Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/184

164 could devise in his ardent imagination, and found them all insufficient, because after torture came death, and after death, if not repose, at least that insensibility that resembles it.

By dint of constantly dwelling on the idea that repose was death, and, in order to punish, other tortures than death must be invented, he began to reflect on suicide. Unhappy he, who, on the brink of misfortune, broods over these ideas! It is one of those dead seas that seem clear and smooth to the eye; but he who unwarily ventures within its embrace finds himself entangled in the bituminous deposit that draws him down and swallows him. Once thus ensnared, unless the protecting hand of God snatch him thence, all is over, and his struggles but tend to hasten his destruction. This state of mental anguish is, however, less terrible than the sufferings that precede, and the punishment that awaits it—a sort of consolation that points to the yawning abyss, at the bottom of which is nothingness.

Edmond found some solace in these ideas. All his sorrows, all his sufferings, with their train of gloomy specters, fled from his cell when the angel of death seemed about to enter. Dantès reviewed with composure his past life, and, looking forward with terror to his future existence, chose that middle line that seemed to afford him a refuge.

"Sometimes," said he, "in my voyages, when I was a man and commanded other men, I have seen the heavens become overcast, the sea rage and foam, the storm arise, and, like a monstrous bird, cover the sky with its wings. Then I felt that my vessel was a vain refuge that, like a feather in a giant's hand, trembled and shook before the tempest. Soon the fury of the waves and the sight of the sharp rocks announced the approach of death, and death then terrified me, and I used all my skill and intelligence as a man and a sailor to escape. But I did so because I was happy, because I had not courted death, because this repose on a bed of rocks and seaweed seemed terrible, because I was unwilling that I, a creature made for the service of God, should serve for food to the gulls and vultures. But now it is different: I have lost all that bound me to life; death smiles and invites me to repose; I die after my own manner, I die exhausted and broken-spirited, as I fall asleep when I have paced three thousand times round my cell,—that is thirty thousand steps, or about ten leagues."

No sooner had this idea taken possession of him than he became more composed, arranged his couch to the best of his power, ate little and slept less, and found this existence almost supportable because he felt he could throw it off at pleasure, like a worn-out garment. He had two means of dying: the one was to hang himself with his handkerchief, to the stanchions of the window; the other, to refuse food, and starve