The Count of Monte Cristo

The Offer of Two Hundred Thousand Francs

When the Englishman suggested this looked like a suspension of payment, De Boville despaired that it appeared more like bankruptcy. The Englishman then proposed to buy the debt for its full amount, offering ready cash from a bundle of bank-notes. De Boville expressed surprise and suggested a discount, but the Englishman declined, explaining that his house did not operate that way. When asked about commission, the Englishman revealed his true motive: he had been educated in Rome by a poor abbé who had disappeared, and he wished to learn particulars about that man’s death.

Request for Prison Registers

The Englishman learned that M. de Boville had been inspector of prisons for fourteen years and kept all registers of entries, departures, and special reports on every prisoner. He then revealed that his former teacher had been the Abbé Faria, who had been confined at Château d’If. De Boville recalled the abbé perfectly, remembering him as crazy—a man who had pretended to know of an immense treasure and offered sums to the government for his liberation.

The Story of Abbé Faria

De Boville recounted that Abbé Faria had died five or six months ago in February, a death he remembered because it was accompanied by a singular incident. The abbé’s dungeon had been forty or fifty feet from that of one of Bonaparte’s dangerous emissaries—a man who had contributed significantly to the usurper’s return in 1815, a very resolute character whom De Boville himself had occasion to see in 1816 or 1817. When Edmond Dantès had discovered the abbé’s dungeon, the prisoners had communicated through a tunnel they had dug or procured tools to create, apparently for escape. When the abbé died from an attack of catalepsy, Dantès saw an opportunity: he conveyed the dead man into his own cell, placed himself in the burial sack, and awaited interment—only to be thrown into the sea with a thirty-six-pound cannonball attached to his feet, since Château d’If had no cemetery.