XVI. Un savant italien.

XVI

An Italian Scholar.

Dantès took this new friend, so long and so impatiently awaited, in his arms, and drew him toward the window, so that the little daylight that penetrated the dungeon might light him fully.

He was a man of small stature, with hair whitened by sorrow rather than by age, with a penetrating eye hidden beneath thick, greying eyebrows, and a beard still black descending to his chest: the leanness of his face, hollowed by deep wrinkles, the bold line of his distinctive features, revealed a man more accustomed to exercising his moral faculties than his physical strength. The newcomer's brow was covered with sweat.

As for his clothing, it was impossible to distinguish its original form, for it hung in rags.

He appeared to be at least sixty-five years old, although a certain vigor in his movements announced that he had perhaps fewer years than a long captivity indicated.

He received the young man's enthusiastic protests with a kind of pleasure; his frozen soul seemed, for an instant, to warm and melt at contact with that ardent soul. He thanked him for his cordiality with some warmth, although his disappointment had been great at finding a second dungeon where he had believed he would meet freedom.

"Let us see first," he said, "if there is a way to make the traces of my passage disappear from your jailers' eyes. All our future tranquility lies in their ignorance of what has happened."

Then he bent toward the opening, took the stone, which he lifted easily despite its weight, and fitted it into the hole.

"This stone was loosened very carelessly," he said, shaking his head; "you have no tools, then?

"And you," Dantès asked with astonishment, "do you have any?"

"I made myself a few. Except for a file, I have everything I need, chisel, pincers, lever."

"Oh! I would be curious to see these products of your patience and ingenuity," said Dantès.

"Here, first, is a chisel."

And he showed him a strong, sharp blade mounted in a piece of beech wood.

"With what did you make that?" said Dantès.

"With one of the bolts of my bed. It is with this instrument that I hollowed out the whole path that brought me here; about fifty feet."

"Fifty feet!" cried Dantès with a kind of terror.

"Speak lower, young man, speak lower; often someone listens at prisoners' doors."

"I am known to be alone."

"No matter."

"And you say you bored fifty feet to get here?"

"Yes, that is about the distance separating my chamber from yours; only I miscalculated my curve, for lack of a geometry instrument to draw my scale of proportion; instead of forty feet of ellipse, there turned out to be fifty; I believed, as I told you, to arrive at the outer wall, pierce that wall and throw myself into the sea. I followed along the corridor, against which your chamber opens, instead of passing beneath it; all my work is lost, for that corridor opens onto a courtyard full of guards."

"That is true," said Dantès; "but that corridor only runs along one face of my chamber, and my chamber has four."

"Yes, no doubt, but here is first one whose wall is made of the rock itself; it would take ten years of work by ten miners furnished with all their tools to pierce the rock; this other must be backed against the foundations of the governor's apartment; we would fall into the cellars which are evidently locked with a key and we would be caught; the other face gives—wait, where does the other face give?"

This face was the one pierced by the loophole through which the daylight came: this loophole, which kept narrowing until it gave entrance to the light, and through which certainly a child could not have passed, was moreover fitted with three rows of iron bars which could reassure the most suspicious jailer as to the fear of an escape by that means.

And the newcomer, as he asked this question, dragged the table beneath the window.

"Mount this table," he said to Dantès.

Dantès obeyed, mounted the table, and, guessing his companion's intentions, pressed his back against the wall and presented him his two hands.

He who had given himself the name of his chamber number, and whose true name Dantès did not yet know, then mounted, more nimbly than his age would have led one to expect, with the skill of a cat or a lizard, first onto the table, then from the table onto Dantès's hands, then from his hands onto his shoulders; thus doubled over, for the vault of the dungeon prevented him from straightening up, he slipped his head between the first row of bars, and could then plunge his gaze from top to bottom.

An instant later, he withdrew his head sharply.

"Oh! oh!" said he, "I suspected as much."

And he let himself slide down Dantès's body onto the table, and from the table jumped to the ground.

"What did you suspect?" asked the young man anxiously, jumping down in turn beside him.

The old prisoner was pondering.

"Yes," said he, "that is it; the fourth face of your dungeon gives onto an outer gallery, a kind of sentry-walk where patrols pass and sentinels keep watch."

