The Count of Monte Cristo

“Why, you poor short-sighted simpleton, can you not guess who this Noirtier was, whose very name he was so careful to keep concealed?”

“Indeed, I cannot!”

“No other than the father of your sympathetic deputy-procureur.”

Had a thunderbolt fallen at the feet of Dantès, or hell opened its yawning gulf before him, he could not have been more completely transfixed with horror than at the sound of words so wholly unexpected, revealing as they did the fiendish perfidy which had consigned him to wear out his days in the dark cell of a prison, that was to him as a living grave. Starting up, he clasped his hands around his head as though to prevent his very brain from bursting, as in a choked and almost inarticulate voice, he exclaimed, “His father! oh, no! not his father, surely!”

“His own father, I assure you,” replied the abbé; “his right name was Noirtier de Villefort!”

At this instant a bright light shot through the mind of Dantès, and cleared up all that had been dark and obscure before. The change that had come over Villefort during the examination; the destruction of the letter, the exacted promise, the almost supplicating tones of the magistrate, who seemed rather to implore mercy than denounce punishment,—all returned with a stunning force to his memory. A cry of mental agony escaped his lips, and he staggered against the wall almost like a drunken man; then, as the paroxysm passed away, he hurried to the opening conducting from the abbé’s cell to his own, and said:

“I must be alone to think over all this.”

When he regained his dungeon he threw himself on his bed, where the turnkey found him at his evening visit, sitting, with fixed gaze and contracted features, still and motionless as a statue; but, during hours of deep meditation, which to him had seemed but as minutes, he had formed a fearful resolution, and bound himself to its fulfilment by a solemn oath.

Dantès was at length roused from his reverie by the voice of Faria, who, having also been visited by his gaoler, had come to invite his fellow-sufferer to share his supper.

The reputation of being out of his mind, though harmlessly, and even amusingly so, had procured for the abbé greater privileges than were allowed to prisoners in general. He was supplied with bread of a finer, whiter description than the usual prison fare, and even regaled each Sunday with a small quantity of wine: the present day chanced to be Sunday, and the abbé came delighted at having such luxuries to offer his new friend.

Dantès followed him with a firm and assured step; his features had lost their almost spasmodic contraction, and now wore their usual expression; but there was that in his whole appearance that bespoke one who had come to a fixed and desperate resolve.

Faria bent on him his penetrating eye: “I regret now,” said he, “having helped you in your late inquiries, or having given you the information I did.”

“Why so?” inquired Dantès.

“Because it has instilled a new passion in your heart—that of vengeance.”

A bitter smile played over the features of the young man: “Let us talk of something else,” said he.

Again the abbé looked at him, then mournfully shook his head; but, in accordance with Dantès’ request, he began to speak of other matters.

The elder prisoner was one of those persons whose conversation, like that of all who have experienced many trials, contained many useful and important hints as well as sound information; but it was never egotistical, for the unfortunate man never alluded to his own sorrows.

Dantès listened with admiring attention to all he said; some of his remarks corresponded with what he already knew, or applied to the sort of knowledge his nautical life had enabled him to acquire. A part of the good abbé’s words, however, were wholly incomprehensible to him; but, like those auroræ which serve to light the navigators in southern latitudes, they sufficed to open fresh views to the inquiring mind of the listener, and to give a glimpse of new horizons, illumined by the wild meteoric flash, enabling him justly to estimate the delight an intellectual mind would have in following the high and towering spirit of one so richly gifted as Faria in all the giddiest heights or lowest depths of science.

“You must teach me a small part of what you know,” said Dantès, “if only to prevent your growing weary of me. I can well believe that so learned a person as yourself would prefer absolute solitude to being tormented with the company of one as ignorant and uninformed as myself. If you will only agree to my request, I promise you never to mention another word about escaping.”

The abbé smiled. “Alas! my child,” said he, “human knowledge is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself. Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to communicate to you the stock of learning I possess.”

“Two years!” exclaimed Dantès; “do you really believe I can acquire all these things in so short a time?”

“Not their application, certainly, but their principles you may; to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other.”

“But can I not learn philosophy as well as other things?”

“My son, philosophy, as I understand it, is reducible to no rules by which it can be learned; it is the amalgamation of all the sciences, the golden cloud which bears the soul to heaven.”

“Well, then,” said Dantès, “leaving philosophy out of the question, tell me what you shall teach me first? I feel my great need of scientific knowledge, and long to begin the work of improvement; say, when shall we commence?”

“Directly, if you will,” said the abbé.

And that very evening the prisoners sketched a plan of education to be entered upon the following day.

Dantès possessed a prodigious memory, combined with an astonishing quickness and readiness of conception. The mathematical turn of his mind rendered him apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally poetical feelings threw a light and pleasing veil over the dry reality of arithmetical computation or the rigid severity of lines. He already knew Italian, and had also picked up a little of the Romaic dialect, during his different voyages to the East; and by the aid of these two languages he easily comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English, and German.

In strict accordance with the promise made to the abbé, Dantès never even alluded to flight; it might have been that the delight his studies afforded him supplied the place of liberty; or, probably, the recollection of his pledged word (a point, as we have already seen, to which he paid a rigid attention) kept him from reverting to any plan for escape: but absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge, days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course. Time flew on, and at the end of a year Dantès was a new man. With Faria, on the contrary, Dantès remarked, that, spite of the relief his society afforded, he daily grew sadder: one thought seemed incessantly to harass and distract his mind. Sometimes he would fall into long reveries, sigh heavily and involuntarily, then suddenly rise, and, with folded arms, begin pacing the confined space of his dungeon.

One day he stopped all at once in the midst of these so often repeated promenades, and exclaimed, “Ah! if there were no sentinel!”

“There shall not be one a minute longer than you please,” said Dantès, who had followed the working of his thoughts as accurately as though his brain were enclosed in crystal, so clear as to display its minutest operations.

“I have already told you,” answered the abbé, “that I loathe the idea of shedding blood.”

“Still, in our case the death we should bestow would not be dictated by any wild or savage propensity, but as a necessary step to secure our own personal safety and preservation.”

“No matter! I could never agree to it!”

“Still, you have thought of it?”

“Incessantly, alas!” cried the abbé.

“And you have discovered a means of regaining our freedom; have you not?” asked Dantès eagerly.

“I have; if it were only possible to place a deaf and blind sentinel in the gallery beyond us.”

“I will undertake to make him both,” replied the young man, with an air of determined resolution that made his companion shudder.

“No, no!” cried the abbé; “I tell you the thing is impossible: name it no more!”

In vain did Dantès endeavour to renew the subject; the abbé shook his head in token of disapproval, but refused any further conversation respecting it.

Three months passed away.

“Do you feel yourself strong?” inquired the abbé of Dantès.

The young man, in reply, took up the chisel, bent it into the form of a horseshoe, and then as readily straightened it.

“And will you engage not to do any harm to the sentry, except as a last extremity?”

“I promise on my honour not to hurt a hair of his head, unless positively obliged for our mutual preservation.”

“Then,” said the abbé, “we may hope to put our design into execution.”

“And how long shall we be in accomplishing the necessary work?”

“At least a year.”

“And shall we begin at once?”