The Count of Monte Cristo

by Alexandre Dumas

  But now that he had seen an old man clasping on to life with such energy and giving him the example of such desperate resolve, he started to reflect and to measure his courage. Another man had attempted to do something that he had not even thought of doing; another, less young, less strong and less agile than himself, had succeeded, by sheer skill and patience, in acquiring all the implements he needed for this incredible task, which had failed only because of a failure of measurement; someone else had done all this, so nothing was impossible for Dantès. Faria had dug fifty feet, he would dig a hundred; Faria, at the age of fifty, had spent three years on the work; he was only half Faria’s age, he could afford six; Faria, the priest, the learned churchman, had not shrunk from the prospect of swimming from the Château d’If to the islands of Daume, Ratonneau or Lemaire; so would he, Edmond the sailor, Dantès the bold swimmer, who had so often plunged to the bottom of the sea to fetch a branch of coral – would he shrink from swimming a league? How long did it take to swim a league: one hour? And had he not spent whole hours on end in the sea without setting foot on shore? No, Dantès needed only to be encouraged by example. Anything that another man had done or could have done, Dantès would do.

  He thought for a moment. ‘I have found what you were looking for,’ he told the old man.

  Faria shivered, and looked up with an expression that announced that if Dantès was telling the truth, his companion’s despair would be short-lived. ‘You?’ he asked. ‘Come, now, what have you found?’

  ‘The tunnel that you dug to reach here from your own cell extends in the same direction as the outer gallery. Is that so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It can only be some fifteen feet away from it?’

  ‘At the most.’

  ‘Well, around the middle of this tunnel we will dig another at right-angles to it. This time, you will take your measurements more carefully. We will come out on to the exterior gallery. We shall kill the sentry and escape. All we need, for this plan to succeed, is resolve, and you have that; and strength, which I have. I say nothing of patience: you have demonstrated it already and I shall do the same.’

  ‘One moment,’ the abbé replied. ‘My good friend, you do not realize the nature of my resolve or the use that I intend to make of my strength. As for patience, I have been patient enough, in resuming every morning the work that I left the night before, and, every night, that which I left in the morning. But you must understand this, young man: I thought that I was serving God by freeing one of His creatures who, being innocent, had not been condemned.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Dantès. ‘What is different now; have you found yourself guilty since you met me?’

  ‘No, and I do not wish to become so. Up to now, I thought I was dealing only with things, but you are suggesting that I deal with men. I can cut through a wall and destroy a staircase, but I shall not cut through a man’s breast and destroy his life.’

  Dantès made a small gesture of surprise and said: ‘Do you mean that, when you might be free, you would be deterred by such considerations?’

  ‘What of you?’ asked Faria. ‘Why have you never bludgeoned your jailer one evening with the leg of your table, then put on his clothes and tried to escape?’

  ‘I never thought of doing it.’

  ‘Because you have an instinctive horror at the idea of such a crime, to the point where it has never even entered your head,’ the old man continued. ‘For, in simple and permitted matters, our natural appetites warn us not to exceed the boundaries of what is permissible for us. The tiger, which spills blood in the natural course of things, because this is its state of being, its destiny, needs only for its sense of smell to inform it that a prey is within reach; immediately it leaps towards this prey, falls on it and tears it apart. That is its instinct, which it obeys. But mankind, on the contrary, is repelled by blood. It is not the laws of society that condemn murder, but the laws of nature.’

  Dantès was struck dumb: this was indeed the explanation of what had gone on, without him knowing it, in his mind – or, rather, in his soul: some thoughts come from the head, others from the heart.

  ‘Moreover,’ Faria went on, ‘in the course of nearly twelve years that I have spent in prison, I have mentally gone over all famous escapes; only very rarely do they succeed. Fortunate escapes, those which succeed fully, are the ones that have been prepared carefully and over a long period of time. That is how the Duc de Beaufort escaped from the Château de Vincennes, Abbé Dubuquoi from the Fort-l’Evêque, Latude from the Bastille.1 There are also some opportunities that occur by chance; those are the best. Let us await such an opportunity and, believe me, if it comes, let us take advantage of it.’

