On the morrow the wedding-feast took place, and at two o'clock Dantès, radiant with joy and happiness, prepared to accompany his bride to the hotel de ville for the civil ceremony. But at that moment the measured tread of soldiery was heard on the stairs, and a magistrate presented himself, bearing an order for the arrest of Edmond Dantès. Resistance or remonstrance was useless, and Dantès suffered himself to be taken to Marseilles, where he was examined by the deputy _procureur du roi,_ M. de Villefort. To him, on demand, he recounted the story of his visit to Elba. "Ah!" said Villefort, "if you have been culpable it was imprudence. Give up this letter you have brought from Elba, and go and rejoin your friends." "You have it already," cried Dantès. Villefort glanced at it, and sank into his seat, stupefied. It was addressed to M. Noirtier, a staunch Bonapartist. "Oh, if he knew the contents of this," murmured he, "and that Noirtier is father of Villefort, I am lost!" He approached the fire, and cast the fatal letter in. "Sir," said he, "I shall detail you till this evening in the Palais de Justice. Should anyone else interrogate you do not breathe a word of this letter." "I promise." It was Villefort who seemed to entreat, and the prisoner to reassure him. But the doom of Edmond Dantès was cast. Sacrificed to Villefort's ambition, he was lodged the same night in a dungeon of the gloomy fortress-prison of the Château d'If, while Villefort posted to Paris to warn the king that the usurper Bonaparte was meditating a landing in France. Napoleon returned. There followed the Hundred Days, and Louis XVIII. again mounted the throne. M. Morrel's intercessions during Napoleon's brief triumph for the release of Dantès but served, on the restoration of Louis, to compromise further the unhappy prisoner, who languished in a foul prison in the depths of the Château d'If. In the cell next to Dantès was another political prisoner, the Abbé Faria. He had been in the château four years when Dantès was immured, and, with marvellously contrived tools and incredible toil, had burrowed a tunnel through the rock fifty feet long, only to find that, instead of leading to the outer wall of the château, whence he could have flung himself into the sea, it led to the cell of another prisoner--Dantès. He penetrated it after Dantès had been solitary six years.