Just as Villefort's chambers gave access to the Palais de Justice, so the Palais de Justice gave access to the prison, a sombre pile overlooked by the bell-tower of Les Accoules, which rises opposite and examines it with curiosity from every gaping aperture.

Crossing the antechamber, the commissioner of police gestured to two gendarmes, who took up their positions on either side of Dantès. A door leading from the chambers of the crown prosecutor to the law courts was opened, and they went along one of those long dark corridors that inspire a shudder in all who enter them, even when they have no cause to fear.

After several twists and turns in the corridor down which they went, Dantès saw a door with an iron wicket open before him. The police commissioner knocked on it with a little hammer, and the three blows sounded to Dantès as though they had been struck against his heart. The door opened and the two gendarmes gently pushed their prisoner forward, for he still hung back. Dantès crossed the awful threshold and the door closed noisily behind him. He now breathed a different atmosphere, where the air was heavy and sulphurous: he was in prison.

He was taken to a cell that was quite clean, despite the bars and locks; the appearance of his surroundings consequently did not arouse too much fear in him. In any case, the deputy prosecutor's words, spoken in tones that seemed to Dantès to express such concern, still echoed in his ears like a sweet promise of hope.

Finally, at around ten o'clock in the evening, just as he was starting to lose hope, he heard a new sound that, this time, really did seem to be coming towards his cell. And, indeed, there were steps in the corridor that halted in front of his door. A key turned in the lock, the bolts creaked and the huge mass of oak moved open, suddenly filling the room with the dazzling light of two torches, in which Dantès could see the shining sabres and muskets of four gendarmes.

It was already four o'clock when Dantès was led into his cell. As we have already mentioned, it was March the first, so the prisoner would soon be in darkness. His hearing became more acute as his sight dimmed and, at the slightest sound which reached him, convinced that they were coming to set him free, he leapt up and took a step towards the door; but the noise soon faded as it vanished in another direction, and Dantès slumped back on to his stool.

"On behalf of Monsieur the deputy crown prosecutor?"

"I suppose so."

"Very well," Dantès replied. "I am ready to go with you."

A carriage was waiting at the street door, the driver was on his seat and there was a police officer sitting beside him.

"Have you come for me?" he asked.

"Yes," one of the gendarmes replied.

"It's for you," one of the gendarmes replied. "Get in."

"Has this carriage come for me?" Dantès asked.

Dantès wanted to say something, but the door opened and he felt a shove. He had neither the opportunity to resist nor any intention of doing so. At once he found himself seated inside the carriage between two gendarmes, while the two others took their place on the bench at the front and the heavy vehicle began to move forward with a sinister rumble.

Certain that it was M. de Villefort who had sent for him, the unfortunate young man had no apprehension and went out calmly, with easy steps, to station himself between the soldiers who formed his escort.

He had taken two steps forward, but stopped in his tracks at the sight of this increased force.

The carriage stopped, the police officer got down and went across to the guardroom. A dozen soldiers emerged and formed ranks. Dantès could see their rifles shining in the reflection from the dockside lamps.

The prisoner looked at the windows, which were barred: he had merely exchanged one prison for another, with the difference that this one was moving and taking him to some unknown destination. However, through the bars which were so closely set that a hand could barely pass between them, Dantès could observe that they were proceeding down the Rue Caisserie, then the Rue Saint-Laurent and the Rue Taramis, heading towards the port.

"Can it be for me," he wondered, "that they are deploying all these men?"

Soon, through his own bars and those of the monument beside which they had stopped, he saw the bright lights of the Detention Barracks.

The officer unlocked the door and, in doing so, answered his question without speaking a word, for Dantès could see that a path had been opened for him between the two lines of soldiers, leading down to the quayside.

The prisoner's first reaction at finding himself outside had been one of joy. The open air was almost freedom. He drew deep breaths, to fill his lungs with the sharp breeze that carries on its wings all the unknown perfumes of the night and the sea. Soon, however, he sighed: they were rowing in front of the same Réserve where he had been so happy that very morning in the hour before his arrest; and, through two brightly lit windows, he could hear the merry sounds of a ball drifting towards him.

