The governor burst out laughing.
‘Is it a long way to your treasure?’ he asked.
‘About a hundred leagues from here,’ Faria said.
‘It’s a clever idea,’ said the governor. ‘If every prisoner was to take his warders on a wild-goose chase for a hundred leagues, supposing the warders agreed to it, there is a good chance that the prisoner would manage to take to his heels as soon as he had the opportunity, which would no doubt occur in the course of such a journey.’
‘It’s an old trick,’ said the inspector, ‘and this gentleman cannot even claim to have invented it for himself.’
Then he turned back to the abbé. ‘I asked you if you were well fed?’
‘Monsieur,’ Faria replied, ‘swear to me in Christ’s name to set me free if what I have told you is the truth, and I shall tell you the place where the treasure is buried.’
‘Are you well fed?’ the inspector insisted.
‘But in this way, you take no risk: you can see that it is not in order to contrive some opportunity to escape, since I shall remain in prison while the journey is made.’
‘You haven’t replied to my question,’ the inspector repeated impatiently.
‘And you haven’t replied to my request!’ cried the abbé. ‘Then be damned, like the other idiots who refused to believe me. You don’t want my gold, then I shall keep it. You deny me my freedom, then God will give it to me. Go, I have nothing more to say.’
Throwing off his blanket, he picked up his scrap of plaster and once more sat down in the middle of his circle, where he went back to his lines and his sums.
‘What is he doing?’ the inspector asked, at the door.
‘Counting his treasure,’ the governor answered.
Faria’s reply to this sarcastic remark was a look of the most sovereign contempt. They went out and the jailer locked the door behind them.
‘Perhaps he did have some treasure, after all,’ the inspector said, on his way up the stairs.
‘Or dreamed about it,’ the governor replied, ‘and woke up the next morning, mad.’
‘Of course,’ the inspector remarked, with the naïvety of the corrupt, ‘if he had really been rich, he would not be in prison.’
For Abbé Faria, that was the end of the adventure. He remained a prisoner and, following the inspector’s visit, his reputation as an entertaining imbecile was greater than ever.
Those great treasure-hunters, Caligula and Nero, searchers after the unattainable, would have listened to the poor man’s words and given him the opportunity that he wanted, the space that he valued so highly and the freedom for which he was ready to pay so great a price. But kings today, confined within the limits of probability, no longer possess the audacity of willpower. They are afraid of the ears that listen to their orders and the eyes that watch whatever they do. They no longer have any sense of the superiority of their divine being: they are men who wear crowns, nothing more. At one time they would have believed themselves (or, at least, have claimed to be) the sons of Jupiter, and their manners would somehow have reflected those of their father, the god: what happens beyond the clouds is not so easily controlled, but nowadays kings are well within reach. And, as despotic governments have always been loath to exhibit the effects of prison and torture in broad daylight – just as there are few instances of a victim of the Inquisition emerging with broken bones and bleeding wounds – so folly, that ulcer conceived in the mire of dungeons as a result of moral torture, almost always remains carefully hidden in the place of its birth, or else, if it should emerge, does so only to be buried once more in some dark hospital whose doctors can recognize neither the man nor his ideas in the shapeless wreck entrusted to them by its tired jailer.
Abbé Faria had gone mad in prison and was condemned, by his very madness, to perpetual confinement.
As for Dantès, the inspector was as good as his word. On returning to the governor’s lodgings, he asked to be shown the committal order. The note on the prisoner was couched in the following terms:
EDMOND DANTES:
Fanatical Bonapartist. Played an active role in the return from Elba.
To be kept in solitary confinement, under the closest supervision.
This note was in a different handwriting and ink from the rest of the order, proving that it had been added after Dantès’ imprisonment.
The accusation was too precise to allow any latitude for discussion, so above the words, which were bracketed together, the inspector wrote: ‘No action.’
The visit had in a sense revived Dantès. Since his arrival at the prison he had forgotten to count the days, but the inspector had given him a new date, which Dantès had not forgotten. Behind him, with a piece of plaster that had fallen from his ceiling, he wrote on the wall: July 30, 1816. From that time on, he made a mark every day, so that he would no longer lose track of the passage of time.
The days went by, then weeks, then months. Dantès waited. He had begun by setting a limit of a fortnight on his release: if the inspector were to devote half the concern that he had appeared to feel to pursuing the matter, then a fortnight should be enough. When that time had expired, he decided that it had been ridiculous of him to think that the inspector would have taken up his case before returning to Paris. Since he could not return to Paris until the end of his tour of inspection, which might last a month or two, he gave himself three months instead of a fortnight. When the three months had passed, he found consolation in a different argument, with the result that he allowed six months; but when the six months were over, adding up all the days, it appeared that he had waited for ten and a half months. Nothing, in these ten months, had changed in the conditions of his imprisonment; he had received no encouraging news and when he questioned his jailer the man remained silent, as usual. Dantès began to doubt the evidence of his senses – to think that what he had taken for a memory was nothing more than a hallucination and that the ministering angel who had appeared to him in his prison had flown in on the wings of a dream.