"Are you sure of it?"

"I saw the soldier's shako and the tip of his musket and I withdrew so quickly only for fear he might see me myself."

"Well?" said Dantès.

"You see plainly that it is impossible to flee by your dungeon."

"Then?" continued the young man with an interrogative accent.

"Then," said the old prisoner, "may the will of God be done!"

And a look of deep resignation spread over the old man's features.

Dantès looked at this man who thus renounced, with such philosophy, a hope so long nourished, with an astonishment mingled with admiration.

"Now, will you tell me who you are?" asked Dantès.

"Oh! my God, yes, if that can still interest you, now that I can no longer be of any use to you."

"You can be of use in consoling and sustaining me, for you seem strong among the strong."

The abbé smiled sadly.

"I am the Abbé Faria," said he, "a prisoner since 1811, as you know, at the Château d'If; but I had been confined for three years in the fortress of Fenestrelle. In 1811, I was transferred from Piedmont to France. It was then I learned that destiny, which at that time seemed subject to him, had given a son to Napoleon, and that this son in his cradle had been named King of Rome. I was far from suspecting then what you told me just now: that, four years later, the colossus would be overthrown. Who then reigns in France? Is it Napoleon II?"

"No, it is Louis XVIII."

"Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI; the decrees of heaven are strange and mysterious. What then was the intention of Providence in abasing the man it had raised and raising the man it had abased?"

Dantès followed with his eyes this man who forgot for an instant his own destiny to concern himself thus with the destinies of the world.

"Yes, yes," he continued, "it is as in England: after Charles I, Cromwell; after Cromwell, Charles II; and perhaps after James II, some son-in-law, some relative, some Prince of Orange; a stadtholder who will make himself king; and then new concessions to the people, then a constitution, then liberty! You will see that, young man," said he, turning toward Dantès, and looking at him with brilliant and deep eyes, as the prophets must have had. "You are still of an age to see it, you will see it."

"Yes, if I get out of here."

"Ah, that is true," said the Abbé Faria. "We are prisoners; there are moments when I forget it, and because my eyes pierce the walls that enclose me, I believe myself free."

"But why are you locked up, you?"

"Me? Because I dreamed in 1807 of the plan that Napoleon wished to realize in 1811; because, like Machiavelli, amid all those petty princes who made of Italy a nest of small tyrannical and weak kingdoms, I wanted one great and sole empire, compact and strong: because I believed I had found my Cesare Borgia in a crowned imbecile who pretended to understand me only to betray me better. It was the plan of Alexander VI and of Clement VII; it will always fail, since they undertook it in vain and Napoleon could not complete it; decidedly Italy is accursed!"

And the old man bowed his head.

Dantès did not understand how a man could risk his life for such interests; it is true that if he knew Napoleon from having seen him and spoken to him, he was, on the other hand, completely ignorant of what Clement VII and Alexander VI were.

"Are you not," said Dantès, beginning to share the opinion of his jailer, which was the general opinion at the Château d'If, "the priest whom they believe... ill?"

"Whom they believe mad, you mean, do you not?"

"I did not dare," said Dantès smiling.

"Yes, yes," continued Faria with a bitter laugh, "yes, it is I who pass for mad; it is I who have amused for so long the guests of this prison, and who would delight the little children, if there were children in this abode of hopeless sorrow."

Dantès remained an instant motionless and mute.

"So you give up escaping?" said he to him.

"I see escape impossible; it is to rebel against God to attempt what God does not will to be accomplished."

"Why discourage yourself? it would be asking too much of Providence also to wish to succeed on the first try. Can you not begin again in another direction what you have done in this one?"

"But do you know what I have done, to speak thus of beginning again? Do you know it took me four years to make the tools I possess? Do you know that for two years I have been scraping and digging an earth hard as granite? Do you know I had to loosen stones which formerly I would not have believed I could move, that whole days passed in this titanic labor and that sometimes, in the evening, I was happy when I had removed a square inch of that old cement, become as hard as the stone itself? Do you know, do you know that to lodge all that earth and all those stones which I buried, I had to pierce the vault of a staircase, in the drum of which all those ruins were in turn entombed, so that today the drum is full, and I would not know where to put a handful of dust? Do you know, finally, that I believed I touched the goal of all my labors, that I felt just the strength to accomplish that task, and that behold God not only pushes back that goal, but transports it I know not where? Ah! I tell you, I repeat to you, I will do nothing more henceforth to try to reconquer my liberty, since the will of God is that it be lost forever."