The soldiers watched Dantès go past with a look of dumb curiosity. In an instant he was placed in the stern of the boat, still between the four gendarmes, while the officer stood in the bow. With a violent shudder, the boat was pushed away from the quay and four oarsmen began to row vigorously towards the Pillon. At a cry from the boat, the chain across the entrance to the port was lowered and Dantès found himself in the area known as the Frioul, that is to say, outside the harbour.

The two gendarmes who were sitting on the front bench got out first; then he himself was taken out, followed by those who had been sitting beside him. They set off towards a dinghy that a boatman of the Customs was holding against the quay by a chain.

"But where are you taking me?" he asked one of the gendarmes.

The boat continued on its way. It had passed by the Tête du Maure and was opposite the cove of the Pharo. It was about to round the Battery, and this Dantès could not understand.

"You will know soon enough."

Being half a soldier himself, Dantès knew that it was ridiculous to ask questions of subordinates who had been forbidden to reply, so he kept silent.

However, the strangest ideas crowded through his brain. Since they could not go far in a boat of this size, and there was no ship at anchor in the direction towards which they were heading, he thought that they must be going to put him ashore on some distant part of the coast and tell him he was free. He was not bound, and no attempt had been made to handcuff him: this seemed like a good sign. In any case, had not the deputy prosecutor told him that, provided he did not mention the dread name of Noirtier, he had nothing to fear? Had not Villefort, in his very presence, destroyed the dangerous letter which was the only proof they had against him?

"But, even so…"

He clasped his hands together, raised his eyes to heaven and prayed.

"We are not allowed to tell you anything."

On their right, they had left behind the Ile Ratonneau, with its lighthouse, and, almost following the line of the coast, they had arrived opposite the bay of the Catalans. Here, the prisoner looked with still greater intensity: here Mercédès lived and he felt at every instant that he could see the vague and ill-defined shape of a woman on the dark shore. Was it possible that Mercédès had been warned by some presentiment that her lover was going by, only three hundred yards away?

So he waited, silent and deep in thought, trying to penetrate the blackness of night with his sailor's eye, accustomed to darkness and familiar with space.

There was only one light burning in the Catalan village. By studying its position, Dantès realized that it came from his fiancée's room. Mercédès was the only person still awake in the whole of the little colony. If the young man were to shout loudly, his fiancée might hear him. But a false feeling of shame prevented him. What would these men who were watching him say, if he cried out like a madman?

Despite his reluctance to ask the gendarme any further questions, Dantès moved over to him and took his hand.

The light disappeared behind a small hill. Dantès turned around and noticed that they were making for the open sea. While he had been looking ashore, taken up with his thoughts, sails had been substituted for the oars and the boat was now being driven before the wind.

"Comrade," he said, "in the name of your conscience and as a soldier, I beg you to have pity on me and to give me an answer. I am Captain Dantès, a good and loyal Frenchman, even though I have been accused of I-know-not-what act of treason. Where are you taking me? Tell me, and I swear as a sailor that I will answer to the call of duty and resign myself to my fate."

So he stayed silent, staring at the light. Meanwhile the boat continued on its way; but the prisoner was not thinking about the boat: he was thinking of Mercédès.

The gendarme scratched his ear and looked at his fellow. The latter made a sign that roughly indicated: since we have gone this far, I see no objection; and the gendarme turned back to Dantès. "You are a Marseillais and a sailor, and you ask me where we are going?"

"Yes, because, on my honour, I don't know."

"But look around you…"

"No."

"I swear by all that is most sacred to me in the world. I beg you, tell me!"

"What about my instructions?"

"That's not possible."