A year later, the governor was transferred: he had been appointed to manage the fort at Ham, and took with him several of his subordinates, including Dantès’ jailer. A new governor arrived. It would have taken him too long to learn the names of his prisoners, so he asked only to be told their numbers. There were fifty furnished rooms in this frightful lodging-house. Its inhabitants were called by the number of the one that they occupied, and the unfortunate young man was no longer called by his first name, Edmond, or his family name, Dantès. He became Number 34.
XV
NUMBER 34 AND NUMBER 27
Dantès went through all the stages of misery endured by prisoners who are left entombed in prison. He started with pride, which is the product of hope and the knowledge of one’s innocence. Then he came to doubt his own innocence, which did a great deal to justify the governor’s ideas on mental derangement. Finally, he fell from the summit of his pride and prayed, not to God, but to men; God is the last refuge. Such unfortunates, who should begin with Our Lord, only come to trust in Him after exhausting all other sources of hope. So Dantès prayed to be removed from his dungeon and put in another, even one that was deeper and darker: any change, albeit for the worse, would be a change, and would provide some relief for a few days. He begged to be allowed exercise, fresh air, books or implements. None of these requests was granted, but he continued to make them for all that. He had become accustomed to talk to his new jailer, even though the man was (if that was possible) more uncommunicative than his predecessor: it was still a pleasure to speak to another human being, however dumb. Dantès talked to hear the sound of his own voice; he had tried talking to himself when he was alone, but that frightened him.
Often, in the days of his freedom, Dantès had been alarmed at the idea of the obscure revels and terrifying camaraderie of those prison cells where vagabonds, bandits and murderers share their base pleasures. But he came to wish that he might be thrown into one of those holes, so that he could catch
sight of some other face apart from that of his impassive jailer who refused to speak; and he dreamed of a convict’s life: the shameful uniform, the ankle chain, the branded shoulder. At least men in the galleys enjoyed the company of their fellows, they breathed fresh air and could see the open sky. Convicts were lucky.
One day he begged the jailer to ask for him to be given a cell-mate: anyone, even the mad abbé he had heard about. However rough a jailer’s skin, there is always something human beneath. Although he had never shown any sign of it, the jailer had often, in the depth of his heart, pitied this unfortunate young man whose captivity was so harsh; so he passed on Number 34’s message to the governor. The latter, cautious as a politician, concluded however that Dantès wanted to start a riot among the prisoners, devise some plot or have a friend to help him in an escape attempt. He turned down the request.
Dantès had exhausted every human resource. Inevitably, as we said earlier, he turned to God. Every pious notion ever sown in the world and gleaned by some wretch, bowed beneath the yoke of destiny, now came to refresh his soul. He recalled the prayers that his mother had taught him and discovered a significance in them that he had not previously understood: to a happy man, a prayer is a monotonous composition, void of meaning, until the day when suffering deciphers the sublime language through which the poor victim addresses God.
So he prayed, not with fervour, but with fury. Praying aloud, he was no longer frightened by the sound of his own words; he fell into a sort of ecstasy, he saw God radiant in every word he uttered and confided every action of his humble and abandoned life to the will of this powerful Deity, deriving instruction from them and setting himself tasks to perform. At the end of every prayer he added the self-interested entreaty that men more often contrive to address to their fellows than to God: ‘And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.’
Despite his fervent prayers, Dantès remained a prisoner.
So his mind darkened and a cloud formed in front of his eyes. Dantès was a simple, uneducated man; to him, the past was covered by a murky veil that can be raised only by knowledge. In the solitude of his dungeon and the desert of his thoughts, he could not reconstruct ages past, revive extinct races or rebuild those antique cities that imagination augments and poeticizes so that they pass before one’s eyes, gigantic and lit by fiery skies, as in Martin’s Babylonian scenes.1 All he had were: his own past, which was so short; his present – so sombre; and his future – so uncertain: nineteen years of light to contemplate, in what might be eternal darkness! There was consequently nothing to help distract his mind. His energetic spirit, which would have wished for nothing better than to take flight through the ages, was forced to remain trapped like an eagle in a cage. He clung to one idea: that of his happiness, which had been destroyed, for no apparent reason, by an unprecedented stroke of fate. He refused to release this thought, turning it over and over, as it were consuming it ravenously, like the pitiless Ugolino2 devouring Archbishop Roger’s skull in Dante’s Inferno. His faith had been transient and he lost it, as others do when they achieve success. The difference was that he had not gained by it.
Fury followed asceticism. Edmond’s curses made his jailer start back in horror. He dashed himself against the walls of his prison and raged against everything around him, himself first of all, at the slightest discomfort caused by a grain of sand, a straw or a draught. Then it was that he recalled the denunciatory letter that he had seen, that Villefort had shown him, that his hands had touched. Every line blazed on the cell wall like the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin at Belshazzar’s feast.3 He decided that it was human hatred and not divine vengeance that had plunged him into this abyss. He doomed these unknown men to every torment that his inflamed imagination could devise, while still considering that the most frightful were too mild and, above all, too brief for them: torture was followed by death, and death brought, if not repose, at least an insensibility that resembled it.
