I criticise him without knowing what he does. Good-day, commander!” “Ah, you know that already,” said the private secretary, smiling and shaking hands with him. “Pardieu!” “And what do they say of it in the world?” “In which world? we have so many worlds in the year of grace 1838.” “In the entire political world, of which you are one of the leaders.” “They say that it is quite fair, and that sowing so much red, you ought to reap a little blue.” “Come, come, that is not bad!” said Lucien. “Why do you not join our party, my dear Beauchamp? With your talents you would make your fortune in three or four years.” “I only await one thing before following your advice; that is, a minister who will hold office for six months. My dear Albert, one word, for I must give poor Lucien a respite. Do we breakfast or dine? I must go to the Chamber, for our life is not an idle one.” “You only breakfast; I await two persons, and the instant they arrive we shall sit down to table.” About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022, from Dumas, Alexandre. 2022. The Count of the Monte-Cristo. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0039 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated: Chapter 39 - The Guests

Summary: This is the backstory of how we built pribot.org . There is a Wired article about the project already. This article provides our story of what went behind the scenes. Whenever someone asks me what I work on, I find nothing better than a single link to a YouTube series of 9 hours filming an actor reading Amazon Kindle’s terms and conditions. Yes, you read it correctly: 9 HOURS. Here is the trailer: And this is a link to the full series . Hopefully, you’re still with me at this early stage and you didn’t get lost in an endless spiral of similar videos recommended by YouTube, such as people streaming themselves reading privacy policies of , , and e, for hours. Google Facebook Appl Actually, the privacy policy, the equally annoying sibling of terms and conditions, is the subject of this article. Have you thought how long it would really take to read all the policies for services we use per year? That would be according to a research by in 2008. 201 hours McDonald and Cranor So given the choice between this unpaid, exhausting task and anything else, it’s no wonder that people prefer spending time fulfilling their yearly exercising goals, reading an amusing book, or just relaxing. This is even when they hear frightening stories of what’s inside privacy policies (like and ). this this Researchers have tried to make these policies simpler, primarily by manual methods, like websites offering of their policy, inspired by nutrition labels. Approaches relying on the wisdom of the crowd have received good traction too (like the “ ” project). Yet, these attempts didn’t scale due to the huge manual effort and human expertise involved. standardized versions Terms of Service; Didn’t Read Fixing Privacy Policies: the Backstory 🛠 Two years ago, my colleagues and I wrote a for a workshop on the future of privacy notices. paper In it, we proposed a vision for turning privacy policies into a conversation via a chatbot called . PriBot Let’s admit it: 2016 was the year of chatbots, and we were — shamelessly — motivated by the hype. After all, the best interface . Right? is no interface Our idea was that you could ask PriBot about any privacy policy like you ask Siri for the capital of Ivory Coast . PriBot would then respond in real time with an answer from the policy itself. (spoiler: Yamoussoukro) Fast forward ⏩ Twenty months later, we have taken our vision to fruition in a new , in which we first show how we realized the goal of automated Question Answering for privacy policies. This is a collaboration between (yours truly), , , , and . research paper Hamza Harkous Kassem Fawaz Rémi Lebret Florian Schaub Kang G. Shin Karl Aberer As our first research outcome, we’re introducing PriBot to the public, via a chatbot that you can converse with right now at : pribot.org/bot PriBot in action On the way to build PriBot, we had a surprising byproduct, which even has the potential to make a wider impact: we built a general system for automatically analyzing privacy policies using machine learning. We call it Polisis. gives you a glimpse about of privacy policy, like the data being collected, the information shared with third parties, the security measures implemented by the company, the choices you have, etc. All that without having to read a single line of the policy itself. Polisis We’re releasing Polisis too at . You can alternatively download its or to analyze websites in a click. pribot.org/polisis Chrome extension Firefox addon Polisis in action To our knowledge, Polisis is the first system to provide such in-depth automated analysis of privacy policies. Who is this for? 