"Your instructions do not forbid you to inform me of something that I shall know in ten minutes, or half an hour, or perhaps an hour. Yet, between now and then, you can spare me centuries of uncertainty. I ask this of you as though you were my friend. Look: I am not trying to resist or to escape. In any case it would be impossible. Where are we going?"

"You haven't guessed?"

"Unless you are blindfolded, or you have never been outside the port of Marseille, then you must surely guess where you are going."

"Not at all."

Dantès got up and naturally turned his eyes to the point towards which the boat appeared to be heading: some two hundred yards in front of them loomed the sheer black rock from which, like a flinty excrescence, rises the Château d'If.

To Dantès, who had not been thinking about it at all, the sudden appearance of this strange shape, this prison shrouded in such deep terror, this fortress which for three centuries has nourished Marseille with its gloomy legends, had the same effect as the spectacle of the scaffold on a condemned man.

"The formalities have been gone through and the enquiry made."

"My God!" he cried. "The Château d'If! Why are we going there?"

"As far as I know, only a governor, jailers, a garrison and solid walls. Come now, my friend, don't be so surprised, or I'll think you are showing your gratitude for my indulgence by making fun of me."

Dantès grasped the gendarme's hand with crushing force.

"I don't know what Monsieur de Villefort promised you," said the gendarme. "All I do know is that we're going to the Château d'If. Hey, there! What are you doing? Hold on! Give me a hand here!"

The gendarme smiled.

"Without any further enquiry or formalities?" the young man asked.

"You can't be taking me to incarcerate me there?" Dantès continued. "The Château d'If is a state prison, meant only for major political criminals. I haven't committed any crime. Are there examining magistrates or any other sort of judges in the Château d'If?"

"Like that, despite Monsieur de Villefort's promise?"

"It seems like it," said the gendarme. "But, in any case, my friend, it won't do you any good to grip my hand so tightly."

"Are you telling me, then, that I am being taken to the Château d'If to be imprisoned there?"

"Fine!" the gendarme exclaimed, kneeling on his chest. "Fine! So that is how you keep your word as a sailor. Still waters run deep! Well now, my good friend, make a single movement, just one, and I'll put a shot in your head. I disobeyed my first instruction, but I guarantee you that I shall not fail to abide by the second."

With a movement as swift as lightning, though not swift enough, even so, to escape the gendarme's practised eye, Dantès tried to leap overboard but was held back just as his feet left the planks of the boat, into which he fell back, screaming furiously.

He gave every indication of his intention to carry out his threat, lowering his musket until Dantès could feel the barrel pressing against his temple.

For an instant he considered making the forbidden movement and so putting a violent end to the misfortune that had swooped down and suddenly seized him in its vulture's grip. But, precisely because the misfortune was so unexpected, Dantès felt that it could not be long-lasting. Then he remembered M. de Villefort's promises. And finally, it must be admitted that death in the bilge of an open boat at the hands of a gendarme struck him as ugly and grim. So he fell back on to the planks of the vessel with a cry of rage, gnawing at his fists in his fury.

Almost at the same moment, the boat shook violently. One of the oarsmen leapt on the rock that had just struck against its prow, a rope groaned as it unwound from a pulley, and Dantès realized that they had arrived and the skiff was being moored.

His guards, holding him simultaneously by his arms and the collar of his jacket, forced him to get up, obliged him to go ashore, and dragged him towards the steps leading up to the gate of the fortress, while the officer took up the rear, armed with a musket and bayonet.

In any case, Dantès did not attempt to struggle pointlessly: his slowness was the result of inertia rather than resistance. He stumbled dizzily like a drunken man. Once more he could see soldiers lined up along the steep embankment. He felt the steps obliging him to lift his feet and noticed that he was passing beneath a gateway and that the gate was closing behind him, but all of this in a daze, as if through a mist, without clearly perceiving anything. He could no longer even distinguish the sea, that vast sorrow of prisoners who stare into space with the awful feeling that they are powerless to cross it.

They waited there for about ten minutes. Certain that Dantès could not escape, the gendarmes had released their hold on him. They appeared to be waiting for orders, which eventually came.