  ‘You were able to wait,’ said Dantès, sighing. ‘This long labour occupied your every moment and, when you did not have that to distract you, you were consoled by hope.’

  ‘I did other things as well.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘I wrote or I studied.’

  ‘Do they give you paper, pens and ink, then?’

  ‘No,’ said the abbé, ‘but I make them for myself.’

  ‘You make paper, pens and ink?’ Dantès exclaimed.

  ‘Yes.’

  Dantès looked admiringly at the man, but found it hard to credit what he was saying. Faria noticed this shadow of a doubt.

  ‘When you come to visit me,’ he said, ‘I shall show you a whole book, the product of the thoughts, the research and meditations of my entire life, which I contemplated writing in the shadow of the Colosseum in Rome, beneath the column of St Mark’s in Venice, on the banks of the Arno in Florence – and which I never suspected that my jailers would one day leave me ample time to complete between the four walls of the Château d’If. It is a Treatise on the Prospects for a General Monarchy in Italy. It will make one large in-quarto volume.’

  ‘You have written it?’

  ‘On two shirts. I have invented a preparation that makes linen as smooth and even as parchment.’

  ‘So you are a chemist…’

  ‘A little. I knew Lavoisier and I am a friend of Cabanis.’2

  ‘But, for such a work, you must have needed to do historical research. Do you have any books?’

  ‘In Rome, I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library. By reading and re-reading them, I discovered that one hundred and fifty books, carefully chosen, give you, if not a complete summary of human knowledge, at least everything that it is useful for a man to know. I devoted three years of my life to reading and re-reading these hundred and fifty volumes, so that when I was arrested I knew them more or less by heart. In prison, with a slight effort of memory, I recalled them entirely. So I can recite to you Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, Strada, Jornadès, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Bossuet; I mention only the most important…’

  ‘But that must mean you know several languages?’

  ‘I speak five living languages: German, French, Italian, English and Spanish. I can understand modern Greek with the help of Ancient Greek, but I speak it poorly; I am studying it now.’

  ‘You are studying it?’ Dantès exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, I have compiled a vocabulary of the words that I know and have arranged them, combined them, turned them one way, then the other, so as to make them sufficient to express my thoughts. I know about one thousand words, which is all I absolutely need, though I believe there are a hundred thousand in dictionaries. Of course I shall not be a polished speaker, but I shall make myself understood perfectly, which is good enough.’

  Increasingly astonished, Edmond began to consider this man’s faculties almost supernatural. He wanted to catch him out on some point or other, so he went on: ‘But if they did not give you a pen, with what did you manage to write this huge treatise?’

  ‘I made very good pens, which would be found superior to ordinary ones if the substance was known, out of the soft bones from the heads of those big whiting that they sometimes serve us on fast
days. In this way, I always looked forward to Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, because they offered me at least a hope of increasing my stock of pens. I have to admit that my historical work is my favourite occupation. When I go back to the past, I forget the present. I walk free and independently through history, and forget that I am a prisoner.’

  ‘But ink?’ Dantès asked. ‘How did you make ink?’

  ‘There used to be a chimney in my dungeon,’ Faria said. ‘This chimney was doubtless blocked up some time before my arrival but, previously, fires had been built there for many years, so the whole of the inside was coated with soot. I dissolve the soot in part of the wine that they give me every Sunday, and it makes excellent ink. For particular notes which must stand out from the text, I prick my fingers and write with my blood.’

  ‘And when can I see all this?’ Dantès asked.

  ‘Whenever you wish,’ Faria replied.

  ‘At once! At once!’ the young man exclaimed.

  ‘Then follow me,’ said the abbé; and he disappeared down the underground passage. Dantès followed him.

