Chapter 35: Number 34 & Number 27: I
Dantès went through every stage of psychological torture that prisoners face when their fate hangs in the balance. At first, his pride kept him going, the stubborn belief that innocent people eventually get justice. Hope was his lifeline. But as weeks turned to months, doubt crept in like poison. Maybe he really was guilty of something? Maybe the warden was right when he muttered about Dantès losing his mind.
His pride crumbled. He stopped praying to God and started begging the guards instead. Funny how people always save God for last, only turning to Him when every human option is exhausted.
"Please," Dantès pleaded with his jailer, "just move me to a different cell. Any change would be better than this." He asked for everything, books, paper, permission to walk around, even just some fresh air. The answer was always no, but he kept asking anyway.
The new guard was even more stone-faced than the last one, barely grunting responses. Still, talking to someone, anyone, was better than the suffocating silence. Dantès spoke just to hear his own voice. When he tried talking to himself alone, the sound terrified him, echoing off the walls like a ghost.
Before his imprisonment, the thought of being locked up with criminals had disgusted him. Thieves, murderers, lowlifes, he’d wanted nothing to do with them. Now he would have given anything to see another human face besides his jailer’s cold stare. He fantasized about being sent to the prison ships, where at least the convicts could see the sky and breathe real air. They could see each other. Compared to this isolation, they were living in paradise.
"Give me a cellmate," he begged the jailer one day. "I don’t care if it’s that crazy old priest everyone talks about."
The jailer, despite years of hardening his heart against suffering, felt a flicker of pity for this young man rotting away in cell 34. He passed the request up to the warden. But the warden was paranoid. He assumed Dantès wanted company to plan an escape or start trouble. Request denied.
With all human help exhausted, Dantès finally turned to God.
Memories flooded back. Prayers his mother had taught him as a child, words that had seemed meaningless during good times. But now, in his misery, every syllable burned with significance. Prosperity makes prayer feel like empty recitation, but when you’re drowning, you finally understand what you’re really asking for.
He prayed out loud, no longer afraid of his own voice. The words lifted him into something like ecstasy. He confessed every mistake he’d ever made, promised to be better, and ended each prayer with the same plea humans have whispered for centuries, "Forgive me as I forgive others."
But despite his desperate prayers, the cell door never opened.
Darkness consumed him then. Dantès wasn’t educated or worldly, he couldn’t escape into grand thoughts about history or philosophy. He couldn’t rebuild ancient civilizations in his mind or lose himself in intellectual pursuits. His past was too short, his present too bleak, his future too uncertain. Nineteen years of sunlight to remember during an eternity of darkness.
With no mental distractions available, his mind became like a caged eagle, beating its wings against invisible bars. He obsessed over one thought, his happiness had been destroyed by some unseen enemy, torn away without reason or warning. He chewed on this idea like a man possessed, the way a starving person gnaws on bones.
Religious devotion gave way to pure fury. Dantès screamed blasphemies that made even the hardened jailer flinch. He threw himself against the stone walls, attacking everything within reach, especially himself. The tiniest irritation, a grain of dust, a draft, anything at all, could trigger explosive rage.
He kept remembering the letter that had condemned him, seeing its words blazing like fire against the walls. It wasn’t God’s punishment that had destroyed his life, it was human malice. Someone out there had deliberately ruined him, and he didn’t even know who.
In his mind, he tortured his unknown enemies in every horrible way imaginable. But even in fantasy, torture seemed too merciful because it ended in death. And death? Death might actually be peaceful.
This was when the most dangerous thought crept in. Killing himself.
Once that idea takes hold, it’s like quicksand. You think you’re moving toward relief, but you’re actually being pulled into something much worse. The mind becomes obsessed with the idea of escape, convinced that death is the only way out. It’s a trap that destroys everything it touches.
But there was something almost comforting about contemplating the void. That dark, unknown place where pain couldn’t follow.
"I used to command ships," Dantès said to himself one day, staring at the ceiling. "When storms came, I’d see the sky turn black and the sea rage like a living monster. Death scared me then because I had reasons to live. I fought against every wave because I was happy, because life was good, because I refused to become food for seagulls on some rocky shore."
He paused, his voice growing hollow. "But now? Now I’ve lost everything that made life worth living. Death doesn’t scare me anymore, it’s calling to me like an old friend, promising rest. I’m already broken and exhausted. What’s the difference between this and dying?"
Two methods presented themselves. He could hang himself using his shirt and the window bars, or simply stop eating and waste away. The first option repulsed him, hanging was how pirates died, and he refused such a shameful end. Starvation it would be.
He’d been imprisoned for nearly four years, though he’d stopped counting time after the second year. ’When they bring my meals,’ he decided, ’I’ll throw the food out the window. They’ll think I ate it.’