"Where is the prisoner?" asked a voice.

"Come on," the gendarmes said, shoving Dantès forward.

"Here," one of the gendarmes replied.

"Let him follow me, I'll conduct him to his cell."

The prisoner followed his guide, who led him into a room that was nearly underground, its bare, dripping walls seemingly impregnated with a vapour of tears. A species of lamp, on a wooden stool, its wick drowning in fetid oil, lit the shining walls of this appalling abode and showed Dantès his guide, a sort of subordinate jailer, poorly dressed and coarse-featured.

There was a momentary pause, during which he tried to gather his wits. He looked around him: he was in a square courtyard, enclosed within four high walls. He could hear the slow, regular footfalls of the sentries and, each time they passed in front of the two or three reflections cast on the walls by the light of as many lamps burning inside the castle, it reflected on the muzzles of their guns.

When the first rays of dawn started to bring a little light into this den, the jailer returned with orders to leave the prisoner where he was. Dantès had not moved. An iron hand seemed to have nailed him to the very spot where he had stopped the night before: only his deep-set eyes were now hidden behind the swelling caused by the moisture of his tears. He was motionless, staring at the floor. He had spent the whole night in this way, standing, and not sleeping for an instant.

"Here is your room for tonight," he said. "It is late and the governor has gone to bed. Tomorrow, when he wakes up and can examine his instructions concerning you, he may move you elsewhere. Meanwhile, here is some bread, you have water in that jar and straw over there in the corner. That is all a prisoner can want. Good night to you."

Before Dantès could open his mouth to reply, let alone see where the jailer was putting the bread or the place where the jar stood, and look over to the corner where the straw was waiting to make him a bed, the jailer had taken the lamp and, shutting the door, denied the prisoner even the dim light that had shown him, as though in a flash of lightning, the streaming walls of his prison. So he found himself alone in the silence and darkness, as black and noiseless as the icy cold of the vaults which he could feel pressing down on his feverish brow.

"Aren't you hungry?"

The jailer came over to him and walked round him, but Dantès appeared not to notice. He tapped him on the shoulder, and Dantès shuddered and shook his head.

"I don't know," Dantès replied. The jailer looked at him in astonishment.

"Do you want anything?"

"Haven't you slept?" asked the jailer.

"I don't know," Dantès replied again.

"I want to see the governor."

The jailer shrugged his shoulders and went out.

So the day was spent. He ate hardly more than a few mouthfuls of bread and drank a few drops of water. At times he remained seated, wrapped in thought; at others, he paced around his prison like a wild animal trapped in an iron cage.

Dantès looked after him, stretched his hands out towards the half-open door, but it was closed again. At this his chest seemed to be torn apart by a profound sob. The tears that filled it burst out like two streams, he fell down, pressed his face to the ground and prayed for a long time, mentally going through the whole of his past life and wondering what crime he had committed in so brief a span that could merit such cruel punishment.

One thought struck him with particular force. It was this: that during the crossing when, not knowing where they were taking him, he had remained so calm and docile, there had been a dozen times when he could have jumped overboard and, once in the water, thanks to an ability that made him one of the most skilful divers in Marseille, have vanished beneath the waves, evaded his captors, reached the shore, fled, hidden in some deserted bay, waited for a Genoese or Catalan ship, gone to Italy or Spain, and from there written to Mercédès to join him. As for a livelihood, he had no misgivings in any country: good sailors are everywhere in short supply. He spoke Italian like a Tuscan and Spanish like a son of Old Castile. He would have lived in freedom, happy, with Mercédès and with his father -- because his father would come to join them. Yet here he was, a prisoner, shut up in this impregnable fortress, in the Château d'If, not knowing what had become of his father or what had become of Mercédès, and all because he had trusted Villefort's word. Dantès thought he would go mad, and he rolled in fury on the fresh straw that his jailer had brought him.

