THE CHATEAU D'IF
There was a part of the Chateau d'If where the most dangerous and the mad prisoners were kept. This was deep down beneath the fortress in the dungeons. Here, in a cell by himself, Dante was locked up. Once in the morning and once in the evening , his door was opened a few inches, just enough for the jailer to push through a plate with some bad food and a small jug of water. Then it was locked again. Dante did not see another living soul.
He could not understand why he had been imprisoned without a trial. For a year he lived in hope that Villefort might come to know of the mistake that had been made, and order his release. Poor Dante! He did not know that it was the Assistant State Prosecutor himself who had ordered him to be locked away.
A second year passed. Dante knew nothing of the outside world. He saw only the four walls of his cell and the jailer who brought his food.
A third year passed, then a fourth year. Dante could now no longer remember whether he was innocent or guilty. His mind was not clear and he was certainly going mad.
In the fifth year of his imprisonment, Dante raged against his jailers, and against the unknown persons who had caused him to be locked away in this dreadful place. His wild actions made him feared by his jailers and they thought him as mad and as dangerous as all the other prisoners in the dungeons.
At the end of six years Dante had no wish to live. He decided to take his own life by starving himself to death. So, twice a day when his food was brought to him, he threw it away through a smll air-hole in the wall of his cell. He became weaker and weaker until he had not the strength to rise from his bed. He was almost dying.
As he lay on his bed, he listened to the noises of the prison. They were no longer strange to him, for he had come to know even the smallest sounds around him. He could hear the ' drip, drip' of the water on the ceiling above him; he could hear the scamper of the rats as they ran around the prison; he could even hear the soft movements of the spider weaving its web in the corner of his cell.
One evening he heard a strange new sound--- a scratching noise behind the wall of his cell. It went on for some time and then stopped, shortly before the jailer arrived with his plate of food. It sounded as though another prisoner was making a tunnel through which to escape. Was this possible? Dante could hardly believe it.
Now Dante began to think once more about living instead of dying. If another prisoner could build a tunnel and try to escape, why should he not do the same thing? He decided that he must find out more about the noise behind the wall.
He started to eat his food again to regain his lost strength. As soon as he felt strong enough, he looked around his cell for some tool with which to scrape the wall to loosen the stones. There was nothing at all. He needed a piece of iron. The only object made of iron which ever came into his cell was the saucepan in which the jailer sometimes brought the thin watery soup which was all the prisoners had to keep them alive. The jailer would pour the soup into a plate and go away again with the saucepan.
This gave Dante an idea.
The next evening, before the jailer arrived, he placed his soup plate on the ground near the door of his cell. The jailer opened the door with his heavy key and put his foot into the opening, right on top of the plate. The plate broke into a hundred pieces. He grumbled at Dante for having left it on the ground, and looked around for something else into which to pour the soup. There was nothing.
'Leave the saucepan,' said Dante. 'You can take it away when you bring me my breakfast.'
The jailer agreed, as it saved him the trouble of fetching another plate.
As soon as his cell door was locked again, Dante quickly drank his soup. Then he set to work. With the handle of his saucepan, he scraped away the mortar around one of the stones in the wall. By the morning the stone was free. Carefully, Dante put it back in its place before the jailer arrived.
The door was unlocked again and the jailer came in with his food.
'You have not brought me another plate,' said Dante.
'I shall leave the saucepan with you,' replied the jailer. 'You cannot break that.'
Dante could not believe his good fortune. He thanked heaven for this piece of iron.
As soon as the jailer had left the cell, Dante picked up the saucepan and started working again. He removed the stone he had already loosened, and began scraping in the space behind it. He toiled on and on until he had made a hole big enough to crawl into. Putting his head and shoulders through this hole, he pulled away the earth behind it. Suddenly he found himself inside the tunnel which his fellow prisoner was making. He started to crawl along it.
Turning a corner, he heard a soft shuffling noise. Someone was crawling towards him from the other end of the tunnel. He lay still, trying not to stir or breathe. The noise came nearer and then stopped. In the darkness of the tunnel, Dante could feel the stranger's breath upon his face.
For the first time, after more than six years alone in his cell in the Chateau d'If, Dante was face to face with another prisoner.
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