英语小说网

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.

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.

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.

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."

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 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. 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 Ugolino 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.

Despite his fervent prayers, Dantès remained a prisoner.

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. 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."

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.

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.

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.

He did as he had promised. Twice a day, he threw his food out of the little barred opening which gave him 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.

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."

The jailer thought he was seriously ill. Edmond hoped for a quick death.

The next day he was unable to see and could hardly hear.

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.

So many verminous creatures used to make noises in the prison that Edmond had gradually become accustomed to sleeping through them; but this time, either because his senses were heightened by abstinence or because the noise really was louder than usual, or because at this final moment everything acquires some importance, Edmond raised his head so that he could hear better.

It was a regular scratching that seemed to suggest a huge claw or powerful teeth, or else the tapping of some implement on the stones.

No, Edmond must surely be mistaken: this was one of the hallucinations that hover around the doors of death.

Weak as he was, the young man's brain was struck by an ordinary notion which is constantly present in a prisoner's mind: freedom. This noise came so aptly at the moment when, for him, every noise was about to cease, that he felt God must finally be taking pity on his suffering an sending him this noise to warn him to stop on the edge of the grave above which his foot was already poised. Who knows? Perhaps one of his friends, one of those beloved beings about whom he had thought so much that his mind was worn out with it, might be concerned for him at this moment and trying to lessen the distance between them.

However, he kept listening to the noise. It lasted about three hours, then he heard a sort of crumbling sound and the noise ceased.

A few hours later, it resumed, louder and nearer. Edmond was already interested in this burrowing that kept him company. Then, suddenly, the jailer came in.

In the week since he had decided to die and for the four days since he had begun to carry out his plan, Edmond had not spoken a word to the man, had not replied when he asked what Edmond thought was the matter with him, and had turned his face to the wall when he was too closely observed. But today the jailer might hear the dull grating sound, become alarmed by it and take steps to end it, thus perhaps upsetting that flicker of hope, the very idea of which delighted Dantès in his last hours.

The jailer was bringing his lunch.

Dantès raised himself on his bed and, in as loud a voice as he could muster, began to talk about everything: about the poor quality of the food he was given and the coldness of his dungeon, muttering and complaining so that he would have an excuse to speak louder. He tried the patience of the jailer, who had actually requested clear broth and fresh bread that day for his sick prisoner and was bringing them to him.

As soon as he was free to do so, Edmond joyfully went back to listen. The noise had become so clear that the young man could now hear it easily.

Fortunately, he imagined that Dantès was delirious. He put the food down on the miserable rickety table where he usually left it, and went out.

"There's no doubt about it," he thought. "Since the noise is continuing, even by day, it must be some unfortunate prisoner like myself who is trying to escape. Oh, if only I was beside him! How willingly I would help!"

Then, suddenly, a dark cloud passed across this first light of hope, in a mind accustomed to misfortune and unable easily to revert to feelings of joy: the idea struck him that the noise was caused by some workmen whom the governor was employing to repair one of the neighbouring cells.

It would be easy to find out, but how could he risk asking? Of course, he could just wait for the jailer to come, ask him to listen to the noise and judge his reaction; but if he were to satisfy his curiosity in this way, might he not sacrifice some more precious interest for a very short-lived gain? Unfortunately, Edmond's head was an empty vessel, deafened by the buzzing of a single idea; he was so weak that his mind drifted like a whiff of smoke and could not fasten on a single thought. He could see only one way to sharpen his wits and recover the lucidity of his judgement: he turned towards the still-steaming broth that the jailer had just put down on the table, got up, staggered over to it, took the cup, raised it to his lips and drank down the liquid that it contained with an unspeakable sensation of well-being.

He had the resolution to leave it at that: he had heard that when unfortunate, shipwrecked mariners had been picked up in the last extremity of starvation, they had died after gorging themselves on too much solid food. Edmond put the bread -- which he was already raising to his lips -- back on the table and returned to his bed. He no longer wished to die.

He soon felt that some light was once again penetrating his brain: all his vague and almost indefinable ideas resumed their place on that marvellous chessboard where perhaps a single extra square is enough to ensure the superiority of men over animals. He was able to think and to strengthen his thoughts by reasoning.

Edmond got up again. This time his legs were steady and his eyes could see clearly. He went over to a corner of the cell, took out a stone that had been loosened by the damp, and came back in order to tap it against the wall at the very point where the echoing sound was loudest. He knocked three times. At the first knock, the noise stopped, as if by magic.

So he told himself: "I must carry out a test, but without compromising anyone. If the person I can hear is an ordinary workman, I have only to knock against the wall and he will immediately stop what he is doing to try and guess who is knocking and why. But since he will not only be working legitimately, but also to orders, he will soon resume what he was doing. If, on the contrary, he is a prisoner, he will be alarmed by the noise that I make. He will be afraid of being found out, so he will stop work and only come back to it this evening, when he imagines everyone to be in bed and asleep."

The day went by and the silence continued. Night came, and the noise had still not resumed.

Full of hope, he ate a few crumbs of the bread, swallowed some mouthfuls of water and, thanks to the powerful constitution with which nature had endowed him, was more or less restored to himself.

The night passed without him hearing the slightest sound. That night, Edmond did not close his eyes.

Edmond listened intently. An hour passed, then two, but no further sound could be heard. He had created a total silence on the far side of the wall.

"It's a prisoner," Edmond thought, with inexpressible joy. At this, his mind began to race and life returned to him, with all the more force for having something to exercise it upon.

Daylight returned and the jailer came in with more food. Edmond had already eaten his previous meal and he devoured this one, continually listening out for the noise, which did not come, fearful that it might have ceased for ever. He walked ten or twelve leagues around his dungeon, spending whole hours shaking the iron bars on his window to restore to his limbs the strength and elasticity that they had lost over a long period without exercise, in short preparing himself for the struggle with whatever fate had in store for him, like a wrestler flexing his arms and rubbing his body with oil before he enters the ring. Then, between these periods of feverish activity, he listened to hear if the sound had returned, growing impatient with the caution shown by this prisoner who had not guessed that it was another like himself who had disturbed him in his efforts to escape -- another prisoner whose eagerness to be free was at least as great as his own.

Finally, one evening when the jailer had just paid his final visit, when Dantès pressed his ear to the wall for the hundredth time, he thought that a barely perceptible scratching echoed in his head as it rested against the silent stones.

Three days went by, seventy-two deadly hours which he counted, minute by minute.

Dantès moved back to compose his whirling brain, walked a few times round the room, then put his ear again to the same spot.

But he could see nothing. He had no knife or other cutting implement, no metal except iron bars, and he had tested these bars often enough to know that they were firmly set and that it was not even worth the effort of trying to loosen them.

There was no doubt: something was happening on the other side. The prisoner had recognized the danger of his earlier method and had changed it: certainly, in order to carry on the work in greater security, he was using a lever instead of a chisel.

Encouraged by the discovery, Edmond decided to come to the assistance of this indefatigable workman. He began by moving his bed, behind which he judged that the burrowing was taking place, and looked around for some object which he could use to chip away at the wall, dig out the damp cement and eventually dislodge a stone.

Certainly, there were iron brackets on the bed, but they were fixed to the wood with screws; it would take a screwdriver to turn these and take off the brackets.

There was nothing on the table and chair. The bucket had once had a handle, but it had been removed.

His only furniture was a bed, a chair, a table, a bucket and a pitcher.

Edmond had the whole night to work, but he made little progress in the dark because he had to feel his way and he realized that he was blunting his crude implement against a piece of stone harder than it. So he put his bed back and waited for daylight. Recovering hope, he had recovered patience.

Only one thing remained for Dantès to do, which was to break the pitcher and set to work with one of the earthenware fragments shaped to a point. He swung the pitcher against a stone and it shattered.

He chose two or three pointed fragments and hid them in his mattress, leaving the rest scattered around on the floor: the breaking of the pitcher was too natural an occurrence for it to arouse any comment.

This plaster had been softened by damp. With a thrill of joy, Dantès saw that fragments of it could be removed. Admittedly, these fragments were so small as to be almost invisible, but after half an hour, even so, Dantès had scraped away roughly a handful. A mathematician could have calculated that after some two years' work, provided he did not encounter the solid rock, it would be possible to dig out a passage two feet across and twenty feet deep.