The tone of Dantès' voice as he said this showed the jailer that his prisoner would be happy to die; and, as every prisoner, when all is said and done, represents roughly ten sous a day for his jailer, the man considered the loss that he would suffer from Dantès' death and continued in milder vein: "Listen, what you want is impossible, so don't ask for it again: it is unheard of for the governor to come into a cell at a prisoner's request. But behave well and you will be allowed to exercise; and one day, while you are in the exercise yard, the governor may go by. Then you can talk to him. It is his business whether he wishes to reply."

"If you get on my nerves by repeating the same thing over and over," said the jailer, "I shall stop bringing you any food at all."

"Better food, if you pay; walks; and sometimes books."

"Come now, pull yourself together! Is there anything you need that I can get you? Tell me."

"I have no need of books, I have no desire to walk and my food suits me well; so there is only one thing I want, which is to see the Governor."

"Pah!" the jailer said impatiently. "I've already told you that's impossible."

"And what is allowed here?" Dantès asked.

"Because, under the prison regulations, a prisoner is not allowed to make that request."

"Well," he asked, "are you in a more reasonable frame of mind than yesterday?"

"Why is it impossible?"

"I want to speak to the Governor."

Dantès did not answer.

The following day, at the same hour, the jailer came in.

"Well, then," said Dantès, "if you do not bring me anything to eat, I shall starve."

"No, put in a dungeon."

"Oh! Don't get obsessed by one single thing that is impossible to obtain, otherwise in a fortnight you'll be mad."

"How long is it since he left this cell?"

"Do you think so?"

"Quite mad. That is always how madness begins. We have an example right here: it was because he kept on offering a million francs to the Governor if he would set him free, that the abbé who occupied this cell before you went off his head."

"Two years."

"But how long," Dantès asked, "am I likely to wait before this occurs?"

"And was he freed?"

"Listen," Dantès said, "I am not an abbé, nor am I mad. Perhaps I shall become so, but alas for the moment I have all my wits. I want to make another suggestion to you."

"Who knows? A month, three months, six… perhaps a year."

"What?"

"I won't offer you a million because I could not give it to you; but if you want, I shall offer you a hundred écus so that, next time you cross to Marseille, you will go to the Catalans and give a letter to a young woman called Mercédès; not even a letter, just a couple of lines."

"That's too long," said Dantès. "I want to see him at once."

"Well," Dantès said, "listen to me, and mark what I say: if you refuse to carry two lines to Mercédès, or at least to let her know that I am here, I shall wait for you one day, hiding behind my door, and, as soon as you enter, crack your head open with this stool."

Dantès took the stool and swung it around his head.

"If I were to carry two lines and I was caught, I should lose my job, which is worth a thousand livres a year, without food and bonuses. So you can see I would be a fine fool if I were to risk losing a thousand livres to make three hundred."

"Threats!" the jailer exclaimed, taking a step back and putting himself on his guard. "You really are losing your mind. The abbé started the same way. In three days you will be raving mad, as he is. Luckily there are dungeons in the Château d'If."

"Very well! Very well!" said the jailer. "Since you insist, it will be reported to the governor."

"At last!" Dantès said, putting the stool down on the floor and sitting on it, wild-eyed, hanging his head, as if he had truly become insane.

"By order of the governor," he said, "take this prisoner to the floor below."

The jailer left and, a moment later, returned with three soldiers and a corporal.

"To the dungeons. The mad must go with the mad."

The four soldiers seized Dantès, who fell into a sort of catatonia and followed them without trying to resist. He was led down fifteen steps and they opened the door of a dungeon which he entered, muttering: "Quite correct: the mad must go with the mad."

"You mean to the dungeons," said the corporal.

The jailer had been right: Dantès was very close to madness.

The door closed and Dantès walked straight ahead, his arms outstretched, until he touched the wall. Then he sat down in a corner and remained motionless, while his eyes, gradually becoming accustomed to the gloom, started to make out his surroundings.