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. 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 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.

Dantes 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


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