"...Unless you are blind or have never been outside the port of Marseilles, you must know.
Look around you.
Dantès got up and quite naturally looked in the direction the boat was moving.
Before him, at a distance of a hundred fathoms, rose the black, steep rock
on which stood the frowning Château d'If.
The strange pile, this prison whose very name spelt terror,
this fortress around which Marseilles had woven its legends for the past three hundred years,
rising up so suddenly before Dantès,
had the effect on him that the sight of a scaffold must have on a condemned man.
My God, he cried, the Château d'If ! Why are we going there ?
The gendarme smiled...." (p.30)