Volume One: Marseilles to the Château d'If

A young sailor returns to Marseilles with his future bright before him. Within hours of stepping ashore, he is engaged to be married, promised a captaincy, and celebrated by all who know him. But envy is a patient architect of ruin, and three men whose jealousies align in a tavern set in motion a conspiracy that will destroy everything. At his wedding celebration, soldiers arrive to drag him away on charges of Bonapartist conspiracy, a crime he knows nothing about. His desperate pleas fall on deaf ears as the deputy prosecutor, seemingly sympathetic at first, makes a decision that seals his fate forever. 

The Château d'If becomes his tomb, a fortress prison carved into rock where hope goes to die. Days turn to years in the darkness, and the promising young man nearly loses his mind to despair and isolation. He contemplates ending his suffering permanently until a strange scratching sound in the wall changes everything. Another prisoner, an elderly Italian abbé, has been tunneling through the fortress for years, and his miscalculated passage leads him not to freedom but to an unexpected companion.

What follows is an education unlike any other. The abbé, a man of extraordinary learning and patience, transforms the broken sailor into something new. He teaches him languages, science, philosophy, and the ways of the world that exists beyond prison walls. But his greatest gift comes near the end, when he reveals a secret he has guarded for years: the location of a vast treasure hidden on a remote island. When the old man dies and opportunity presents itself in the form of a burial shroud, the prisoner makes a desperate gamble for freedom. This is the story of how an innocent man was buried alive and what he became in the darkness.