The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (16 page)

Soon, through his own bars and those of the monument beside which they had stopped, he saw the bright lights of the Detention Barracks.

The carriage stopped, the police officer got down and went across to the guardroom. A dozen soldiers emerged and formed ranks. Dantès could see their rifles shining in the reflection from the dockside lamps.

‘Can it be for me,’ he wondered, ‘that they are deploying all these men?’

The officer unlocked the door and, in doing so, answered his question without speaking a word, for Dantès could see that a path had been opened for him between the two lines of soldiers, leading down to the quayside.

The two gendarmes who were sitting on the front bench got out first; then he himself was taken out, followed by those who had been sitting beside him. They set off towards a dinghy that a boatman of the Customs was holding against the quay by a chain. The soldiers watched Dantès go past with a look of dumb curiosity. In an instant he was placed in the stern of the boat, still between the four gendarmes, while the officer stood in the bow. With a violent shudder, the boat was pushed away from the quay and four oarsmen began to row vigorously towards the Pillon. At a cry from the boat, the chain across the entrance to the port was lowered and Dantès found himself in the area known as the Frioul, that is to say, outside the harbour.

The prisoner’s first reaction at finding himself outside had been one of joy. The open air was almost freedom. He drew deep breaths,
to fill his lungs with the sharp breeze that carries on its wings all the unknown perfumes of the night and the sea. Soon, however, he sighed: they were rowing in front of the same Réserve where he had been so happy that very morning in the hour before his arrest; and, through two brightly lit windows, he could hear the merry sounds of a ball drifting towards him.

He clasped his hands together, raised his eyes to heaven and prayed.

The boat continued on its way. It had passed by the Tête du Maure and was opposite the cove of the Pharo. It was about to round the Battery, and this Dantès could not understand.

‘But where are you taking me?’ he asked one of the gendarmes.

‘You will know soon enough.’

‘But, even so…’

‘We are not allowed to tell you anything.’

Being half a soldier himself, Dantès knew that it was ridiculous to ask questions of subordinates who had been forbidden to reply, so he kept silent. However, the strangest ideas crowded through his brain. Since they could not go far in a boat of this size, and there was no ship at anchor in the direction towards which they were heading, he thought that they must be going to put him ashore on some distant part of the coast and tell him he was free. He was not bound, and no attempt had been made to handcuff him: this seemed like a good sign. In any case, had not the deputy prosecutor told him that, provided he did not mention the dread name of Noirtier, he had nothing to fear? Had not Villefort, in his very presence, destroyed the dangerous letter which was the only proof they had against him?

So he waited, silent and deep in thought, trying to penetrate the blackness of night with his sailor’s eye, accustomed to darkness and familiar with space.

On their right, they had left behind the Ile Ratonneau, with its lighthouse, and, almost following the line of the coast, they had arrived opposite the bay of the Catalans. Here, the prisoner looked with still greater intensity: here Mercédès lived and he felt at every instant that he could see the vague and ill-defined shape of a woman on the dark shore. Was it possible that Mercédès had been warned by some presentiment that her lover was going by, only three hundred yards away?

There was only one light burning in the Catalan village. By
studying its position, Dantès realized that it came from his fiancée’s room. Mercédès was the only person still awake in the whole of the little colony. If the young man were to shout loudly, his fiancée might hear him. But a false feeling of shame prevented him. What would these men who were watching him say, if he cried out like a madman? So he stayed silent, staring at the light. Meanwhile the boat continued on its way; but the prisoner was not thinking about the boat: he was thinking of Mercédès.

The light disappeared behind a small hill. Dantès turned around and noticed that they were making for the open sea. While he had been looking ashore, taken up with his thoughts, sails had been substituted for the oars and the boat was now being driven before the wind.

Despite his reluctance to ask the gendarme any further questions, Dantès moved over to him and took his hand.

‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘in the name of your conscience and as a soldier, I beg you to have pity on me and to give me an answer. I am Captain Dantès, a good and loyal Frenchman, even though I have been accused of I-know-not-what act of treason. Where are you taking me? Tell me, and I swear as a sailor that I will answer to the call of duty and resign myself to my fate.’

The gendarme scratched his ear and looked at his fellow. The latter made a sign that roughly indicated: since we have gone this far, I see no objection; and the gendarme turned back to Dantès.

‘You are a Marseillais and a sailor, and you ask me where we are going?’

‘Yes, because, on my honour, I don’t know.’

‘You haven’t guessed?’

‘Not at all.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘I swear by all that is most sacred to me in the world. I beg you, tell me!’

‘What about my instructions?’

‘Your instructions do not forbid you to inform me of something that I shall know in ten minutes, or half an hour, or perhaps an hour. Yet, between now and then, you can spare me centuries of uncertainty. I ask this of you as though you were my friend. Look: I am not trying to resist or to escape. In any case it would be impossible. Where are we going?’

‘Unless you are blindfolded, or you have never been outside the
port of Marseille, then you must surely guess where you are going.’

‘No.’

‘But look around you…’

Dantès got up and naturally turned his eyes to the point towards which the boat appeared to be heading: some two hundred yards in front of them loomed the sheer black rock from which, like a flinty excrescence, rises the Château d’If.
¹

To Dantès, who had not been thinking about it at all, the sudden appearance of this strange shape, this prison shrouded in such deep terror, this fortress which for three centuries has nourished Marseille with its gloomy legends, had the same effect as the spectacle of the scaffold on a condemned man.

‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The Château d’If! Why are we going there?’

The gendarme smiled.

‘You can’t be taking me to incarcerate me there?’ Dantès continued. ‘The Château d’If is a state prison, meant only for major political criminals. I haven’t committed any crime. Are there examining magistrates or any other sort of judges in the Château d’If?’

