What He Left the Abbé

Jerome's health had never been robust, even before his imprisonment, and the Château d'If's damp stone chambers and inadequate provisions did to his constitution over the following years what such conditions did to nearly every prisoner unlucky enough to endure them for long: a slow, cumulative erosion that Faria, drawing on whatever medical knowledge his broad education had furnished him, recognized long before Jerome himself was willing to name it directly in their whispered conversations through the wall.

What passed between them, in Jerome's final months, was a different kind of instruction than the languages and history and mathematics that had filled their earlier years together: a patient, mutual negotiation of how a dying man might make use of whatever time remained to him, conducted by two people who could not see each other's faces and had built, across years of conversation through solid stone, a friendship considerably more intimate than most people manage with companions they can look upon.

Jerome asked, in one of their final extended conversations, whether Faria believed the years of education had been worth the pain of the awakening: whether a mind reawakened to real hope and true intellectual life, only to discover that death would arrive before any of that renewed capacity could be spent on an actual free existence, was better or worse off than the deliberately numbed state Jerome had maintained during his first three years of imprisonment, before Faria's digging had first reached his wall.

Faria's answer, delivered through the gap between their cells with the particular gravity he brought to questions he considered important, was that he could not speak to what Jerome himself should conclude, since only Jerome could weigh his own experience against his own dying, but that he, Faria, held a firm conviction on the matter that he was prepared to offer as his honest counsel rather than as any objective truth: that a mind fully awakened, even briefly, even under circumstances that denied it any chance to act on what it had learned, had lived more fully in those few years than an entire lifetime of the deliberate numbness Jerome had practiced before their friendship began. Awareness itself, Faria argued, was the actual substance of a life, regardless of whether that awareness was ever permitted to translate into freedom or action; a mind that had truly thought, wondered, hoped, however briefly, had accomplished something no amount of protective numbness could ever claim to have equaled, whatever additional years the numbness might have preserved.

Jerome died on a night Faria would remember with painful clarity for the remainder of his own long imprisonment, whispering his gratitude through the same gap in the stone that had first connected them, for an education he would never get to use and a hope he would never get to see fulfilled, and insisting, with what little strength remained to him, that the gratitude was real and not merely a dying man's kindness to a friend who could not have prevented his death regardless of what either of them had or hadn't done differently.

What Jerome left the Abbé, beyond the grief of a friendship ended too soon, was something Faria would carry forward, consciously and deliberately, into the considerably more famous friendship that would eventually develop with the young sailor who arrived, some time later, digging toward what he believed was an entirely different destination and finding, instead, an aging priest whose digging had already claimed one student and was about to acquire a second. Faria taught Edmond Dantès everything he had once taught Jerome, and considerably more besides, drawing on years of refined method that Jerome's earlier lessons had helped him develop. But he taught Dantès something else too, something Jerome's death had specifically equipped him to offer that his own earlier, more purely academic instruction had lacked: an insistence, delivered with the full weight of hard personal experience, that whatever knowledge and capability Dantès acquired in that cell, he must, if he ever won free of it, actually use it — must not let the specific tragedy of imprisoned potential, which Faria had now watched consume one beloved student entirely, be repeated in a second, if there existed any way at all to prevent it.

Dantès, of course, did win free, and did use everything Faria had taught him, building from that education an entire elaborate architecture of revenge and reinvention that the novel follows in exhaustive detail. What the novel does not dwell on, and what Faria himself never fully explained even to Dantès, was how much of that insistence, the relentless, almost desperate emphasis Faria placed on ensuring his final student escaped to use what he'd learned, had been shaped by an earlier failure Faria could do nothing to redeem except, perhaps, by making absolutely certain it was not repeated a second time, whatever the cost to his own dwindling years of trying.