The Abbé's Last Student

The novel makes clear that Abbé Faria spent years digging toward what he believed was another prisoner's cell before discovering Edmond Dantès instead — and mentions, briefly, that Faria had once begun similar lessons with an earlier, unnamed companion who did not survive long enough to benefit from them. This two-chapter story imagines that earlier student: who he was, what the Abbé taught him, and what it meant to die at the Château d'If having been made, for a few short years, into someone capable of imagining a life he would never get to live.