Day came and the jailer entered. Dantès told him that, the evening before, while he was taking a drink straight from the pitcher, it had slipped out of his hands and broken on the ground. The jailer went off, grumbling, to get a new pitcher, without even bothering to take away the pieces from the previous one. He returned a few moments later, told the prisoner to be more careful and then left.

Throughout that night he listened, hearing the unknown miner continue his subterranean burrowing.

Dantès was overjoyed at hearing the sound of the bolt which previously used to make his heart sink every time it slammed shut. He listened to the noise of footsteps fading and, when it died away, hurried over to his bed and pulled it aside. By the dim light of day that entered the dungeon, he could see that he had achieved nothing by his efforts the night before, because he had attacked the stone itself, instead of the plaster around it.

After an hour of fruitless effort, he got up, perspiring with anguish. Was he to be defeated at the very start? Would he have to wait, helpless and inactive, for his neighbour to do everything -- when the man himself might become discouraged?

Over the next three days, taking extraordinary care to avoid discovery, he managed to remove all the plaster and expose the stone. The wall was composed of rubble which had been strengthened in places by blocks of hewn stone. He had almost loosened one of these blocks, and he now had to shift it in its socket. He tried to do so with his nails, but made no impression, and the fragments of the pitcher which Dantès pushed into the gaps, in the hope of using them as a lever, broke when he tried to do so.

Realizing this, the prisoner regretted not having devoted the long hours that had already passed, ever more slowly, to this task, instead of wasting them in hope, prayer and despair. However slow the work, how much would he have achieved in the six or so years that he had spent buried in this dungeon! The idea fired him with renewed enthusiasm.

In the evening, Dantès put his plate on the floor, half-way between the door and the table. As he came in, the jailer stepped on the plate and broke it into a thousand pieces.

Every day the jailer brought Dantès his soup in a tin pot. This pot contained soup for him and for another prisoner, because Dantès had noticed that it was always either full or half empty, depending on whether the turnkey had started his rounds, giving out the food, with Dantès or with his fellow-prisoner.

Then an idea occurred to him, and he stood there, smiling. Of its own accord, the sweat dried on his forehead.

The pot had an iron handle: it was this iron handle that Dantès coveted -- and would have paid for it, if required to do so, with ten years of his life.

The jailer poured the contents of the pot into Dantès' plate. After eating his soup with a wooden spoon, Dantès would wash the plate, so that it could serve the same purpose each day.

This time, he had nothing to reproach Dantès with: he had been wrong to leave his plate on the floor, admittedly, but the jailer had been wrong not to look where he was walking.

This advice appealed to the jailer, since it saved him the trouble of going back upstairs, then down and back up again. He left the pot.

So he merely grumbled. Then he looked around to see where he could pour the soup. As Dantès had only that one plate, there was no alternative.

"Leave the pot," Dantès said. "You can collect it when you bring me my dinner tomorrow."

Dantès shuddered with joy. This time, he eagerly ate the soup and the meat which, as is customary in prisons, was put in with the soup. Then, after waiting for an hour, to make sure that the jailer did not change his mind, he moved his bed, took the pot, slipped the end of the handle between the stone block which he had scraped clean of plaster and the surrounding rubble, and began to lever it. A slight movement in the stone proved to him that he was succeeding; and indeed, after an hour, the stone had been removed from the wall, leaving a gap more than one and a half feet in diameter.

Dantès carefully swept up all the plaster, distributed it around the corners of the cell, scraped at the greyish earth with a splinter from his jug and covered the plaster in earth.

His breakfast consisted of a piece of bread. The jailer came in and put it on the table.

Then, wanting to take full advantage of this night in which chance -- or, rather, the ingenuity of the scheme that he had dreamt up -- had delivered so precious an implement to him, he continued to dig eagerly. At dawn, he replaced the stone in its hole, pushed his bed against the wall and lay down on it.

"What? Aren't you bringing me a new plate?" Dantès asked.

"No," said the turnkey. "You break everything. You smashed your jug and it's your fault that I broke your plate. If all the prisoners were responsible for as much damage, the government couldn't keep up with it. We are leaving you the pot and your soup will be poured into that. In this way, perhaps you won't destroy everything around here."