  XVII

  THE ABBÉ’S CELL

  After passing through the underground passage, bent over but still without too much difficulty, Dantès arrived at the far end of the tunnel where it entered the abbé’s cell. At this point it narrowed to allow just enough room for a man to squeeze through. The floor of the abbé’s cell was paved and it was by lifting one of the stones, in the darkest corner, that he had begun the laborious tunnelling that had brought him to Dantès.

  As soon as he was inside and standing up, the young man studied the room carefully. At first sight there was nothing unusual about it.

  ‘Good,’ said the abbé. ‘It is only a quarter past twelve, so we still have a few hours ahead of us.’

  Dantès looked around, to find the clock on which the abbé had been able to tell the time so precisely.

  ‘Look at that ray of sunlight shining through my window,’ said the abbé. ‘Now look at the lines I have drawn on the wall. Thanks to these lines, which take account of the double movement of the earth and its course round the sun, I know the time more accurately than if I had a watch, because the mechanism of a watch may be damaged, while that of the earth and the sun never can.’

  Dantès understood nothing of this explanation: he had always thought, seeing the sun rise behind the mountains and set in the Mediterranean, that it moved, and not the earth. He considered almost impossible this ‘double movement’ of the earth which he did not perceive, even though he inhabited it, and he saw contained in each of the other man’s words the mysteries of a science that would be as exciting to explore as the mines of gold and diamonds he had visited while still almost a child on a journey that he had made to Gujarat and Golconda.

  ‘Come, now,’ he said to the abbé. ‘I am impatient to see your treasures.’

  The abbé went over to the chimney and, with the chisel which he still had in his hand, moved the stone that had once formed the hearth of the fire, behind which there was a fairly deep hole. In this, he concealed all the objects he had mentioned to Dantès.

  ‘What do you wish to see first?’ he asked.

  ‘Show me your great work on the monarchy in Italy.’

  Faria took three or four linen rolls out of the precious cupboard, wound over on themselves like rolls of papyrus: these were bands of cloth, about four inches wide and eighteen long. Each one was numbered and covered with writing which Dantès could read, because it was in the abbé’s mother-tongue, Italian, and, as a Provençal, Dantès understood it perfectly.

  ‘See,’ the abbé told him, ‘it is all there. It is now about a week since I wrote the word “end” at the foot of the sixty-eighth roll. Two of my shirts and all the handkerchiefs I had have gone into it. If ever I should regain my freedom and find a printer in Italy who dares to print the work, my reputation will be made.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dantès, ‘I can see. And now, please show me the pens with which you wrote this work.’

  ‘Look,’ said Faria, and showed the young man a small stick, six inches long and as thick as the handle of a paintbrush, at the end of which one of the fishbones that the abbé had mentioned was tied with thread; still stained with ink, it had been shaped to a point and split like an ordinary pen-nib.

  Dantès studied it and looked around for the implement that could have served to sharpen the nib so finely.

  ‘Ah, yes. The penknife?’ said Faria. ‘This is my masterpiece. I made it, as I did this other knife, out of an old iron candlestick.’

  The penknife cut like a razor. As for the other, it had the advantage of being able to serve both as a cutting implement and as a dagger.

  Dantès examined these various objects as closely as – in curiosity shops in Marseille – he had sometimes studied the tools made by savages, brought back from the South Seas by captains on long-haul voyages.

  ‘As for the ink,’ said Faria, ‘you know how I manage. I make it as and when I need it.’

  ‘Now, only one thing still puzzles me,’ said Dantès, ‘which is that the days were long enough for you to accomplish all this.’

  ‘I had the nights,’ Faria replied.

  ‘The nights! Are you a cat? Can you see in the dark?’

  ‘No, but God has given mankind enough intelligence to compensate for the inadequacies of his senses. I found light.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I separate the fat from the meat that they bring me, melt it and obtain a kind of solid oil from it. Look: this is my candle.’

