The prisoners met every day between the visits of their gaolers. Faria showed Dantès the products of his industry and ingenuity--his books, written on the linen of shirts, his fish-bone pens and needles, knives, and matches, all accomplished secretly; and beguiled much of the weariness of confinement by educating Dantès in the sciences, history, and languages. Dantès possessed a prodigious memory, combined with readiness of conception, and his studies progressed rapidly. Soon Dantès told the abbé his story, and the abbé had little difficulty in opening the eyes of the astonished Dantès to the villainy of his supposed friends and the deputy _procurer_. Thus was instilled into his heart a new passion--vengeance. _II.--The Cemetery of the Château d'If_ More than seven years passed thus when coming into the abbé's dungeon one night, Dantès found him stricken with paralysis. His right arm and leg remained paralysed after the seizure. When Dantès next visited him the abbé showed him a paper, half-burnt, and rolled in a cylinder. "This paper," said Faria, "is my treasure; and if I have not been allowed to possess it, you will. Who knows if another attack may not come, and all be finished?" The abbé had been secretary to the last of the Counts of Spada, one of the most powerful families of mediaeval Italy, and he, dying in poverty, had left Faria an old breviary, which had been in the family since the days of the Borgias. In this, by chance, Faria found a piece of yellowed paper, on which, when put in the fire, writing began to appear. From the remains of the paper he made out during the early days of his imprisonment, that a Cardinal Spada, at the end of the fifteenth century, fearing poisoning at the hands of Pope Alexander VI., had buried in the Island of Monte Cristo, a rock between Corsica and Elba, all his ingots, gold, money, and jewels, amounting then to nearly two million Roman crowns. "The last Count of Spada made me his heir," said the abbé. "The treasure now amounts to nearly thirteen millions of money!" The abbé remained paralysed, and had given up all hope of enjoying the treasure himself; and presently another seizure took him, and one night Dantès was alone with the corpse. Next morning the preparations for burying the dead man were made, the body being placed in a sack and left in the cell till the evening. Dantès came into the cell again. "Ah!" he muttered. "Since the dead leave this dungeon, let me assume the place of the dead!" Opening the sack, he took out the dead body of his friend, and dragged it through the tunnel to his own cell. Placing it on his own bed, he covered it with the rags he wore himself. Then he sewed himself in the sack with one of the abbé's needles. In his hand he held the dead man's knife, and with palpitating heart awaited events.