"Not their application, certainly, but their principles you
may; to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the
learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other."

"But cannot one learn philosophy?"

"Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the
sciences to truth; it is like the golden cloud in which the
Messiah went up into heaven."

"Well, then," said Dantes, "What shall you teach me first? I
am in a hurry to begin. I want to learn."

"Everything," said the abbe. And that very evening the
prisoners sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon
the following day. Dantes possessed a prodigious memory,
combined with an astonishing quickness and readiness of
conception; the mathematical turn of his mind rendered him
apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally
poetical feelings threw a light and pleasing veil over the
dry reality of arithmetical computation, or the rigid
severity of geometry. He already knew Italian, and had also
picked up a little of the Romaic dialect during voyages to
the East; and by the aid of these two languages he easily
comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at
the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English,
and German. In strict accordance with the promise made to
the abbe, Dantes spoke no more of escape. Perhaps the
delight his studies afforded him left no room for such
thoughts; perhaps the recollection that he had pledged his
word (on which his sense of honor was keen) kept him from
referring in any way to the possibilities of flight. Days,
even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive
course. At the end of a year Dantes was a new man. Dantes
observed, however, that Faria, in spite of the relief his
society afforded, daily grew sadder; one thought seemed
incessantly to harass and distract his mind. Sometimes he
would fall into long reveries, sigh heavily and
involuntarily, then suddenly rise, and, with folded arms,
begin pacing the confined space of his dungeon. One day he
stopped all at once, and exclaimed, "Ah, if there were no
sentinel!"

"There shall not be one a minute longer than you please,"
said Dantes, who had followed the working of his thoughts as
accurately as though his brain were enclosed in crystal so
clear as to display its minutest operations.

"I have already told you," answered the abbe, "that I loathe
the idea of shedding blood."

"And yet the murder, if you choose to call it so, would be
simply a measure of self-preservation."

"No matter! I could never agree to it."

"Still, you have thought of it?"

"Incessantly, alas!" cried the abbe.

"And you have discovered a means of regaining our freedom,
have you not?" asked Dantes eagerly.

"I have; if it were only possible to place a deaf and blind
sentinel in the gallery beyond us."

"He shall be both blind and deaf," replied the young man,
with an air of determination that made his companion
shudder.

"No, no," cried the abbe; "impossible!" Dantes endeavored to
renew the subject; the abbe shook his head in token of
disapproval, and refused to make any further response. Three
months passed away.

"Are you strong?" the abbe asked one day of Dantes. The
young man, in reply, took up the chisel, bent it into the
form of a horseshoe, and then as readily straightened it.

"And will you engage not to do any harm to the sentry,
except as a last resort?"

"I promise on my honor."

"Then," said the abbe, "we may hope to put our design into
execution."

"And how long shall we be in accomplishing the necessary
work?"

"At least a year."

"And shall we begin at once?"

"At once."

"We have lost a year to no purpose!" cried Dantes.

"Do you consider the last twelve months to have been
wasted?" asked the abbe.


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