‘As far as I know, only a governor, jailers, a garrison and solid walls. Come now, my friend, don’t be so surprised, or I’ll think you are showing your gratitude for my indulgence by making fun of me.’

Dantès grasped the gendarme’s hand with crushing force.

‘Are you telling me, then, that I am being taken to the Château d’If to be imprisoned there?’

‘It seems like it,’ said the gendarme. ‘But, in any case, my friend, it won’t do you any good to grip my hand so tightly.’

‘Without any further enquiry or formalities?’ the young man asked.

‘The formalities have been gone through and the enquiry made.’

‘Like that, despite Monsieur de Villefort’s promise?’

‘I don’t know what Monsieur de Villefort promised you,’ said the gendarme. ‘All I do know is that we’re going to the Château d’If. Hey, there! What are you doing? Hold on! Give me a hand here!’

With a movement as swift as lightning, though not swift enough, even so, to escape the gendarme’s practised eye, Dantès tried to leap overboard but was held back just as his feet left the planks of the boat, into which he fell back, screaming furiously.

‘Fine!’ the gendarme exclaimed, kneeling on his chest. ‘Fine! So that is how you keep your word as a sailor. Still waters run deep! Well now, my good friend, make a single movement, just one, and I’ll put a shot in your head. I disobeyed my first instruction, but I guarantee you that I shall not fail to abide by the second.’

He gave every indication of his intention to carry out his threat, lowering his musket until Dantès could feel the barrel pressing against his temple.

For an instant he considered making the forbidden movement and so putting a violent end to the misfortune that had swooped down and suddenly seized him in its vulture’s grip. But, precisely because the misfortune was so unexpected, Dantès felt that it could not be long-lasting. Then he remembered M. de Villefort’s promises. And finally, it must be admitted that death in the bilge of an open boat at the hands of a gendarme struck him as ugly and grim. So he fell back on to the planks of the vessel with a cry of rage, gnawing at his fists in his fury.

Almost at the same moment, the boat shook violently. One of the oarsmen leapt on the rock that had just struck against its prow, a rope groaned as it unwound from a pulley, and Dantès realized that they had arrived and the skiff was being moored.

His guards, holding him simultaneously by his arms and the collar of his jacket, forced him to get up, obliged him to go ashore, and dragged him towards the steps leading up to the gate of the fortress, while the officer took up the rear, armed with a musket and bayonet.

In any case, Dantès did not attempt to struggle pointlessly: his slowness was the result of inertia rather than resistance. He stumbled dizzily like a drunken man. Once more he could see soldiers lined up along the steep embankment. He felt the steps obliging him to lift his feet and noticed that he was passing beneath a gateway and that the gate was closing behind him, but all of this in a daze, as if through a mist, without clearly perceiving anything. He could no longer even distinguish the sea, that vast sorrow of prisoners who stare into space with the awful feeling that they are powerless to cross it.

There was a momentary pause, during which he tried to gather his wits. He looked around him: he was in a square courtyard, enclosed within four high walls. He could hear the slow, regular footfalls of the sentries and, each time they passed in front of the
two or three reflections cast on the walls by the light of as many lamps burning inside the castle, it reflected on the muzzles of their guns.

They waited there for about ten minutes. Certain that Dantès could not escape, the gendarmes had released their hold on him. They appeared to be waiting for orders, which eventually came.

‘Where is the prisoner?’ asked a voice.

‘Here,’ one of the gendarmes replied.

‘Let him follow me, I’ll conduct him to his cell.’

‘Come on,’ the gendarmes said, shoving Dantès forward.

The prisoner followed his guide, who led him into a room that was nearly underground, its bare, dripping walls seemingly impregnated with a vapour of tears. A species of lamp, on a wooden stool, its wick drowning in fetid oil, lit the shining walls of this appalling abode and showed Dantès his guide, a sort of subordinate jailer, poorly dressed and coarse-featured.

‘Here is your room for tonight,’ he said. ‘It is late and the governor has gone to bed. Tomorrow, when he wakes up and can examine his instructions concerning you, he may move you elsewhere. Meanwhile, here is some bread, you have water in that jar and straw over there in the corner. That is all a prisoner can want. Good night to you.’

Before Dantès could open his mouth to reply, let alone see where the jailer was putting the bread or the place where the jar stood, and look over to the corner where the straw was waiting to make him a bed, the jailer had taken the lamp and, shutting the door, denied the prisoner even the dim light that had shown him, as though in a flash of lightning, the streaming walls of his prison. So he found himself alone in the silence and darkness, as black and noiseless as the icy cold of the vaults which he could feel pressing down on his feverish brow.

When the first rays of dawn started to bring a little light into this den, the jailer returned with orders to leave the prisoner where he was. Dantès had not moved. An iron hand seemed to have nailed him to the very spot where he had stopped the night before: only his deep-set eyes were now hidden behind the swelling caused by the moisture of his tears. He was motionless, staring at the floor. He had spent the whole night in this way, standing, and not sleeping for an instant.

The jailer came over to him and walked round him, but Dantès
appeared not to notice. He tapped him on the shoulder, and Dantès shuddered and shook his head.

‘Haven’t you slept?’ asked the jailer.

‘I don’t know,’ Dantès replied. The jailer looked at him in astonishment.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

‘I don’t know,’ Dantès replied again.

‘Do you want anything?’

‘I want to see the governor.’

The jailer shrugged his shoulders and went out. Dantès looked after him, stretched his hands out towards the half-open door, but it was closed again. At this his chest seemed to be torn apart by a profound sob. The tears that filled it burst out like two streams, he fell down, pressed his face to the ground and prayed for a long time, mentally going through the whole of his past life and wondering what crime he had committed in so brief a span that could merit such cruel punishment.