The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (31 page)

‘What was that? The denunciation?’

‘No, the other letter.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I saw it with my own eyes.’

‘That’s another matter; the man may be a deeper-dyed villain than you imagine.’

‘I swear, you are frightening me!’ said Dantès. ‘Is the world full of tigers and crocodiles, then?’

‘Yes, except that the tigers and crocodiles with two legs are more dangerous than the rest.’

‘Continue, tell me more.’

‘Gladly. You say he burned the letter?’

‘Yes, and as he did so said to me: “You see, this is the only proof against you, and I am destroying it.” ’

‘Such behaviour was too good to be true.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I am certain. To whom was the letter addressed?’

‘To Monsieur Noirtier, 13, rue Coq-Héron, Paris.’

‘Have you any reason to believe that your deputy had some reason to want this letter to disappear?’

‘Perhaps. He did make me promise two or three times, in my own interests, as he said, not to mention the letter to anyone, and he made me swear not to speak the name that was written on the address.’

‘Noirtier?’ the abbé repeated. ‘Noirtier… I used to know a Noirtier at the court of the former Queen of Etruria, a Noirtier who was a Girondin during the Revolution. And what was the name of this deputy of yours?’

‘Villefort.’

The abbé burst out laughing, and Dantès looked at him in astonishment.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Do you see that ray of sunlight?’ the abbé asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, everything is now clearer to me than that brightly shining ray of light. My poor child, you poor young man! And this magistrate was good to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘This noble deputy burned the letter, destroyed it?’

‘He did.’

‘This honest purveyor of souls to the dungeon made you swear never to speak the name of Noirtier?’

‘Correct.’

‘This Noirtier, poor blind fool that you are, do you know who this Noirtier was? This Noirtier was his father!’

If a shaft of lightning had fallen at Dantès’ feet and opened an abyss with hell in its depths, it would not have produced a more startling or electric or overwhelming effect on him than these unexpected words. He got up and clasped his head in both hands, as if to prevent it from bursting.

‘His father? His father!’ he cried.

‘Yes, his father, who is called Noirtier de Villefort,’ the abbé said.

At this, a devastating flash of light burst inside the prisoner’s head and the picture that he had not previously understood was instantly bathed in dazzling light. He recalled everything: Villefort’s shilly-shallying during the interrogation, the letter he had destroyed, the promise he had elicited and the almost pleading tone of the magistrate’s voice – which, instead of threatening him, seemed to be begging. He gave a cry and staggered for a moment like a drunken man; then, rushing to the opening that led from the abbé’s cell to his own, he exclaimed: ‘Ah! I must be alone to consider this.’

When he reached his dungeon, he fell on the bed and it was there that the turnkey found him that evening, still sitting, his eyes staring and his features drawn, motionless and silent as a statue.

During those hours of meditation, which had passed like seconds, he had made a fearful resolution and sworn a terrible oath.

A voice roused Dantès from his reverie: it was the Abbé Faria who, after being visited in his turn by the jailer, had come to invite Dantès to take supper with him. As a certified madman, above all as an entertaining madman, the old prisoner enjoyed certain privileges, among them that of having bread that was a little whiter than the rest and a small jar of wine on Sundays. This happened to be a Sunday and the abbé was asking Dantès to share his bread and wine.

Dantès followed him. His expression had returned to normal and his features were composed, but with a strength and firmness,
as it were, that implied a settled resolve. The abbé looked closely at him.

‘I regret having helped you in your investigation and said what I did to you,’ he remarked.

‘Why is that?’ Dantès asked.

‘Because I have insinuated a feeling into your heart that was not previously there: the desire for revenge.’

Dantès smiled and said: ‘Let us change the subject.’

The abbé gave him a further brief look and sadly shook his head; then, as Dantès had requested, he began to talk of other things.

The old prisoner was one of those men whose conversation, like that of everyone who has known great suffering, contains many lessons and is continually interesting; but it was not self-centred: the unfortunate man never spoke about his own troubles.

Dantès listened to every word with admiration. Some of what the abbé said concurred with ideas that he already had and things that he knew from his profession as a seaman, while others touched on the unknown and, like the aurora borealis giving light to sailors in northern latitudes, showed the young man new lands and new horizons, bathed in fantastic colours. Dantès understood the happiness of an intelligence that could follow such a mind on the moral, philosophical and social peaks where it habitually roamed.

‘You must teach me a little of what you know,’ he said, ‘if only to avoid becoming bored by my company. I now feel that you must prefer solitude to an uneducated and narrow-minded companion like myself. If you agree, I undertake not to mention escape to you again.’

The abbé smiled.

‘Alas, my child,’ he said, ‘human knowledge is very limited and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history and the three or four modern languages that I speak, you will know everything that I know; and it will take me scarcely two years to transfer all this knowledge from my mind to yours.’

‘Two years!’ said Dantès. ‘Do you think I could learn all this in two years?’

‘In their application, no; but the principles, yes. Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.’

‘But can’t one learn philosophy?’

‘Philosophy cannot be taught. Philosophy is the union of all acquired knowledge and the genius that applies it: philosophy is the shining cloud upon which Christ set His foot to go up into heaven.’

‘Come then,’ said Dantès. ‘What will you teach me first? I am eager to begin, I am athirst for knowledge.’

‘Everything, then!’ said the abbé.

