The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 15. Number 34 and Number 27-1

Chapter 15. Number 34 and Number 27

Dantès passed through all the stages of torture natural to prisoners in

suspense. He was sustained at first by that pride of conscious innocence

which is the sequence to hope; then he began to doubt his own innocence,

which justified in some measure the governor’s belief in his mental

alienation; and then, relaxing his sentiment of pride, he addressed his

supplications, not to God, but to man. God is always the last resource.

Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him

till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.

Dantès asked to be removed from his present dungeon into another, even

if it were darker and deeper, for a change, however disadvantageous, was

still a change, and would afford him some amusement. He entreated to be

allowed to walk about, to have fresh air, books, and writing materials.

His requests were not granted, but he went on asking all the same. He

accustomed himself to speaking to the new jailer, although the latter

was, if possible, more taciturn than the old one; but still, to speak to

a man, even though mute, was something. Dantès spoke for the sake of

hearing his own voice; he had tried to speak when alone, but the sound

of his voice terrified him.

Often, before his captivity, Dantès’ mind had revolted at the idea of

assemblages of prisoners, made up of thieves, vagabonds, and murderers.

He now wished to be amongst them, in order to see some other face

besides that of his jailer; he sighed for the galleys, with the infamous

costume, the chain, and the brand on the shoulder. The galley-slaves

breathed the fresh air of heaven, and saw each other. They were very

happy.

He besought the jailer one day to let him have a companion, were it even

the mad abbé. The jailer, though rough and hardened by the constant

sight of so much suffering, was yet a man. At the bottom of his heart he

had often had a feeling of pity for this unhappy young man who suffered

so; and he laid the request of number 34 before the governor; but the

latter sapiently imagined that Dantès wished to conspire or attempt an

escape, and refused his request. Dantès had exhausted all human

resources, and he then turned to God.

All the pious ideas that had been so long forgotten, returned; he

recollected the prayers his mother had taught him, and discovered a new

meaning in every word; for in prosperity prayers seem but a mere medley

of words, until misfortune comes and the unhappy sufferer first

understands the meaning of the sublime language in which he invokes the

pity of heaven! He prayed, and prayed aloud, no longer terrified at the

sound of his own voice, for he fell into a sort of ecstasy. He laid

every action of his life before the Almighty, proposed tasks to

accomplish, and at the end of every prayer introduced the entreaty

oftener addressed to man than to God: “Forgive us our trespasses as we

forgive them that trespass against us.” Yet in spite of his earnest

prayers, Dantès remained a prisoner.

Then gloom settled heavily upon him. Dantès was a man of great

simplicity of thought, and without education; he could not, therefore,

in the solitude of his dungeon, traverse in mental vision the history of

the ages, bring to life the nations that had perished, and rebuild the

ancient cities so vast and stupendous in the light of the imagination,

and that pass before the eye glowing with celestial colors in Martin’s

Babylonian pictures. He could not do this, he whose past life was so

short, whose present so melancholy, and his future so doubtful. Nineteen

years of light to reflect upon in eternal darkness! No distraction could

come to his aid; his energetic spirit, that would have exalted in thus

revisiting the past, was imprisoned like an eagle in a cage. He clung to

one idea—that of his happiness, destroyed, without apparent cause, by an

unheard-of fatality; he considered and reconsidered this idea, devoured

it (so to speak), as the implacable Ugolino devours the skull of

Archbishop Roger in the Inferno of Dante.

Rage supplanted religious fervor. Dantès uttered blasphemies that made

his jailer recoil with horror, dashed himself furiously against the

walls of his prison, wreaked his anger upon everything, and chiefly upon

himself, so that the least thing,—a grain of sand, a straw, or a breath

of air that annoyed him, led to paroxysms of fury. Then the letter that

Villefort had showed to him recurred to his mind, and every line gleamed

forth in fiery letters on the wall like the mene, mene, tekel upharsin

of Belshazzar. He told himself that it was the enmity of man, and not

the vengeance of Heaven, that had thus plunged him into the deepest

misery. He consigned his unknown persecutors to the most horrible

tortures he could imagine, and found them all insufficient, because

after torture came death, and after death, if not repose, at least the

boon of unconsciousness.

By dint of constantly dwelling on the idea that tranquillity was death,

and if punishment were the end in view other tortures than death must be

invented, he began to reflect on suicide. Unhappy he, who, on the brink

of misfortune, broods over ideas like these!

Before him is a dead sea that stretches in azure calm before the eye;

but he who unwarily ventures within its embrace finds himself struggling

with a monster that would drag him down to perdition. Once thus

ensnared, unless the protecting hand of God snatch him thence, all is

over, and his struggles but tend to hasten his destruction. This state

of mental anguish is, however, less terrible than the sufferings that

precede or the punishment that possibly will follow. There is a sort of

consolation at the contemplation of the yawning abyss, at the bottom of

which lie darkness and obscurity.

