Chapter 5
As Edmond lay dying on his cot, he heard a noise—a constant scraping. His dungeon was infested with rats and large bugs, but this scraping was different from any of their sounds. Edmond raised his head weakly and listened harder. The sound was like a large claw scraping on the stone wall near his cot.
His heart gave a great lurch as he realized that some prisoner was attempting to escape. The thought of someone making his way to freedom made Edmond feel dizzy. He told himself that his weakness was making him hear things. But the sound continued. ‘It cannot be a workman for the prison’, Edmond reasoned, because it is the middle of the night. His starving body then caused him to fall into a disturbed sleep.
He awoke in the morning angry with himself. Perhaps some fellow sufferer was trying to signal him and he had not heard. When the jailor brought his breakfast, Edmond gobbled it up. His desire for death had vanished. Now his one thought was to make contact with whoever was scraping.
After breakfast, Edmond waited tensely by the wall for an hour. Then it came! Scrape…scrape…scrape…He leaped up and grabbed his chair. Knocking the back of the chair against the wall, he made a clunking noise. He did it three times. At once the scraping stopped. Edmond knocked three times more. Trembling, he waited to hear something. For an hour, he stood there holding the chair, ready to respond.
At last, the sound behind the wall came again. In a fever of joy, Edmond beat the back of the chair against the wall. Then, he stopped suddenly, fearful that a jailor might hear him. To calm his rapidly beating heart, he threw himself down on his cot. There, he reproached himself for wasting twelve years by never trying to escape as the man behind his wall was trying.
This thought propelled Edmond off his cot and into a search for something to scrape with. His cot had iron clamps, but they were screwed tightly into the wood. His eyes lit up when he saw his water mug. Without hesitation, he dropped the mug onto the stone floor. It broke, and Edmond selected the largest and sharpest fragment. Then he attacked the wall with it. The scraping on the other side was so much like a companionship that Edmond found himself crying with happiness.
The plaster that held the stones of the wall together was crumbly from age and from the dampness of the dungeon. Edmond scraped vigorously and was soon rewarded by a shower of plaster dust and small pieces of stone. He worked through the day. Before his jailor arrived with dinner, he moved his bed to conceal the loosening stone. He trickled the plaster dust out of the window, hid his scraper under his blanket and lay down on top of it.
Edmond was given another mug. The jailor did not notice that one large piece of the broken mug was missing when he swept the fragments from the dungeon. After dinner Edmond waited an hour before daring to go back to his task. While he waited, he rested because he was still weak from starving himself.
This pattern continued for the next two days. By then, Edmond had cleared all the plaster from the sides of one stone. But when he tried to move the huge slab, his fingers could not budge it. He needed a lever to work the stone out. Desperately, Edmond examined his dungeon. “I cannot fail now,” he told himself, pacing back and forth in his anxiety.
The jailors had begun bringing around dinner. The clank of their utensils came to Edmond’s ears along with an idea. His nightly soup was brought in an iron pot. Its iron handle would make a perfect lever. But the jailor usually poured his soup from this pot into his plate and took the pot away with him.
“Suppose,” Edmond whispered to himself with a wild surge of hope, “just suppose I did not have a plate.” Quickly, he put his plate in front of the door, then flung himself on his cot to watch and hope.
Edmond’s jailor entered. All his attention was centered on not spilling the soup, so he did not see the plate before his heavy foot crunched down on it.
“Look, what you have made me do,” complained the jailor, “You have left your plate in my way. First your mug, now your plate. Do you think our citizens have nothing to do with their tax money but buy you dishes?” He was angry with Edmond but also with himself, for it was his foot that broke the dish. “All right, take the pot for your soup plate. See if you can keep that in one piece.”
Edmond almost fainted with joy. At most, he had hoped to have the iron pot for one night. Now it was to be his permanently. That night, he levered the big stone out easily with the pot handle and set to work scraping around the next stone. A passageway began to form with the first stone being moved in and out to conceal the entrance. Edmond found that the stones beyond it could be pushed under a wooden beam that arched in back of the wall.
The day came when Edmond and the first scraper were working on the same stone from opposite ends. Edmond scraped with almost insane energy until they moved the last stone aside.
On their knees in the passageway, the two prisoners faced each other. They stretched out trembling hands and touched. Edmond drew the other man forward while he inched backward towards his entrance. Back in his dungeon, Edmond reached down and helped the other man to his feet.
“Who are you?” Edmond asked. His voice shook so terribly that he had to repeat the question.
The man answered, “I am Father Faria. The jailors call me ‘The Mad Priest’.”
‘The Mad Priest’ was rather short. His hair was white from suffering, but his beard, which reached down his chest, was still black. Yet, he was probably sixty-five years old. His eyes burned, not with madness as the jailors said, but with intelligence. At once, Edmond poured out the story of his imprisonment. Then, it was Father Faria’s turn.
The priest had been at the Chateau d’If sixteen years, four years longer than Edmond. He was an Italian, a man of the church, and learned. Political enemies had caused his arrest after the death of the rich Cardinal Spada, who had protected Faria and treated him like a son.
As he listened, Edmond felt that his whole world had turned over, now that he had a friend. He dared to say ‘friend’ even though Faria was so much older and so much better educated than he. Edmond would never have dared consider such a man his friend back in Marseilles. On his side, Faria was warmed by Edmond’s youth and admiration for him.
For the next few weeks, the two men used the passageway freely to go between Edmond’s dungeon and the priest’s cell. This cell was a larger and fitter place to live than the dungeon, since Faria was not considered dangerous, only mad, by his jailors.
Edmond was in a constant state of amazement at the priest’s accomplishments. Faria had made a rope ladder, using the threads unravelled from his blanket. The sharp bone of a fish had been fashioned into a needle. Cartilage or tissue fibres, from other fish were made into pens, and an unused fireplace provided soot for ink. With such writing tools Faria had covered all of his shirts and handkerchiefs with his political ideas on the government in Italy. Sometimes he even used his own blood to write with. Finally, he showed Edmond his main accomplishment—a razorsharp knife made from a candlestick.
As all these treasures were laid before Edmond, he began to weep at his own inferiority. Not only was he ignorant of everything written on Faria’s cloth, but also he had wasted his prison years in idleness.
At Edmond’s confession Faria’s eyes shone, for he loved to teach. At once he formed a plan for Edmond’s education. He, himself, knew four languages, and had read widely in all of them. He was determined to pass them and all that he knew of mathematics, physics, and history on to Edmond.
During the next year and a half, Faria taught, and Edmond made rapid progress. He was delighted to find within himself a love of learning, and he worked hard at his studies. Another change occurred in him. Without realizing it, he began to adopt Faria’s refined, quiet way of speaking and moving. Soon the rough sailor vanished, and an educated young gentleman emerged.
With his newly found powers of thinking Edmond also plotted their escape. They would tunnel into the corridor in front of Faria’s cell. In the middle of the night they would burst out of the tunnel and overpower the two guards who always sat half-asleep at a table. Dressed in the guards’ uniforms and using their keys, they would make their way out of the prison. Then they would jump into the sea and swim to safety. The two friends shook hands on it.