👩‍⚖️🕵️‍👨‍💻 We have three audiences envisioned: We designed PriBot and Polisis to be highly intuitive for the general user who is interested in the privacy aspects of the sites they use. General users: We envision that the technology powering Polisis could be used for large-scale analysis of privacy policies by regulation agencies. For example, in our , we used Polisis to show how privacy certification companies (such as — now TrustArc) have been highly permissive with businesses. Regulators: paper TRUSTe A lot of research has studied apps and websites in an automated way based on their code, their embedded scripts, or on what they share over the network. A missing piece of the puzzle is what these apps promise in their privacy policies. We hope our work can empower researchers with new insights from the policies’ angle. Researchers: To that goal, we would be glad to collaborate with regulators, researchers, and the general industry. Feel free to if you are interested. reach out No Magic Pill Now to the research part! You might say: “couldn’t you do the above by combining a few APIs or open source projects? Didn’t IBM Watson beat humans at answering “Jeopardy!” questions? And why couldn’t you use commercial services like ?” Microsoft QnA Maker The answer is that such systems are not magic pills. If they are trained on specific domains, like insurance questions, they can be rarely adequate for others. If they are trained on a general domain, they suffer when tested with specific problems. Imagine asking the question: “ ” around a privacy policy. Almost every QA system will favor the answer “ ” over the answer “we use your location for customizing our service.” Obviously, the second is the better answer. Yet, this is not easy to get. do you gather my address info? for your info, we work hard to address your issues What makes things harder is that there are no public datasets of questions and answers about privacy policies waiting to be trained. So traditional approaches to this problem were not the way forward. A Hierarchical Approach 💤 We took the other way around. We focused on solving the problem of automatically labeling segments in the privacy policy, producing . Then we leveraged that solution for the QA problem, producing . On a high-level, our approach for automatically labeling segments was as follows: Polisis PriBot We first trained a model on 130K privacy policies that we collected. Unsupervised Learning step: word embedding We then trained a hierarchy of 22 classifiers (each being a neural network) for labeling the different aspects of the policy. We relied on the valuable OPP-115 dataset from the for this part. Supervised Learning step: Usable Privacy Project : if you just read these steps, and you try to reproduce the results, that will lead to a horrible performance. Our discusses the devil in the details, which lead to a high accuracy, from data preprocessing to classifier selection, etc. Spoiler paper How can we move from classification to QA? Let’s say you had a question “Do you share my info?”. To get an answer, we first break the policy into . Each segment is a candidate answer. Then, we rank the answers by their similarity to the question. small standalone segments The similarity is measured by seeing which answers receive “close” labels to the question. To get these labels, we pass both the question and the answers through our classification hierarchy. How to define “close” is also important. For example, questions are frequently broad. You don’t want to frustrate the user by with close, but generic answers. Hence, we came up with a new similarity algorithm to account for this issue (details in the ). paper Examples We Love Hopefully, by now you are willing to give our tools a try. Head over to to see them both in action. pribot.org And to get inspired when you stress-test PriBot, you can check the following examples. Here, PriBot works although there are no common words between the question and the answer: …or when our hands get sloppy, and we misspell a few critical words (you can thank for this): subword embeddings PriBot also notifies users when there is a contradiction in the potential answers: …and it tries to not appear stupid when presented with irrelevant questions: Likewise, you can give a go, and you can a few examples below: Polisis With Fitbit’s policy, you can get an overview of what data the company collects. By clicking on “Analytics/Research”, you can see all the data being collected for that purpose, with the options you get. You can also see that Fitbit shares health information with third parties in the second tab. Hovering over the link will give you the exact evidence from the policy itself. If the policy gives you choices to mitigate data collection, you can see these choices in the dedicated tab, along with the links to opt-in or opt-out. Finally, if there is no information about a certain aspect in the policy, we give an explanation on why this is the case. We hope you enjoy playing with these services, and we welcome your feedback. We know well the limitations of this technology. Hence, we do not claim that the results are legally binding or are completely accurate. Yet, we believe that this a great step forward on the road to Make Privacy Policies Cool (I’m tempted to end the sentence with ‘Again’, but they were never cool before 😀 )! And thanks for reading! You might also be interested in checking my other articles on my Medium page: _Read writing from Hamza Harkous on Medium. Postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland; working at the intersection of Privacy, NLP…_medium.com Hamza Harkous — Medium … or my website: _Personal website of Hamza Harkous_hamzaharkous.com Hamza Harkous’ Site

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