He often told himself, thinking of his enemies, that tranquillity was death and that other means, apart from death, were needed by whoever wished to inflict a cruel punishment, until eventually he fell into the melancholy quietude of thoughts of suicide. Woe to the man who, sliding into misfortune, is drawn by such dark thoughts! This is one of those dead seas that seem to offer the inviting blue of pure waters, but where the swimmer’s feet are sucked into a bituminous mire which draws him, drags him down and swallows him up. Once caught, he is lost if God does not come to his aid, and every effort that he makes pulls him nearer to death.
However, this state of moral agony is less fearful than the suffering that precedes it or the punishment that may follow: it is a kind of dizzying comfort to contemplate the open abyss when, at the bottom of that abyss, lies nothingness. Reaching this point, Edmond found some consolation in the idea; all his sufferings, all his sorrows and the procession of spectres that follow in their train seemed to take wing and fly from the corner of his prison where the angel of death might rest his silent foot. Dantès looked with equanimity at his past life, with terror at what was to come, and chose the mid-point that appeared to offer a refuge.
‘Sometimes,’ he thought at such moments, ‘in my distant voyages, when I was still a man – and when that man, free and powerful, gave orders to others that they carried out – I used to see the sky open, the sea tremble and groan, a storm brewing in some part of the sky and thrashing the horizon with its wings like a giant eagle; then I would feel that my vessel was nothing but a useless refuge, itself shaking and shuddering, as light as a feather in the hand of a giant. Soon the appearance of some sharp rocks and the awful thundering of the waves against them spoke to me of death, and death appalled me. I strove to escape it, uniting all my strength as a man and all my skill as a sailor in the struggle against God!… All this, because I was happy then; to return to life was to return to happiness; because I had not asked for death, I had not chosen it; because finally sleep on a bed of seaweed and pebbles seemed hard to me – I, who believed myself to be a creature made in the image of God, rebelled at the idea of serving, after my death, as nourishment for seagulls and vultures. But today it is different: I have lost everything that could make me love life and now death smiles at me like a nursemaid to the child she will rock to sleep. Today I die at my own pleasure and go to sleep, tired and broken, as I used to fall asleep after one of those evenings of despair and fury when I had counted three thousand circuits of my room, that is to say thirty thousand paces, or almost ten leagues.’
As soon as this thought had taken root in the young man’s mind he became milder and more amenable. He was more ready to accept his hard bed and black bread, he ate less, no longer slept and found this remainder of a life more or less bearable, being sure that he could cast it off when he wanted to, like a discarded suit of clothes.
There were two ways for him to die. The first was simple: it involved fixing his kerchief to one of the bars on the window and hanging himself. The alternative was to pretend to eat and allow himself to die of hunger. Dantès was very loath to adopt the first course. He had been brought up with a horror of pirates, people who are hanged from the yardarm, so he saw hanging as an ignominious method of execution which he did not want to apply to himself. Consequently he chose the second way and began to carry out his decision that very day.
Almost four years had passed while his mood fluctuated in the way we have described. At the end of the second, Dantès had ceased to count the days and lapsed back into the unawareness of time from which the inspector’s visit had roused him.
Having said ‘I wish to die’ and chosen his own death, Dantès had given thought to the implications and, afraid that he might change his mind, had sworn to himself that he would die in this way. ‘When they bring me my morning and evening meals,’ he thought, ‘I shall throw the food out of the window, and so appear to have eaten it.’
He did as he had promised. Twice a day, he threw his food out of the little barred opening which gave hi
m no more than a glimpse of the sky, first joyfully, then thoughtfully and finally with regret. He had to remind himself of the oath he had sworn to find the strength to pursue his awful resolution. Seen with the eyes of hunger, this food, which had formerly disgusted him, appeared appetizing to look at and smelled exquisite. Sometimes he held the plate containing it for an hour in his hand, staring at the piece of rotten meat or repulsive fish, and the mouldy black bread. The last instinct of survival struggled within him and occasionally defeated his resolve. At such times, his dungeon seemed less dark and his situation less desperate. He was still young, he must be about twenty-five or twenty-six, so he had roughly fifty years left to live, that is to say twice as long as he had lived so far. In this vast expanse of time, how many different events might unlock the doors and break down the walls of the Château d’If, and set him free! At such times he put his lips towards the meal that, like a deliberate Tantalus, he was snatching from his own mouth. But then he would remember the oath which his nature was too generous to break for fear that he might end by despising himself. So, firm and implacable, he summoned up the little remnant of life that remained to him, until the day came when they brought him his supper and he was too weak to get up and throw it out of the window.
The next day he was unable to see and could hardly hear.
The jailer thought he was seriously ill. Edmond hoped for a quick death.
So the day passed. Edmond felt himself overtaken by a numbing sense of drowsiness, which was not altogether unpleasant. The cramps in his stomach had died down and his burning thirst had calmed. When he closed his eyes, he saw a host of brilliant lights like those will-o’-the-wisps that hover at night over marshlands: this was the twilight of that unknown country known as death. Suddenly, in the evening at about nine o’clock, he heard a dull sound on the wall beside which he was lying.
The Count of Monte Cristo Page 19