VIII. Le château d'If.

VIII

The Château d'If.

As he crossed the antechamber, the police commissioner made a sign to two gendarmes, who placed themselves, one to the right and the other to the left of Dantès; a door was opened communicating from the apartment of the King's Attorney to the courthouse, and for some time they followed one of those dark great corridors that make those who pass through them shudder, even when they have no reason to shudder.

Just as Villefort's apartment communicated with the courthouse, the courthouse communicated with the prison, a gloomy monument leaning against the palace and which the belfry of the Accoules, rising before it, curiously regards through all its gaping openings.

After many turnings in the corridor he was following, Dantès saw a door open with an iron wicket; the police commissioner struck three blows with an iron hammer that reverberated, for Dantès, as though struck upon his heart; the door opened, the two gendarmes gently pushed their prisoner, who still hesitated. Dantès crossed the dreaded threshold, and the door closed noisily behind him. He was breathing another air, a heavy and mephitic air: he was in prison.

He was conducted into a fairly clean room, but barred and bolted; the result was that the aspect of his dwelling did not give him too much fear: besides, the words of the deputy King's Attorney, pronounced in a voice that had seemed to Dantès so full of interest, rang in his ear like a sweet promise of hope.

It was already four o'clock when Dantès had been conducted to his room. It was, as we have said, the 1st of March; the prisoner therefore soon found himself in the night.

Then, the sense of hearing increased in him with the sense of sight which had just been extinguished: at the least noise that reached him, convinced that they were coming to set him free, he rose quickly and took a step toward the door; but soon the noise died away in another direction, and Dantès fell back upon his stool.

At length, toward ten o'clock in the evening, at the moment when Dantès was beginning to lose hope, a new noise made itself heard, which seemed to him, this time, to be coming toward his room: indeed, steps sounded in the corridor and stopped before his door; a key turned in the lock, the bolts creaked, and the massive oak barrier opened, suddenly letting into the dark room the dazzling light of two torches.

By the light of these two torches, Dantès saw gleam the sabers and muskets of four gendarmes.

He had taken two steps forward; he remained motionless in his place on seeing this increase of force.

"Have you come to fetch me?" asked Dantès.

"Yes," answered one of the gendarmes.

"From Monsieur the deputy King's Attorney?"

"But I think so."

"Very well," said Dantès, "I am ready to follow you."

The conviction that they had come for him on behalf of M. de Villefort removed all fear from the unhappy young man: he therefore advanced, calm in mind, free in gait, and placed himself of his own accord in the midst of his escort.

A carriage was waiting at the street door, the coachman was on his seat, an orderly was seated beside the coachman.

"Is that carriage there for me?" asked Dantès.

"It is for you," answered one of the gendarmes. "Get in."

Dantès wished to make some observations, but the door opened, he felt himself pushed; he had neither the power nor even the intention of resisting, and in an instant he found himself seated at the back of the carriage, between two gendarmes; the other two sat on the front bench, and the heavy machine began to roll with a sinister noise.

The prisoner cast his eyes upon the openings; they were grated: he had but changed prisons; only this one rolled, and was transporting him, as it rolled, toward an unknown destination. Through the bars, too close to be able to pass even a hand through, Dantès nevertheless recognized that they were going along the rue Caisserie, and that by the rue Saint-Laurent and the rue Taramis they were descending toward the quay. Soon, he saw, through his bars and the bars of the monument near which he was, the lights of the Consigne gleam. The carriage stopped, the orderly got down, approached the guardhouse; a dozen soldiers came out and ranged themselves in file; Dantès saw, by the light of the quay lamps, their muskets glitter.

"Is it for me," he asked himself, "that such military force is deployed?"

The orderly, in opening the door which was locked although without uttering a single word, answered this question, for Dantès saw, between the two hedges of soldiers, a path made for him from the carriage to the port.