So that evening the two prisoners drew up an educational syllabus which they began to carry out the following day. Dantès had a remarkable memory and found concepts very easy to grasp: a mathematical cast of mind made him able to understand everything by calculating it, while a seafarer’s poetry compensated for whatever was too materialistic in arguments reduced to dry figures and straight lines. Moreover he already knew Italian and a little Romaic, which he had picked up on his journeys to the East. With those two languages, he soon understood the workings of all the rest, and after six months had started to speak Spanish, English and German.

As he promised Abbé Faria, he no longer spoke of escape, either because the enjoyment of study compensated him for his loss of freedom, or because (as we have seen) he would always keep his word strictly, once he had given it, and the days passed quickly and instructively. After a year, he was a different man.

As for Abbé Faria, Dantès noticed that, though the older man’s captivity had been lightened by his presence, he grew more melancholy by the day. One pervasive and incessant thought seemed to plague his mind. He would fall into deep reveries, give an involuntary sigh, leap suddenly to his feet, cross his arms and pace gloomily around his cell.

One day, he stopped abruptly while pacing for the hundredth time around his room, and exclaimed: ‘Oh! If only there was no sentry!’

‘There need be no sentry, if only you would agree to it,’ said Dantès, who had followed the train of thought inside his head as if there were a crystal window in his skull.

‘I have told you,’ the abbé said, ‘I abhor the idea of murder.’

‘Yet if this murder were to be committed, it would be through our instinct for self-preservation, through an impulse of self-defence.’

‘No matter, I cannot do it.’

‘But you think about it?’

‘Continually,’ the abbé muttered.

‘And you have thought of a plan, haven’t you?’ Dantès asked eagerly.

‘Yes, if only we could station a blind and deaf sentry on that walkway.’

‘He will be blind, he will be deaf,’ the young man said, with a grim resolve that terrified the abbé.

‘No, no,’ he exclaimed. ‘Impossible!’

Dantès wanted to pursue the subject, but the abbé shook his head and refused to say any more about it.

Three months passed.

‘Are you strong?’ the abbé asked Dantès one day.

Without saying anything, Dantès took the chisel, bent it into a horseshoe and then straightened it again.

‘Would you undertake only to kill the sentry as a last resort?’

‘Yes, on my honour.’

‘Then we can carry out our plan,’ said the abbé.

‘How long will it take?’

‘A year, at least.’

‘But we can start work?’

‘At once.’

‘Look at that!’ Dantès cried. ‘We have wasted a year!’

‘Do you think it was wasted?’ the abbé asked.

‘Oh! Forgive me, forgive me,’ Edmond said, blushing.

‘Hush,’ said the abbé. ‘A man is only a man, and you are one of the best I have ever encountered. Now, here is my plan.’

The abbé showed Dantès a drawing he had made: it was a plan of his own room, that of Dantès and the passageway linking them. From the middle of this he had drawn a side-tunnel like those they use in mines. This would take the two prisoners beneath the walkway where the sentry kept guard. Once they had reached this, they would carve out a broad pit and loosen one of the paving-stones on the floor of the gallery. At a chosen moment this paving-stone would give way beneath the soldier’s feet and he would fall into the pit. Dantès would jump on him as, stunned by his fall, he was unable to defend himself; he would tie him up and gag him, and the two of them, climbing through one window of the gallery, would go down the outside wall with the help of the rope ladder, and escape.

Dantès clapped his hands; his eyes shone with joy: the plan was so simple that it was bound to succeed.

That same day, the tunnellers set to work, all the more eagerly since they had been idle for a long time and, quite probably, each had secretly been longing for this resumption of physical labour.

Nothing interrupted their work except the time when they were both obliged to go back to their cells for the jailer’s visit. Moreover they had grown accustomed to detecting the almost imperceptible sound of his footsteps and could tell precisely when the man was coming down, so neither of them was ever taken by surprise. The soil that they dug out of their new tunnel, which would eventually have filled up the old one, was thrown bit by bit, with extreme caution, through one or other of the windows in Dantès’ or Faria’s dungeon: it was ground up so fine that the night wind carried it away without a trace.

More than a year passed in this work, undertaken with no other implements than a chisel, a knife and a wooden lever. Throughout that year, even as they worked, Faria continued to instruct Dantès, speaking to him sometimes in one language, sometimes in another, teaching him the history of the nations and the great men who from time to time have left behind them one of those luminous trails that are known as glory. A man of the world and of high society, the abbé also had a sort of melancholy majesty in his bearing – from which Dantès, endowed by nature with an aptitude for assimilation, was able to distil the polite manners that he had previously lacked and an aristocratic air which is usually acquired only by association with the upper classes or by mixing with those of superior attainments.

In fifteen months the tunnel was complete. They had dug out a pit beneath the gallery and could hear the sentry passing backwards and forwards above them; the two workmen, who were obliged to wait for a dark and moonless night to make their escape more certain, had only one fear: that the floor might give way prematurely under the soldier’s feet. To guard against this, they put in place a sort of little beam, which they had found in the foundations. Dantès was just fixing this when he suddenly heard a cry of distress from Abbé Faria, who had stayed in the young man’s cell sharpening a peg which was to hold the rope ladder. Dantès hurried back and found the abbé standing in the middle of the room, pale-faced, his forehead bathed in sweat and his fists clenched.

‘Oh, my God!’ Dantès cried. ‘What is it? What is wrong?’

‘Quickly,’ the abbé said. ‘Listen to what I say.’

Dantès looked at Faria’s livid features, his eyes ringed with blue, his white lips and his hair, which was standing on end. In terror, he let the chisel fall from his hand.

‘But what is the matter?’ he cried.