It’s time to rant about Benedetto/Andrea again
So. The entire revenge plot. The count’s revenge plots. We all know about them. And if someone would ask which one Benedetto was involved in we’d say Villefort’s. Obviously.
I mean he also killed Caderousse, but the count wasn’t planning that one from the start.
BUT LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING (something that I tell you about once a year, tbh). He played a vital role in all 3 revenge plans, and without him the count would have very little revenge.
First let’s look at what would have happened if he wouldn’t have been involved in Danglars’s revenge plan. If he wouldn’t have been engaged to Eugenie, Danglars would have been a lot less calm about losing all that money in the stock market, because Eugenie would be engaged to a guy with much less money than the Cavalcantis supposedly had. So he would have taking some sort of action sooner to ensure that he didn’t lose as much as he did as quickly as he did. And yes, he made most of his money off of Lucien telling his wife what stocks to invest in. But he clearly knows what he’s doing to some extent, and he’d probably be able to regain a significant amount of his losses. There you have it, revenge failed.
Onto Fernand. Say Benedetto wasn’t there. Then Albert would have been engaged to Eugenie. That would have been a nice respectable marriage. Fernand had gone to Danglars asking him to speed up the engagement/ have them get married, but since Danglars was considering replacing Albert with Andrea, he refused. In this alternate universe, there is no Andrea to replace Albert, so the engagement get sped up and they get married. Now Albert can’t send Beauchamp to look into the mysterious article written about his father, because he’s married and has to deal with whatever starting a marriage entails. (Idk what that would be, it just seems like a lot of work). Also, the count can’t randomly take Albert away from Paris during his father’s trial, so chances are things may have worked out a bit differently there.
IN CONCLUSION. Andrea’s engagement to Eugenie wasn’t just a good cover for him in the time before he was arrested, it also literally destroyed the lives the upper class people of France.