The two gendarmes who were seated on the front bench got down first, then he was made to descend in his turn, then those who were at his sides followed him. They marched toward a boat which a customs sailor held near the quay by a chain. The soldiers looked at Dantès pass with an air of stupefied curiosity. In an instant, he was installed at the stern of the boat, still between those four gendarmes, while the orderly stayed at the prow. A violent jerk drew the boat from the shore, four rowers pulled vigorously toward the Pilon. At a cry from the boat, the chain that closes the port lowered, and Dantès found himself in what is called the Frioul, that is to say outside the port. The first movement of the prisoner, on finding himself in the open air, had been a movement of joy.

Air, that is almost freedom. He therefore breathed at full chest this lively breeze which brings upon its wings all those unknown scents of night and sea. Soon, however, he sighed; he was passing before that Réserve where he had been so happy that very morning during the hour which had preceded his arrest, and, through the ardent opening of two windows, the joyful noise of a ball reached him.

Dantès joined his hands, raised his eyes to heaven and prayed.

The boat continued on its way; it had passed the Tête de Mort, it was opposite the cove of Pharo; it was going to double the battery, a maneuver incomprehensible to Dantès.

"But where then are you taking me?" he asked one of the gendarmes.

"You will know it presently."

"But still...."

"We are forbidden to give you any explanation."

Dantès was half a soldier; to question subordinates who were forbidden to answer him seemed to him an absurd thing, and he was silent. Then the strangest thoughts passed through his mind: as one could not make a long journey in such a boat, as there was no vessel at anchor on the side to which they were going, he thought they were going to set him down at some distant point on the coast and tell him he was free; he was not bound, no attempt had been made to put him in irons, that seemed to him of good omen; besides, had not the deputy, so excellent toward him, told him that, provided he did not pronounce that fatal name of Noirtier, he had nothing to fear? Had not Villefort, in his presence, annihilated that dangerous letter, the only proof he had against him? He therefore waited, mute and thoughtful, and trying to pierce, with that eye of the sailor practiced in darkness and accustomed to space, the obscurity of the night. They had left to the right the island of Ratonneau, where a lighthouse burned, and while almost skirting the coast, they had arrived abreast of the cove of the Catalans. There, the prisoner's glances redoubled in energy: it was there that Mercédès was, and it seemed to him at every instant that he saw outlined upon the dark shore the vague and indistinct form of a woman.

Why did no presentiment tell Mercédès that her lover was passing three hundred paces from her?

A single light shone at the Catalans. In questioning the position of this light, Dantès recognized that it illuminated his betrothed's chamber. Mercédès was the only one awake in all the little colony. By uttering a great cry the young man could be heard by his fiancée.

A false shame restrained him. What would these men who were looking at him say, on hearing him cry like a madman? He therefore remained mute, his eyes fixed upon that light.

During this time, the boat continued on its way; but the prisoner was not thinking of the boat, he was thinking of Mercédès.

An accident of the ground made the light disappear. Dantès turned round and perceived that the boat was making for the open sea.

While he was looking, absorbed in his own thought, they had substituted sails for oars, and the boat was now advancing, driven by the wind.

Despite the repugnance Dantès felt at addressing new questions to the gendarme, he drew near him, and taking his hand.

"Comrade," said he to him, "in the name of your conscience and by your quality as a soldier, I adjure you to take pity on me and answer me. I am Captain Dantès, a good and loyal Frenchman, although accused of I know not what treason: where are you taking me? tell me, and, sailor's faith, I will submit to my duty and resign myself to my fate."

The gendarme scratched his ear, looked at his comrade. The latter made a movement which meant about this: It seems to me that at the point we have reached there is no inconvenience, and the gendarme turned back toward Dantès:

"You are from Marseilles and a sailor," said he, "and you ask me where we are going?

"Yes, for, upon my honor, I do not know."

"Do you not suspect it?"

"Not at all."

"That is impossible."

"I swear it to you upon what I hold most sacred in the world. Answer me then, I beg you!

"But the orders?"

"The orders do not forbid you from telling me what I shall know in ten minutes, in half an hour, in an hour perhaps. Only you spare me until then centuries of uncertainty. I ask it of you, as if you were my friend, look: I wish neither to revolt nor to flee; besides I cannot: where are we going?"

