"'There are only,' said the gendarme, 'a governor, a garrison, turnkeys, and good thick walls. Come, come, do not look so astonished, or you will make me think you are laughing at me in return for my good nature.' Dantès pressed the gendarme's hand as though he would crush it. "'You think, then,' said he, 'that I am conducted to the château to be imprisoned there?' "'It is probable.'" The details of Dantès' horrible confinement, at first in an upper cell, and later in a lower dungeon, where, as "No. 34," he became the neighbour of the old Abbé Faria, "No. 27," are well known of all lovers of Dumas. The author does not weary one, and there are no lengthy descriptions dragged in to merely fill space. When Dantès finally escapes from the château, after he had been imprisoned for fourteen years, Dumas again launches into that concise, direct word-painting which proclaims him the master. "It was necessary for Dantès to strike out to sea. Ratonneau and Pomègue are the nearest isles of all those that surround the Château d'If; but Ratonneau and Pomègue are inhabited, together with the islet of Daume; Tiboulen or Lemaire were the most secure. The isles of Tiboulen and Lemaire are a league from the Château d'If.... "Before him rose a mass of strangely formed rocks, that resembled nothing so much as a vast fire petrified at the moment of its most fervent combustion. It was the isle of Tiboulen.... "As he rose, a flash of lightning, that seemed as if the whole of the heavens were opened, illumined the darkness. By its light, he saw the isle of Lemaire and Cape Croiselle, a quarter of a league distant." In "The Count of Monte Cristo," Dumas makes a little journey up the valley of the Rhône into Provence. In the chapter entitled "The Auberge of the Pont du Gard," he writes, in manner unmistakably familiar, of this land of the troubadours, the roses, and the beautiful women; for the women of Arles--those world-famous Arlesiennes--are the peers, in looks, of all the women of France. Dumas writes of Beaucaire, of Bellegarde, of Arles, and of Aigues-Mortes, but not very affectionately; indeed, he seems to think all Provence "an arid, sterile lake," but he comes out strong on the beauty of the women of Arles, and marvels how they can live in the vicinity of the devastating fevers of the Camargue. The auberge of the Pont du Garde itself--the establishment kept by the old tailor, Caderousse, whom Dantès sought out after his escape from the Château d'If--the author describes thus: