Dantès said, ‘I wish to die,’ and had chosen the manner of his death; and fearful of changing his mind, he had taken an oath to die. ‘When my morning and evening meals are brought,’ thought he, ‘I will cast them out of the window, and they will think I have eaten them.’ He kept his word . . . [N]othing but the recollection of his oath gave him the strength to proceed . . . He persisted until, at last, he had not sufficient force to cast his supper out of the loophole . . . Suddenly . . . Edmond heard a hollow sound in the wall against which he was lying.
‘[Y]ou will come to me, or you will let me come to you. We will escape, and if we cannot escape we will talk, you of those you love and I of those whom I love . . . If you are young, I will be your comrade; if you are old, I will be your son . . . I shall love you as I love my father.’ . . . Dantès rose, dispersed the fragments with the same precaution as before, and pushed back his bed against the wall. He then gave himself up to his happiness: he would no longer be alone.
Dantès listened with admiring attention to all he said . . . enabling him to estimate the delight an intellectual mind would have in following the high and towering spirit of one so gifted as Faria . . . ‘You must teach me a small part of what you know,’ said Dantès, ‘if only to prevent yourself growing weary of me. I can well believe that so learned a person as yourself would prefer absolute solitude to being tormented with the company of one as ignorant and uninformed as myself.’
Who knows if to-morrow, or the next day after, the third attack may not come on? and then it will be too late. I have often thought with a bitter joy that these riches, which would make the wealth of a dozen families, will be forever denied to those men who persecute me . . . But . . . now that I think of all that may come to you from such a disclosure, I shudder at any delay, and tremble lest I should not transmit to one so worthy as you the possession of so vast an amount of hidden treasure.
Without giving himself time to reconsider his decision . . . he bent over the sack, opened it with the knife which Faria had made, drew the corpse from the sack, and transported it along the tunnel to his own cell, laid it on his couch, . . . returned to the other cell, took from the hiding-place the needle and thread, flung off his rags that they might feel naked flesh beneath the coarse sack-cloth, and getting inside the sack, placed himself in the posture in which the dead body had been laid, and sewed up the mouth of the sack from inside.
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