d within very narrow limits; and when I have
taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern
languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do
myself. Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to communicate to
you the stock of learning I possess."

"Two years!" exclaimed Dantes; "do you really believe I can acquire all
these things in so short a time?"

"Not their application, certainly, but their principles you may; to
learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory
makes the one, philosophy the other."

"But cannot one learn philosophy?"

"Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to
truth; it is like the golden cloud in which the Messiah went up into
heaven."

"Well, then," said Dantes, "What shall you teach me first? I am in a
hurry to begin. I want to learn."

"Everything," said the abbe. And that very evening the prisoners
sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon the following day.
Dantes possessed a prodigious memory, combined with an astonishing
quickness and readiness of conception; the mathematical turn of his
mind rendered him apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally
poetical feelings threw a light and pleasing veil over the dry reality
of arithmetical computation, or the rigid severity of geometry. He
already knew Italian, and had also picked up a little of the Romaic
dialect during voyages to the East; and by the aid of these two
languages he easily comprehended the construction of all the others, so
that at the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English, and
German. In strict accordance with the promise made to the abbe, Dantes
spoke no more of escape. Perhaps the delight his studies afforded him
left no room for such thoughts; perhaps the recollection that he had
pledged his word (on which his sense of honor was keen) kept him from
referring in any way to the possibilities of flight. Days, even months,
passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course. At the end of
a year Dantes was a new man. Dantes observed, however, that Faria, in
spite of the relief his society afforded, daily grew sadder; one thought
seemed incessantly to harass and distract his mind. Sometimes he would
fall into long reveries, sigh heavily and involuntarily, then suddenly
rise, and, with folded arms, begin pacing the confined space of his
dungeon. One day he stopped all at once, and exclaimed, "Ah,