Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/225

Rh "You must teach me a small part of what you know," said Dantès, "if only to prevent your growing weary of me. I can well believe that you would prefer solitude to the company of one as ignorant and uninformed as myself. If you will only agree to my request, I promise you never to mention another word about escaping."

The abbé smiled.

"Alas! my child," said he, "human knowledge is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself. Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to communicate to you the stock of learning I possess."

"Two years!" exclaimed Dantès; "do you really believe I can acquire all these things in so short a time?"

"Not their application, certainly, but their principles you may; to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other."

"But can I not learn philosophy as well as other things?"

"My son, philosophy, as I understand it, is reducible to no rules by which it can be learned; it is the amalgamation of all the sciences, the golden cloud on which Christ placed his feet to remount to heaven."

"Well, then," said Dantès, "tell me what you shall teach me first? When shall we commence?"

"Directly, if you will," said the abbé.

And that very evening the prisoners sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon the following day. Dantès possessed a prodigious memory, an astonishing quickness of conception; the mathematical turn of his mind rendered him apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally poetical feelings corrected the dry reality of arithmetical computation or the rigid severity of lines. He already knew Italian, and a little of the Romaic dialect, picked up during his different voyages to the East; and by the aid of these two languages he easily comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English, and German.

In strict accordance with the promise made to the abbé, Dantès never even alluded to flight: it might have been that the delight his studies afforded him supplied the place of liberty; or, probably, the recollection of his pledged word (a point, as we have already seen, to which he paid rigid attention) kept him from reverting to any plan for escape; but, absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge, days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course; time flew on, and at the end of a year Dantès was a new man. With Faria,