Dantès raised his eyes to heaven and joined his hands in prayer under the blanket. This piece of iron which he had been allowed to keep aroused a more profound wave of gratitude towards heaven in his heart than he had experienced, in his previous life, from the greatest blessings that had descended upon him.

No matter. This was no reason to give up his efforts. That evening, thanks to his new implement, he had extracted more than ten handfuls of stone filling, plaster and mortar from the wall.

When the time came for the jailer's visit, he straightened out the twisted handle of the pot and put the receptacle back in its usual place. The turnkey poured out the standard ration of soup and meat; or, rather, of soup and fish, because this happened to be a fast day: three times a week the prisoners were given a meatless diet. That would have been another way of counting time, if Dantès had not long ago given up measuring it.

However, he had noticed that, since he himself had started to work, the other prisoner was no longer digging.

Then, after pouring out the soup, the turnkey went out.

This time Dantès wanted to ascertain whether his neighbour had in fact stopped working. He listened. All was as silent as it had been during the three days when the work was interrupted. Dantès sighed. His neighbour was clearly suspicious of him.

"Oh, my God, my God!" he cried. "I have prayed so often to You that I hoped You might have heard me. My God! After having deprived me of freedom in life, oh, God! After having deprived me of the calm of death. Oh, God! When you had recalled me to life, have pity on me! God! Do not let me die in despair!"

Dantès felt the object with his hands and realized that he had hit a beam. It ran across -- or, rather, entirely blocked -- the hole that Dantès had started to dig. Now he would have to dig over or under. The poor young man had not foreseen this obstacle.

"Who is it that speaks of God and despair at one and the same time?" asked a voice which seemed to come from beneath the earth and which, muffled by the darkness, sounded on the young man's ears with a sepulchral tone. Edmond felt his hair rise on his head and shuffled back, still kneeling.

However, he did not give up and continued to work throughout the night. But after two or three hours of digging, he came up against an obstruction. The iron had ceased to cut, but slid across a flat surface.

"He abdicated in Fontainebleau in 1814 and was exiled to the island of Elba. But what of yourself? How long have you been here, if you know nothing of all that?"

"In heaven's name!" Dantès cried. "Whoever spoke, speak again, even though your voice terrified me. Who are you?"

"Tell me who you are," the voice demanded.

"I am innocent."

"Of what country?"

"What! The return of the emperor! Is he no longer on the throne, then?"

"What was your crime?"

"Seaman."

"And your name?"

"Ah!" he exclaimed. "I can hear a man's voice!"

"How long have you been here?"

"France."

"Conspiring for the return of the emperor."

"Since February the twenty-eighth, 1815."

For the past four or five years, Edmond had heard no one speak except his jailer; and, to a prisoner, a jailer is not a man but a living door added to the oak door of his cell and a bar of flesh joined to his bars of iron.

"But what were you accused of?"

"Edmond Dantès."

"An unfortunate prisoner," Dantès said, not at all unwilling to reply.

"Profession?"

"At ground level."

"I should have plunged into it and swum for one of the islands in the vicinity of the Château d'If, either the Ile de Daume or the Ile de Tiboulen, or even the coast itself; and then I should have been saved."

"Heavens above, what is the matter?" Dantès cried.

"But then you would have come out on the sea."

"Behind my bed."

"To the courtyard."

"Has your bed been moved since you were in the cell?"

"Since 1811."

"Alas!" the voice exclaimed.

"Suppose you had succeeded."

"How is it concealed?"

"That is what I wanted."

"The matter is that I have made a mistake, that the inaccuracy of my drawings led me astray, that I am lost for not having a compass, that a deviation the thickness of a line on my plan was equal to fifteen feet on the ground and that I mistook the wall where you have been digging for that of the castle!"

"Very well. Do not dig any more," the voice said, speaking rapidly. "Just tell me at what level is the hole that you have dug?"

"A corridor."

"Which leads where?"

Dantès shuddered. This man had been four years longer in prison than he had.

"What is outside your cell?"

"Not once."

"Would you have managed to swim so far?"

"Lost?"

"I am… I am Number 27."