Edmond lowered his head so as not to confess to this man that the joy of having a companion kept him from sympathizing, as he ought, with the sorrow the prisoner felt at not having been able to save himself.

The Abbé Faria let himself fall onto Edmond's bed, and Edmond remained standing.

The young man had never thought of escape. There are things which seem so impossible that one does not even have the idea of attempting them and avoids them by instinct. To dig fifty feet under the earth, to devote three years of labor to this operation in order to arrive, if one succeeded, at a precipice falling straight into the sea; to hurl oneself from fifty, sixty, a hundred feet perhaps, to be crushed, in falling, head against some rock, if the sentinels' bullet had not already killed one beforehand; to be obliged, if one escaped all these dangers, to swim a league, that was too much not to resign oneself, and we have seen that Dantès had nearly pushed this resignation to the point of death.

But now that the young man had seen an old man cling to life with such energy and give him the example of desperate resolutions, he began to reflect and measure his courage. Another had attempted what he had not even had the idea of doing; another, less young, less strong, less skillful than he, had procured, by force of skill and patience, all the instruments he needed for this incredible operation, which only a wrongly taken measurement could cause to fail: another had done all that, nothing then was impossible to Dantès: Faria had bored fifty feet, he would bore a hundred, Faria, at fifty years, had spent three years on his work; he was only half Faria's age, he would spend six; Faria, abbé, scholar, man of the Church, had not feared to risk the crossing from the Château d'If to the island of Daume, of Ratonneau or of Lemaire; he, Edmond the sailor, he, Dantès the bold diver, who had so often gone to fetch a branch of coral from the bottom of the sea, would he then hesitate to swim a league? what did it take to swim a league? an hour? Well, had he not remained whole hours at sea without regaining the shore! No, no, Dantès needed only to be encouraged by an example. All that another had done or could have done, Dantès would do.

The young man reflected an instant.

"I have found what you were seeking," said he to the old man.

Faria started.

"You?" said he, and in raising his head with an air which indicated that if Dantès spoke the truth, his companion's discouragement would not be of long duration; "you, come, what have you found?"

"The corridor that you bored to come from your place to here extends in the same direction as the outer gallery, does it not?"

"Yes."

"It must be only some fifteen paces from it?"

"At most."

"Well, toward the middle of the corridor we bore a passage forming like the branch of a cross. This time you take your measurements better. We come out onto the outer gallery. We kill the sentinel and escape. For this plan to succeed, only courage is needed, you have it; only vigor, I do not lack it. I do not speak of patience, you have proven yourself and I will prove myself."

"One moment," answered the abbé; "you have not known, my dear companion, of what sort is my courage, and what use I intend to make of my strength. As for patience, I believe I have been patient enough in beginning again each morning the task of the night, and each night the task of the day. But then listen well to me, young man, it is that it seemed to me I was serving God, in delivering one of his creatures who, being innocent, could not have been condemned."

"Well," asked Dantès, "is the matter not at the same point, and have you recognized yourself guilty since you met me, say?"

"No, but I do not wish to become so. Until now I believed I had to do only with things, behold you propose to me to have to do with men. I could bore a wall and destroy a staircase, but I will not bore a breast and will not destroy an existence."

Dantès made a slight movement of surprise.

"How," said he, "being able to be free, would you be held back by such a scruple?"

"But you yourself," said Faria, "why did you not one evening knock out your jailer with the leg of your table, put on his clothes and try to flee?"

"It is that the idea did not come to me," said Dantès.

"It is that you have such an instinctive horror for such a crime, such a horror that you did not even think of it," resumed the old man; "for in simple and permitted things our natural appetites warn us that we do not deviate from the line of our right. The tiger, who sheds blood by nature, whose state it is, the destination, needs but one thing, which is that his smell warn him he has prey within reach. At once, he springs toward that prey, falls upon it and tears it. It is his instinct, and he obeys it. But man, on the contrary, shrinks from blood; it is not social laws which shrink from murder, it is natural laws."

