The Count of Monte Cristo

by Alexandre Dumas

He recalled the prayers that his mother had taught him and discovered a significance in them that he had not previously understood: to a happy man, a prayer is a monotonous composition, void of meaning, until the day when suffering deciphers the sublime language through which the poor victim addresses God.

it is a kind of dizzying comfort to contemplate the open abyss when, at the bottom of that abyss, lies nothingness.

‘Sometimes,’ he thought at such moments, ‘in my distant voyages, when I was still a man – and when that man, free and powerful, gave orders to others that they carried out – I used to see the sky open, the sea tremble and groan, a storm brewing in some part of the sky and thrashing the horizon with its wings like a giant eagle; then I would feel that my vessel was nothing but a useless refuge, itself shaking and shuddering, as light as a feather in the hand of a giant. Soon the appearance of some sharp rocks and the awful thundering of the waves against them spoke to me of death, and death appalled me. I strove to escape it, uniting all my strength as a man and all my skill as a sailor in the struggle against God! … All this, because I was happy then; to return to life was to return to happiness; because I had not asked for death, I had not chosen it; because finally sleep on a bed of seaweed and pebbles seemed hard to me – I, who believed myself to be a creature made in the image of God, rebelled at the idea of serving, after my death, as nourishment for seagulls and vultures. But today it is different: I have lost everything that could make me love life and now death smiles at me like a nursemaid to the child she will rock to sleep.