Abbe Faria

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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An elderly priest in a tattered cassock steps through a freshly broken stone wall into a candlelit prison cell, white-knuckled pick still in hand, while a younger prisoner half-rises from a stone bench in shock. — In the eleventh hour of the eleventh year, the wall of Château d'If opened its mouth, and out stepped an old man in a tattered cassock — beaming with the frantic joy of a man who had spent six years knocking on the wrong door.

A young prisoner kneels beside an unconscious elderly priest laid out on a stone bed, holding a crude tin lancet and a bloodied rag, a bottle of brandy at his knee. — He bled the old man with a lancet made from a tin handle, brought him back from the threshold with hot rags and brandy — and wept, for the first time in eleven years, when the eyes opened.

In the eleventh hour of the eleventh year, the wall of Château d'If opened its mouth, and out of that mouth stepped Abbe Faria — not the specter of deliverance Dantès had imagined in his first naive fantasies of escape, but an old man in a tattered cassock, perspiring, half-starved, and beaming with the frantic joy of a man who has spent six years knocking on the wrong door. He had been tunneling, he explained with a strange apologetic candor, in the hope of reaching the sea. He had calculated, measured, accounted for the curvature of the rock; he had calculated everything except that the architect who had drawn up the prison's blueprints had been a more faithful geometer than himself. So he had emerged, instead, into the cell of a young man whose name he did not yet know, and whose face he would soon enough learn to read. The young man read him too. Faria was a Roman priest of formidable learning — a man who had once tutored princes and written treatises on the possibility of an Italian monarchy — and who had been sent to this same fortress by an English government, and then by a French one, for the inconvenient crime of knowing too much about the politics of thrones. Madness, the official diagnosis ran; his mind, the doctors said, was unhinged by his theories. The truth was simpler and more cruel: he had been committed by people who could not afford to be contradicted. Dantès, listening to this with the starving attentiveness of a man who has spent years with no conversation but his own, felt something rekindle. He had a tutor. He had, more astonishingly, a friend.

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The old priest taught him everything he had — Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, the higher mathematics, a sketch of universal history, philosophy enough to season it. Each lesson was a brick laid in a cathedral that Dantès was constructing inside his own skull. But the most important course was not on any syllabus. It was the one Faria gave him, almost without intending to, when Dantès told him the story of his arrest. Faria listened as a doctor listens to a case history; he asked questions; he cross-examined. And at the end, with the cold exactitude of a man laying out a diagnosis, he named the three men who had consigned Dantès to this tomb: Danglars, the jealous supercargo; Fernand, the lover in a Catalan's coat; and Villefort, the magistrate whose silent complicity had converted the letter of arrest into a death warrant. The third name was the heaviest. Dantès had not known. Dantès, in his long brooding, had suspected the first two. The third — the man of law, the man of honor — cracked something open in him that would never close again.

Then came the cataleptic fit. Faria had warned him; he had warned him many times. The old priest's body was a machine that occasionally short-circuited, collapsing him into a stillness so profound that the warders had once nearly buried him alive. Dantès, alone in the cell with a corpse that was not yet a corpse, did what the prison could not have imagined: he bled the old man with a lancet made from a tin handle, brought him back from the threshold with hot rags and brandy, watched the breathing return, and wept — for the first time in eleven years — when the eyes opened. From that night the relationship between them was sealed in a kind of sacrament. Faria, in his lucid hours, returned to a subject he had hinted at before: a treasure.

The treasure had belonged to the great Spada family of Rome, the last of whom — a friend of Faria's youth — had died in this very prison and had whispered to him, on the last night, where the gold was hidden. It lay on the island of Monte Cristo, in a cave, behind a certain rock, beneath a certain mark. Faria had memorized it; he had carried it across years of confinement as a man carries a loaded pistol in his pocket. Now, feeling his body begin to fail, he passed it to the only other person in the world who could use it. Dantès received the inheritance the way a young man receives a sword on the morning of his wedding: knowing it would be drawn, and knowing where. The years had been long. The education was complete. The list of names was written down in the marrow. The gold was waiting on a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Patience, that long-winded angel of the dungeon, had at last finished her sermon.