"Yes. Seal up your hole carefully, stop working on it, take no notice of anything and wait for me to contact you."

"Who are you? At least tell me who you are!"

"Don't you trust me, then?" Dantès asked. He thought he heard a bitter laugh make its way through the stonework towards him.

"God would have given me strength. But now all is lost."

"Oh, I'm a good Christian," he called, guessing instinctively that the man was thinking of leaving him. "I swear on Christ's name that I would allow myself to be killed rather than give away a hint of the truth to your jailers and mine. But, in heaven's name, do not deprive me of your presence, do not deprive me of your voice or -- I swear it -- I shall dash my head against the wall, and you will have my death on your conscience."

"How old are you? Your voice sounds like that of a young man."

"I do not know my age, because I have had no means of measuring time since I have been here. All I know is that I was approaching nineteen when I was arrested, on February the eighteenth, 1815."

"Not quite twenty-six," the voice muttered. "Very well, then: at that age, men are not yet traitors."

"No, no! I swear it," Dantès said again. "I have already told you, and I repeat, that I would let myself be cut into pieces rather than betray you."

"You did well to talk to me, and you did well to beg me, because I was about to change my plans and have nothing to do with you. But I am reassured by your age. I shall join you. Expect me."

"But you won't abandon me, you won't leave me alone, you will come to me or allow me to go to you? We shall escape together and, if we cannot escape, we shall talk: you of those you love, I of those who are dear to me. You must love someone?"

"I must calculate the risks. I shall give you a signal."

"When?"

"I am alone in the world."

"Then you shall love me. If you are young, I shall be your friend; if you are old, your son. I have a father who must be seventy years old, if he is still alive. I loved only him and a young woman called Mercédès. My father has not forgotten me, I am sure; but as for her -- God knows if she still thinks of me. I shall love you as I loved my father."

These few words were said in tones that convinced Dantès. He asked nothing more, but got up, took the same precautions as before with the rubble he had removed from the wall, and pushed his bed back against it.

"Very well," said the prisoner. "Until tomorrow."

And then he gave himself over entirely to his feelings of happiness. He was certainly no longer going to be alone, he might perhaps even be free. The worst case, should he remain a prisoner, was to have a companion: captivity shared is only semi-captivity. Sighs united together are almost prayers; prayers coming from two hearts are almost acts of grace.

Throughout the day, Dantès came and went in his cell, his heart leaping with joy. From time to time this joy stifled him. At the least noise in the corridor, he leapt on to his bed, clasping his chest with his hands. Once or twice his thoughts turned to the fear that he might be separated from this stranger, whom he already loved as a friend. So he had made up his mind: at the moment when the jailer pushed his bed aside and bent over to examine the opening in the wall, he would crack his head open with the stone on which his jug stood. He knew quite well that he would be condemned to death; but was he not about to die of boredom and despair when that miraculous sound had brought him back to life?

Dantès did not answer, fearing that the emotion in his voice might betray him.

"Is that you?" he said. "I am here!"

In the evening the jailer came. Dantès was on his bed, feeling that there he was better able to guard the unfinished opening. He must have looked at this unwelcome visitor in a peculiar manner, because the man said: "Come, come, are you going mad again?"

When night came, Dantès thought that his neighbour would take advantage of the silence and darkness to resume their conversation, but he was wrong. The night passed but no sound came to relieve his feverish expectation. But the following day, after the morning visit, when he had just moved his bed away from the wall, he heard three knocks, equally spaced. He fell to his knees.

"Has your jailer left?" the voice asked.

The jailer left, shaking his head.

"Yes," Dantès said. "He will not be back until this evening. We have twelve hours' freedom."

"So it is safe for me to act?" asked the voice.

"Yes, yes; don't delay, do it now, I beg you."

Dantès was half inside the opening and, at this moment, the portion of ground on which he was resting his two hands seemed to give way beneath him. He plunged back, while a mass of earth, rubble and broken stones fell away into a hole that had opened up beneath the opening which he himself had made. Then, in the bottom of this dark hole, the depth of which he was unable to assess, he saw a head appear, then some shoulders and finally a whole man, who emerged, with a fair degree of agility, from the pit they had dug.