"Unless you have a bandage over your eyes, or you have never left the port of Marseilles, you must however guess where you are going?"

"No."

"Look around you then."

Dantès rose, naturally cast his eyes upon the point where the boat seemed to be directing itself, and a hundred fathoms before him he saw rise the black and steep rock upon which mounts, like a superfluity of flint, the gloomy château d'If.

That strange form, that prison around which reigns so profound a terror, that fortress which for three hundred years has made Marseilles live by its lugubrious traditions, appearing thus suddenly to Dantès who was not thinking of it, produced upon him the effect that the sight of the scaffold produces upon a condemned man.

"Ah! my God!" cried he, "the château d'If! and what are we going to do there?"

The gendarme smiled.

"But they are not taking me there to be imprisoned?" continued Dantès. "The château d'If is a state prison, destined only for great political criminals. I have committed no crime. Are there examining judges, any magistrates whatsoever at the château d'If?"

"There is, I suppose," said the gendarme, "only a governor, jailers, a garrison and good walls. Come, come, friend, do not look so astonished; for, in truth, you would make me believe that you recognize my complaisance in mocking me."

Dantès pressed the gendarme's hand to break it.

"You pretend then," said he, "that they are conducting me to the château d'If to imprison me there?"

"It is probable," said the gendarme; "but in any case, comrade, it is useless to press me so hard."

"Without other information, without other formality?" asked the young man.

"The formalities are fulfilled, the inquiry is made."

"Thus, despite the promise of M. de Villefort?..."

"I do not know if M. de Villefort made you a promise," said the gendarme, "but what I know is that we are going to the château d'If. Well, what are you doing? Hola! comrades, to me!"

By a movement quick as lightning, which however had been foreseen by the practiced eye of the gendarme, Dantès had tried to leap into the sea; but four vigorous wrists held him back at the moment when his feet were leaving the floor of the boat.

He fell back to the bottom of the boat howling with rage.

"Good!" cried the gendarme, putting a knee on his chest, "good! that is how you keep your sailor's word. Trust then to soft-spoken people! Well, now, my dear friend, make a movement, a single one, and I'll lodge a bullet in your head. I failed in my first order, but, I answer to you, I shall not fail in the second."

And he indeed lowered his carbine toward Dantès, who felt the muzzle press against his temple. For an instant, he had the idea of making that forbidden movement and thus violently ending with the unexpected misfortune which had fallen upon him and suddenly seized him in its vulture's claws. But, precisely because that misfortune was unexpected, Dantès thought that it could not be lasting; then the promises of M. de Villefort came back to his mind; then, if it must finally be told, that death at the bottom of a boat, coming from the hand of a gendarme, appeared to him ugly and bare. He therefore fell back upon the floor of the boat, uttering a howl of rage and gnawing his hands with fury. Almost at the same instant, a violent shock shook the skiff. One of the boatmen jumped upon the rock which the prow of the little boat had just touched, a rope creaked as it unwound around a pulley, and Dantès understood that they had arrived and were mooring the shallop.

Indeed, his guards, who held him at once by the arms and by the collar of his coat, forced him to rise, constrained him to descend to land, and dragged him toward the steps which mount to the gate of the citadel, while the orderly, armed with a musket with bayonet, followed behind.

Dantès, for the rest, made no useless resistance; his slowness came rather from inertia than from opposition; he was stunned and staggering like a drunken man. He again saw soldiers who were stationed on the steep slope, he felt stairs which forced him to lift his feet, he perceived that he was passing under a door and that this door closed behind him, but all that mechanically, as through a fog, without distinguishing anything positive. He no longer even saw the sea, that immense sorrow of prisoners, who look upon space with the terrible feeling that they are powerless to cross it.

There was a halt of a moment, during which he tried to collect his spirits. He looked around him: he was in a square court, formed by four high walls; one heard the slow and regular step of the sentinels; and each time they passed before two or three reflections thrown upon the walls by the light of two or three lamps which shone in the interior of the castle, one saw scintillate the barrel of their muskets.