Dantès remained confounded: it was, indeed, the explanation of what had passed unknown to him in his mind or rather in his soul, for there are thoughts which come from the head, and others which come from the heart.

"And then," continued Faria, "for some twelve years that I have been in prison, I have gone over in my mind all the celebrated escapes. I have rarely seen succeed the escapes. The happy escapes, the escapes crowned with full success, are the escapes meditated with care and slowly prepared; it is thus that the Duc de Beaufort escaped from the Château de Vincennes; the Abbé Dubuquoi from the Fort-l'Évêque, and Latude from the Bastille. There are still those that chance may offer: those are the best; let us wait for an opportunity, believe me, and if that opportunity presents itself, let us profit by it."

"You could wait, you," said Dantès sighing; "that long labor was an occupation of every instant, and when you had not your labor to distract you, you had your hopes to console you."

"Besides," said the abbé, "I did not occupy myself only with that."

"What did you do then?"

"I wrote or studied."

"They give you then paper, pens, ink?"

"No," said the abbé, "but I make them."

"You make yourself paper, pens and ink?" cried Dantès.

"Yes." Dantès looked at this man with admiration; only, he still found it hard to believe what he said. Faria perceived this slight doubt.

"When you come to my place," he said to him, "I will show you a whole work, result of the thoughts, researches and reflections of my whole life, which I had meditated in the shadow of the Coliseum at Rome, at the foot of the Column of St. Mark at Venice, on the banks of the Arno at Florence, and which I little suspected that one day my jailers would leave me the leisure to execute between the four walls of the Château d'If. It is a Treatise on the Possibility of a General Monarchy in Italy. It will make a large quarto volume.

"And you have written it?"

"On two shirts. I invented a preparation which renders linen smooth and even like parchment."

"You are then a chemist."

"A little. I knew Lavoisier and am connected with Cabanis."

"But, for such a work, you must have made historical researches. You had books then?"

"At Rome, I had about five thousand volumes in my library. By dint of reading and rereading them, I discovered that with a hundred and fifty well-chosen works one has, if not the complete summary of human knowledge, at least all that it is useful for a man to know. I devoted three years of my life to reading and rereading those hundred and fifty volumes, so that I knew them almost by heart when I was arrested. In my prison, with a slight effort of memory, I recalled them completely. Thus I could recite to you Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Bossuet. I cite you only the most important."

"But you know then several languages?"

"I speak five living languages, German, French, Italian, English and Spanish; with the help of ancient Greek I understand modern Greek; only I speak it badly, but I am studying it at this moment."

"You study it?" said Dantès.

"Yes, I made myself a vocabulary of the words I know, I arranged them, combined them, turned them and returned them, so that they may suffice to express my thought. I know about a thousand words, that is all I strictly need, although there are a hundred thousand, I believe, in the dictionaries. Only, I will not be eloquent, but I will make myself wonderfully understood and that suffices me."

More and more amazed, Edmond began to find almost supernatural the faculties of this strange man; he wished to find him at fault on some point, he continued:

"But if they gave you no pens," said he, "with what could you write that so voluminous treatise?"

"I made myself excellent ones, and which would be preferred to ordinary pens if the material were known, with the cartilages of the heads of those enormous whiting that are sometimes served us during lean days. Thus I always see the Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays arrive with great pleasure, for they give me the hope of increasing my provision of pens, and my historical labors are, I confess, my sweetest occupation. In descending into the past, I forget the present; in walking free and independent in history, I no longer remember that I am a prisoner."

"But the ink?" said Dantès, "with what did you make yourself ink?"

"There was formerly a chimney in my dungeon," said Faria; "this chimney was stopped up some time before my arrival, no doubt, but for long years fire had been made in it: all the inside is therefore tapestried with soot. I dissolve this soot in a portion of the wine they give me every Sunday, that furnishes me excellent ink. For particular notes, which need to attract the eyes, I prick my fingers and write with my blood."

"And when may I see all that?" asked Dantès.

"Whenever you wish," answered Faria.

"Oh! right away!" cried the young man.

"Follow me then," said the abbé.

And he reentered the underground corridor where he disappeared. Dantès followed him.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”