the latter sapiently imagined that Dantes wished to conspire or
attempt an escape, and refused his request. Dantes 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, Dantes
remained a prisoner.
Then gloom settled heavily upon him. Dantes 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.implacable Ugolino devours the skull of Archbishop Roger in the
Inferno of Dante.
Rage supplanted religious fervor. Dantes 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 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. Dantes reviewedcell when the angel of death seemed about to enter. Dantes 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."
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. Dantes 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.