They waited there about ten minutes; certain that Dantès could no longer flee, the gendarmes had let him go. They seemed to be waiting for orders, those orders arrived.

"Where is the prisoner?" asked a voice.

"Here he is," answered the gendarmes.

"Let him follow me, I am going to conduct him to his lodging."

"Go," said the gendarmes, pushing Dantès. The prisoner followed his conductor, who indeed conducted him into a nearly subterranean room, whose naked and sweating walls seemed impregnated with a vapor of tears. A kind of lantern placed upon a stool, and whose wick swam in a fetid grease, illuminated the polished sides of this frightful abode, and showed Dantès his conductor, a sort of subordinate jailer, ill-dressed and of low countenance.

"Here is your room for tonight," said he; "it is late, and M. the governor is in bed. Tomorrow, when he wakes and has taken cognizance of the orders concerning you, perhaps he will change your dwelling; in the meantime, here is bread, there is water in this jug, straw there in a corner: that is all a prisoner can desire. Good night."

And before Dantès had thought to open his mouth to answer him, before he had noticed where the jailer placed this bread, before he had accounted to himself for the spot where lay this jug, before he had turned his eyes toward the corner where awaited him that straw destined to serve him as a bed, the jailer had taken the lantern, and, closing the door, taken from the prisoner that wan reflection which had shown him, like the gleam of lightning, the dripping walls of his prison.

Then he found himself alone in the darkness and in the silence, as mute and as dark as those vaults whose icy cold he felt lowering upon his burning brow.

When the first rays of day had brought back a little clarity into this den, the jailer returned with order to leave the prisoner where he was. Dantès had not changed place. An iron hand seemed to have nailed him to the very spot where the evening before he had stopped: only his deep eye was hidden under a swelling caused by the humid vapor of his tears. He was motionless and looking at the ground.

He had thus passed the whole night standing, and without sleeping an instant.

The jailer approached him, turned around him, but Dantès did not seem to see him.

He struck him on the shoulder, Dantès started and shook his head.

"Have you not slept then?" asked the jailer.

"I do not know," answered Dantès.

The jailer looked at him with astonishment.

"Are you not hungry?" continued he.

"I do not know," answered Dantès again.

"Do you wish for anything?"

"I should like to see the governor."

The jailer shrugged his shoulders and went out.

Dantès followed him with his eyes, stretched his hands toward the half-open door, but the door closed.

Then his chest seemed to tear in a long sob. The tears which swelled his breast sprang like two streams, he threw himself forehead to the ground and prayed long, running over in his mind all his past life, and asking himself what crime he had committed in that life, still young, which merited so cruel a punishment.

The day passed thus. Scarcely did he eat a few mouthfuls of bread and drink a few drops of water. Sometimes he remained seated and absorbed in his thoughts; sometimes he turned all around his prison as a wild animal enclosed in an iron cage does.

One thought above all made him bound: it was that, during that crossing, where, in his ignorance of the place to which he was being conducted, he had remained so calm and so tranquil, he could have ten times, thrown himself into the sea, and, once in the water, thanks to his skill at swimming, thanks to that habit which made him one of the most skillful divers of Marseilles, disappeared under the water, escaped his guards, gained the coast, fled, hidden in some deserted creek, waited for a Genoese or Catalan vessel, gained Italy or Spain and from there written to Mercédès to come rejoin him. As for his life, in no country was he uneasy about it: everywhere good sailors are rare; he spoke Italian like a Tuscan, Spanish like a child of Old Castile; he would have lived free, happy with Mercédès, his father, for his father would have come to rejoin him; whereas he was a prisoner, enclosed in the château d'If in that impregnable prison, not knowing what had become of his father, what had become of Mercédès, and all that because he had believed in the word of Villefort: it was enough to drive one mad; thus Dantès rolled himself furiously upon the fresh straw which his jailer had brought him.

The next day, at the same hour, the jailer entered.

