Chapter 15 - Page 2

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." Yet in spite of his earnest
prayers, Dantes remained a prisoner.

Then gloom settled heavily upon him. Dantes was a man of
great simplicity of thought, and without education; he could
not, therefore, in the solitude of his dungeon, traverse in
mental vision the history of the ages, bring to life the
nations that had perished, and rebuild the ancient cities so
vast and stupendous in the light of the imagination, and
that pass before the eye glowing with celestial colors in
Martin's Babylonian pictures. 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 exalted 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 (so to
speak), as the implacable Ugolino devours the skull of
Archbishop Roger in the Inferno of Dante.

Rage supplanted religious fervor. Dantes uttered blasphemies
that made his jailer recoil with horror, dashed himself
furiously against the walls of his prison, wreaked his anger
upon everything, and chiefly upon himself, so that the least
thing, -- a grain of sand, a straw, or a breath of air that
annoyed him, led to paroxysms of fury. Then the letter that
Villefort had showed to him recurred to his mind, and every
line gleamed forth in fiery letters on the wall like the
mene tekel upharsin of Belshazzar. He told himself that it
was the enmity of man, and not the vengeance of heaven, that
had thus plunged him into the deepest misery. He consigned
his unknown persecutors to the most horrible tortures he
could imagine, and found them all insufficient, because
after torture came death, and after death, if not repose, at
least the boon of unconsciousness.

By dint of constantly dwelling on the idea that tranquillity
was death, and if punishment were the end in view other
tortures than death must be invented, he began to reflect on
suicide. Unhappy he, who, on the brink of misfortune, broods
over ideas like these!

Before him is a dead sea that stretches in azure calm before
the eye; but he who unwarily ventures within its embrace
finds himself struggling with a monster that would drag him
down to perdition. Once thus ensnared, unless the protecting
hand of