The journalist Beauchamp holds court at the sensational Benedetto trial, trading gossip with Debray and Château-Renaud and grimly hinting a poisoner haunts the Villefort house.
Beauchamp, 'one of the kings of the press,' presides through his monocle over the packed assizes for the Benedetto affair, where all Paris has come to see the fallen 'Prince' Andrea Cavalcanti tried for murdering Caderousse. With Lucien Debray and Château-Renaud he trades worldly banter—mocking the sham Italian prince, noting the bloodstained waistcoat displayed 'as a testimony of the crime,' and remarking that the Count of Monte Cristo (Edmond Dantès) cannot appear, being both the intended burglary victim and the dupe cheated of 100,000 francs. Spotting a veiled lady they take for Madame Danglars, and puzzling over the 'strange' death of Valentine de Villefort, Beauchamp darkly jokes that people 'die so multitudinously' at Villefort's because 'there is an assassin in the house'—naming, absurdly, little Edward de Villefort.
His flippant chatter, half in jest, circles unknowingly close to the horrors about to erupt in open court.
A fashionable Parisian journalist, sharp-featured and worldly, eternally fixing a monocle in his eye, elegantly dressed.
The society journalist whose trial-day gossip circles the Villefort scandal it cannot yet grasp.