“I promise.”

It was Villefort who seemed to entreat, and the prisoner to reassure him.

But the doom of Edmond Dantes was cast.  Sacrificed to Villefort’s ambition, he was lodged the same night in a dungeon of the gloomy fortress-prison of the Chateau d’If, while Villefort posted to Paris to warn the king that the usurper Bonaparte was meditating a landing in France.

Napoleon returned.  There followed the Hundred Days, and Louis XVIII. again mounted the throne.  M. Morrel’s intercessions during Napoleon’s brief triumph for the release of Dantes but served, on the restoration of Louis, to compromise further the unhappy prisoner, who languished in a foul prison in the depths of the Chateau d’If.

In the cell next to Dantes was another political prisoner, the Abbe Faria.  He had been in the chateau four years when Dantes was immured, and, with marvellously contrived tools and incredible toil, had burrowed a tunnel through the rock fifty feet long, only to find that, instead of leading to the outer wall of the chateau, whence he could have flung himself into the sea, it led to the cell of another prisoner—­Dantes.  He penetrated it after Dantes had been solitary six years.

The prisoners met every day between the visits of their gaolers.  Faria showed Dantes the products of his industry and ingenuity—­his books, written on the linen of shirts, his fish-bone pens and needles, knives, and matches, all accomplished secretly; and beguiled much of the weariness of confinement by educating Dantes in the sciences, history, and languages.  Dantes possessed a prodigious memory, combined with readiness of conception, and his studies progressed rapidly.  Soon Dantes told the abbe his story, and the abbe had little difficulty in opening the eyes of the astonished Dantes to the villainy of his supposed friends and the deputy procurer.  Thus was instilled into his heart a new passion—­vengeance.

II.—­The Cemetery of the Chateau d’If

More than seven years passed thus when coming into the abbe’s dungeon one night, Dantes found him stricken with paralysis.  His right arm and leg remained paralysed after the seizure.  When Dantes next visited him the abbe showed him a paper, half-burnt, and rolled in a cylinder.

“This paper,” said Faria, “is my treasure; and if I have not been allowed to possess it, you will.  Who knows if another attack may not come, and all be finished?”

The abbe had been secretary to the last of the Counts of Spada, one of the most powerful families of mediaeval Italy, and he, dying in poverty, had left Faria an old breviary, which had been in the family since the days of the Borgias.  In this, by chance, Faria found a piece of yellowed paper, on which, when put in the fire, writing began to appear.  From the remains of the paper he made out during the early days of his imprisonment, that a Cardinal Spada, at the end of the fifteenth century, fearing poisoning at the hands of Pope Alexander VI., had buried in the Island of Monte Cristo, a rock between Corsica and Elba, all his ingots, gold, money, and jewels, amounting then to nearly two million Roman crowns.