Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/183

Rh his heart he had often compassionated the unhappy young man who suffered thus; and he laid the request of No. 34 before the governor but the latter sapiently imagined that Dantès wished to conspire or attempt an escape, and refused his request. Dantès had exhausted all human resources; and he then turned to God.

All the pious ideas that had been so long forgotten, returned; he recollected the prayers his mother had taught him, and discovered a new meaning in every word; for in prosperity prayers seem but a mere assemblage of words, until the day when misfortune comes to explain to the unhappy sufferer the sublime language by which he speaks to God. He prayed and prayed aloud, no longer terrified at the sound of his voice; for he fell into a species of ecstasy and saw God at every word he uttered. He laid every action of his life before the Almighty, proposed tasks to accomplish, and at the end of every prayer introduced the entreaty oftener addressed to man than to God, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us." Spite of his earnest prayers, Dantès remained a prisoner.

Then a gloomy feeling took possession of him. He was simple, and without education; he could not, therefore, in the solitude of his dungeon, and of his own thoughts, reconstruct the ages that had passed, reanimate the nations that had perished, and rebuild the ancient cities that imagination renders so vast and poetic, and that pass before our eyes, illuminated by the fires of heaven, as in Martin's pictures of Babylon. He could not do this, he whose past life was so short, whose present so melancholy, and his future so doubtful. Nineteen years of light to reflect upon in eternal darkness. No distraction could come to his aid; his energetic spirit, that would have exulted 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 (thus to speak), as Ugolino devours the skull of the Archbishop Roger in the Inferno of Dante.

Rage succeeded to this. Dantes uttered blasphemies that made his jailer recoil with horror, dashed himself furiously against the walls of his prison; he was in a fury with everything, and chiefly himself, and the least thing—a grain of sand, a straw, or a breath of air—that annoyed him. Then the letter of denunciation that he had seen and that Villefort had showed to him recurred to his mind, and every line seemed visible in fiery letters on the wall, like the Mene Tekel Upharsin of Belshazzar. He said that it was the vengeance of man, and not of Heaven, that had thus plunged him into the deepest misery. He devoted these unknown persecutors to the most horrible tortures he