"Well," asked the jailer, "are you more reasonable today than yesterday?"

Dantès answered not a word.

"Come now," said the latter, "a little courage! Do you desire anything that is in my power? come, say."

"I desire to speak to the governor."

"Eh!" said the jailer with impatience, "I have already told you that it is impossible."

"Why, impossible?"

"Because, by the prison regulations, it is not permitted a prisoner to ask for him."

"What then is permitted here?" asked Dantès.

"Better food at a price, the walk, and sometimes books."

"I have no need of books, I have no wish to walk and I find my food good; thus I want but one thing, to see the governor."

"If you weary me with always repeating the same thing," said the jailer, "I shall bring you no more to eat."

"Well," said Dantès, "if you bring me no more to eat, I shall die of hunger, that is all."

The accent with which Dantès pronounced these words proved to the jailer that his prisoner would be happy to die; also, as every prisoner, all told, brings in about ten sous a day to his jailer, that of Dantès envisaged the deficit which would result for him from his death, and resumed in a softer tone:

"Listen: what you desire there is impossible; do not ask it then any further, for it is without example that, upon his request, the governor has come into a prisoner's room; only, be very good, they will permit you the walk, and it is possible that one day, while you are walking, the governor will pass: then you will question him, and, if he wishes to answer you, that concerns him."

"But," said Dantès, "how long may I wait thus without that chance presenting itself?"

"Ah! well," said the jailer, "a month, three months, six months, a year perhaps."

"That is too long," said Dantès; "I wish to see him at once."

"Ah!" said the jailer, "do not absorb yourself thus in a single impossible desire, or, before fifteen days, you will be mad."

"Ah! you think so?" said Dantès.

"Yes, mad. That is always how madness begins; we have an example here: it is in constantly offering a million to the governor, if one would set him free, that the brain of the abbé who occupied this room before you became deranged."

"And how long is it since he left this room?"

"Two years."

"Was he set free?"

"No: he was put in the dungeon."

"Listen!" said Dantès, "I am not an abbé, I am not mad; perhaps I shall become one; but, unfortunately, at this hour, I still have all my reason: I am going to make you another proposition."

"Which?"

"I shall not offer you a million, I, for I could not give it to you; but I offer you a hundred crowns if you will, the first time you go to Marseilles, go down to the Catalans, and give a letter to a young girl called Mercédès... not even a letter, only two lines."

"If I carried those two lines and were discovered, I should lose my place, which is a thousand livres a year, not counting the profits and the food; you see then that I should be a great imbecile to risk losing a thousand livres to gain three hundred."

"Well!" said Dantès, "listen and note this well: if you refuse to warn the governor that I desire to speak to him; if you refuse to carry two lines to Mercédès, or at least to warn her that I am here, one day I shall wait for you behind my door, and, at the moment you enter, I shall break your head with this stool."

"Threats!" cried the jailer, making a step backward and putting himself on the defensive; "decidedly your head is turning. The abbé began like you, and in three days you will be mad as a hatter, like him; happily there are dungeons at the château d'If."

Dantès took the stool, and he made it whirl around his head.

"Very well! very well!" said the jailer; "well! since you absolutely wish it, they shall warn the governor."

"That's right!" said Dantès, setting his stool upon the ground and sitting down on it, his head low and his eyes wild, as if he were really becoming senseless.

The jailer went out, and, an instant after, re-entered with four soldiers and a corporal.

"By order of the governor," said he, "take the prisoner down a story below this one."

"To the dungeon then?" said the corporal.

"To the dungeon. One must put madmen with madmen."

The four soldiers seized Dantès, who fell into a kind of atony and followed them without resistance. He was made to descend fifteen steps, and the door of a dungeon was opened into which he entered murmuring:

"He is right, one must put madmen with madmen."

The door closed, and Dantès went before him, his hands extended until he felt the wall; then he sat down in a corner and remained immobile, while his eyes, gradually accustoming themselves to the obscurity, began to distinguish objects.

The jailer was right, it wanted but little that Dantès was not mad.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”