Dantès urges Faria to resume their plans for escape and although he is very weak, the Abbé does, but again he collapses, this time in fearful and harrowing spasms, and then lies unconscious. Dantès tries to revive him, as he did before with the Abbé's potent medicine, but this time, it is to no avail.
Panicking, Dantès scurries along the secret passageway back to his own cell and waits until he thinks that it is safe to return to the Abbé's cell. When he does so, he carefully removes a stone from the cell wall and sees the Abbé's corpse encased in a shroud. His future plans crumble; he cannot think of escape any longer. He and the Abbé have been like brothers, working long and difficult hours in order to reach freedom. Now Dantès is alone. Yet a small flicker of the possibility of escape remains in Dantès, and clutching at freedom like a drowning man, he takes the Abbè's body back along the secret corridor, lays it out on his own bed, toward the wall, replaces the stone leading to their secret passageway, and hurries back to the Abbé's cell, where he stitches himself into the Abbé's shroud. And none too soon, for the prison guards arrive and lift up Dantès' stiffened body. Ominously, one of them comments that the corpse seems unusually heavy, and for an instant, Dantès is filled with fear, but nothing more is said as they carry him out of the prison. Then Dantès hears the sound of waves breaking against the rocks of the Chateau d'If.
"What miserable weather," one of the guards remarks, and they both laugh. Dantès hears a heavy object being dropped on the ground, and then he feels the sudden pain of a heavy rope being knotted around his ankles. There is more laughter, and then Dantès is heaved far out into the depths of the fierce, icy sea — the "cemetery," Dantès realizes, of this abominable prison.