  He showed Dantès a sort of lamp, like those they use to illuminate public places.

  ‘How did you light it?’

  ‘Here are my two flints and some scorched linen.’

  ‘But what about a match… ?’

  ‘I pretended to have a skin disease and asked for sulphur, which they gave me.’

  Dantès put all the objects he was holding on the table and bowed his head, overawed by the perseverance and strength of this spirit.

  ‘That is not all,’ said Faria. ‘One should not hide all one’s treasure in a single place. Let’s close this one.’

  They put the stone back, the abbé spread a little dust over it, ran his foot across it to disguise any evidence of unevenness on the surface, went over to his bed and pushed it to one side. Behind the head of the bed, hidden beneath a stone that formed an almost perfectly hermetic lid, was a hole, with inside it a rope ladder of between twenty-five and thirty feet in length. Dantès examined it; it was strong enough to sustain any weight.

  ‘Who supplied you with the rope for this wonderful contrivance?’ he asked.

  ‘First of all, some shirts that I had, then the sheets from my bed which I unpicked, in my three years’ captivity in Fenestrelle. When I was transported to the Château d’If, I found the means to bring the threads with me and I carried on working after I arrived here.’

  ‘Did no one notice that your bed-linen no longer had any hems?’

  ‘I resewed it.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘With this needle.’

  The abbé, parting a shred of his clothes, showed Dantès a long, sharp fishbone, still threaded, which he carried with him.

  ‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘At first I thought of loosening the bars and escaping through this window, which is a little wider than yours, as you can see; I should have widened it still further during my escape. But I noticed that the window gives access only to an inner courtyard, so I abandoned the plan as being too risky. However, I kept the ladder in case some opportunity should arise for one of those escapes I mentioned, which are the outcome of chance.’

  Dantès appeared to be examining the ladder, while his mind was actually on something else; an idea had entered his head. It was that this man, so intelligent, so ingenious and so deep in understanding, might see clearly in the darkness of his own misfortune and make out something that he had failed to see.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ the a
bbé asked with a smile, imagining that Dantès’ silence must indicate a very high degree of admiration.

  ‘Firstly, I am thinking of one thing, which is the vast knowledge that you must have expended to attain the point that you have reached. What might you not have done, had you been free?’

  ‘Perhaps nothing: the overflowing of my brain might have evaporated in mere futilities. Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces electricity, electricity produces lightning and lightning gives light.’

  ‘No, I know nothing,’ said Dantès, ashamed of his ignorance. ‘Some of the words that you use are void of all meaning for me; how lucky you are to know so much!’

  The abbé smiled: ‘You said a moment ago that you were thinking of two things.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have only told me one of them. What is the other?’

  ‘The other is that you have told me about your life, but you know nothing about mine.’

  ‘Your life, young man, has been somewhat short to contain any events of importance.’

  ‘It does contain one terrible misfortune,’ said Dantès; ‘a misfortune that I have not deserved. And I should wish, so that I may no longer blaspheme against God as I have occasionally done, to have some men whom I could blame for my misfortune.’

  ‘So you claim to be innocent of the crime with which you are charged?’

  ‘Entirely innocent, I swear it by the heads of the two people whom I hold most dear, my father and Mercédès.’

  ‘Well then,’ said the abbé, closing the hiding-place and putting his bed back in its place. ‘Tell me your story.’

  Dantès told what he called his life story, which amounted to no more than a voyage to India and two or three voyages to the Levant, until finally he arrived at his last journey, the death of Captain Leclère, the packet that the captain gave him for the marshal, the interview with the marshal, the letter he was handed, addressed to a certain M. Noirtier; and, after that, his return to Marseille, his reunion with his father, his love for Mercédès, his betrothal, his arrest, his interrogation, his temporary confinement at the Palais de Justice, and then his final imprisonment in the Château d’If. From that point, Dantès knew nothing more, not even the amount of time that he had been a prisoner.