Edmond found some solace in these ideas. All his sorrows, all his

sufferings, with their train of gloomy spectres, fled from his cell when

the angel of death seemed about to enter. Dantès reviewed his past life

with composure, and, looking forward with terror to his future

existence, chose that middle line that seemed to afford him a refuge.

“Sometimes,” said he, “in my voyages, when I was a man and commanded

other men, I have seen the heavens overcast, the sea rage and foam, the

storm arise, and, like a monstrous bird, beating the two horizons with

its wings. Then I felt that my vessel was a vain refuge, that trembled

and shook before the tempest. Soon the fury of the waves and the sight

of the sharp rocks announced the approach of death, and death then

terrified me, and I used all my skill and intelligence as a man and a

sailor to struggle against the wrath of God. But I did so because I was

happy, because I had not courted death, because to be cast upon a bed of

rocks and seaweed seemed terrible, because I was unwilling that I, a

creature made for the service of God, should serve for food to the gulls

and ravens. But now it is different; I have lost all that bound me to

life, death smiles and invites me to repose; I die after my own manner,

I die exhausted and broken-spirited, as I fall asleep when I have paced

three thousand times round my cell,—that is thirty thousand steps, or

about ten leagues.”

No sooner had this idea taken possession of him than he became more

composed, arranged his couch to the best of his power, ate little and

slept less, and found existence almost supportable, because he felt that

he could throw it off at pleasure, like a worn-out garment. Two methods

of self-destruction were at his disposal. He could hang himself with his

handkerchief to the window bars, or refuse food and die of starvation.

But the first was repugnant to him. Dantès had always entertained the

greatest horror of pirates, who are hung up to the yard-arm; he would

not die by what seemed an infamous death. He resolved to adopt the

second, and began that day to carry out his resolve.

Nearly four years had passed away; at the end of the second he had

ceased to mark the lapse of time. Dantès said, “I wish to die,” and had

chosen the manner of his death, and fearful of changing his mind, he had

taken an oath to die. “When my morning and evening meals are brought,”

thought he, “I will cast them out of the window, and they will think

that I have eaten them.”

He kept his word; twice a day he cast out, through the barred aperture,

the provisions his jailer brought him—at first gayly, then with

deliberation, and at last with regret. Nothing but the recollection of

his oath gave him strength to proceed. Hunger made viands once

repugnant, now acceptable; he held the plate in his hand for an hour at

a time, and gazed thoughtfully at the morsel of bad meat, of tainted

fish, of black and mouldy bread. It was the last yearning for life

contending with the resolution of despair; then his dungeon seemed less

sombre, his prospects less desperate. He was still young—he was only

four or five-and-twenty—he had nearly fifty years to live. What

unforseen events might not open his prison door, and restore him to

liberty? Then he raised to his lips the repast that, like a voluntary

Tantalus, he refused himself; but he thought of his oath, and he would

not break it. He persisted until, at last, he had not sufficient

strength to rise and cast his supper out of the loophole. The next

morning he could not see or hear; the jailer feared he was dangerously

ill. Edmond hoped he was dying.

Thus the day passed away. Edmond felt a sort of stupor creeping over him

which brought with it a feeling almost of content; the gnawing pain at

his stomach had ceased; his thirst had abated; when he closed his eyes

he saw myriads of lights dancing before them like the will-o’-the-wisps

that play about the marshes. It was the twilight of that mysterious

country called Death!

Suddenly, about nine o’clock in the evening, Edmond heard a hollow sound

in the wall against which he was lying.

So many loathsome animals inhabited the prison, that their noise did

not, in general, awake him; but whether abstinence had quickened his

faculties, or whether the noise was really louder than usual, Edmond

raised his head and listened. It was a continual scratching, as if made

by a huge claw, a powerful tooth, or some iron instrument attacking the

stones.

Although weakened, the young man’s brain instantly responded to the idea

that haunts all prisoners—liberty! It seemed to him that heaven had at

length taken pity on him, and had sent this noise to warn him on the

very brink of the abyss. Perhaps one of those beloved ones he had so

often thought of was thinking of him, and striving to diminish the

distance that separated them.

No, no, doubtless he was deceived, and it was but one of those dreams

that forerun death!

Edmond still heard the sound. It lasted nearly three hours; he then

heard a noise of something falling, and all was silent.

Some hours afterwards it began again, nearer and more distinct. Edmond

was intensely interested. Suddenly the jailer entered.

For a week since he had resolved to die, and during the four days that

he had been carrying out his purpose, Edmond had not spoken to the

attendant, had not answered him when he inquired what was the matter

with him, and turned his face to the wall when he looked too curiously

at him; but now the jailer might hear the noise and put an end to it,

and so destroy a ray of something like hope that soothed his last

moments.

The jailer brought him his breakfast. Dantès raised himself up and began