CHÂTEAU D'IF.
The whole circuit of the cliffs, containing an area of, perhaps, two acres, is surrounded by fortifications. Climbing some rocky steps, we waited in the guardroom till the concièrge brought the keys of the castle. It was formerly used as a state prison; and the vaulted passages, echoing to the clang of keys and bolts, and deep and gloomy dungeons, from which air and light were almost excluded by the thick walls, reminded one of the unhappy wretches, victims of despotic or revolutionary tyranny, who had been immured there without trial and without hope. The island now serves as a depôt for recruits to fill up the regiments serving in Algiers; and some of the larger apartments of the château are used as a caserne.
But the Château d'If is probably best known to many of my readers as connected with a remarkable incident in the adventures of the Count de Monte-Cristo, the hero of the celebrated novel of Alexandre Dumas. The story is shortly this:
Dantès (the count) being thrown into one of the dungeons, remains in hopeless captivity for a great number of years. In the end, by working his way through the massive walls, he establishes a communication with the cell of another prisoner, who was in a still more deplorable condition. His fellow-prisoner dies, and Dantès effects his escape by contriving to insert himself in the sack in which the corpse of his friend was deposited; having first dressed the body in his own clothes, and placed it in his bed, to deceive the gaolers. In the dead of the night the sack is thrown into the sea from the castle walls, and Dantès sinks with a thirty-two-pound shot fastened to his feet. He cuts the cord with a knife he had secreted, and, disengaged from the sack, rises to the surface and swims to a neighbouring island.
We were looking over the battlements towards these islands. One of them is covered by a vast lazzeretto,—a place, for the time, only a few degrees worse than the prison. The isles of Ratoneau and Pomègue lay nearest. Farther off was Lémaire, to which Dantès is described as swimming. They are all mere rocky islets washed by the sea, the group being very picturesque.
“Mon ami,” said I, pointing to the isle of Lémaire, “do you think you could do what the count is represented to have done.”
“What! swim from hence to that island? I would try, if I was shut up in this horrid place, and had the chance.”
The distance I reckoned to be about three miles; and as my friend has since swum across the Bosphorus, where the current is strong, he would probably have found no difficulty in that part of the affair.
“But how about cutting the cord to get rid of the thirty-two-pound shot, and extricating yourself from the sack?”
“Ça dépend! All this is not impossible for a strong man in good health; for a prisoner, exhausted by fourteen years' captivity in a dungeon—c'est autre chose. Have you read the book?”