Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/180

160 "Or dreamed he was, and awoke mad."

"After all," said the inspector, with the candor of corruption, "if he had been rich, he would not have been here."

Thus finished the adventure of the Abbé Faria. He remained in his cell, and this visit only increased the belief of his insanity.

Caligula or Nero, those treasure-seekers, those desirers of the impossible, would have accorded to the poor wretch, in exchange for his wealth, the liberty and the air he so earnestly prayed for. But the kings of modern ages, retained within the limits of probability, have neither the courage nor the desire. They fear the ear that hears their orders, and the eye that scrutinizes their actions. They do not feel the divinity that hedges a king; they are men with crowns—that is all. Formerly they believed themselves sprung from Jupiter, and shielded by their birth; but, nowadays, they are not inviolable. It has always been against the policy of despotic governments to suffer the victims of their policy to re-appear. As the Inquisition rarely suffered its victims to be seen with their limbs distorted and their flesh lacerated by torture, so madness is always concealed in its cell, from whence, should it depart, it is conveyed to some gloomy hospital, where the doctor recognizes neither man nor mind in the mutilated being the jailer delivers to him. The very madness of the Abbé Faria, gone mad in prison, condemned him to perpetual captivity.

The inspector kept his word with Dantès: he examined the register, and found the following note concerning him:

This note was in a different hand from the rest, which proved it had been added since his confinement. The inspector could not contend against this accusation; he simply wrote, Nothing to be done.

This visit had infused new vigor into Dantès; he had, till then, forgotten the date; but now, with a fragment of plaster, he wrote the date, 30th July, 1816; and made a mark every day, in order not to lose his reckoning again. Days and weeks passed away, then months Dantès still waited; he at first expected to be freed in a fortnight. This fort night expired; he reflected the inspector would do nothing until his return to Paris, and that he would not reach there until his circuit was finished; he therefore fixed three months; three months passed away, then six more. During these ten months no favorable change had taken place; no consoling news came, his jailer was dumb as usual, and Dantès began to fancy the inspector's visit was but a dream, an illusion of the brain.