The Count of Monte Cristo

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 24th of February 1815, the merchant ship Pharaon glides into the port of Marseille, and the adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo begins on the very day Napoleon escapes from his exile on Elba. Aboard is Edmond Dantès, a young first mate whose captain, Leclère, has just died during the voyage. The ship-owner Pierre Morrel is so impressed by how Dantès handled the command that he promotes him to captain. He also grants him two weeks of leave to marry his Catalan fiancée, Mercédès Herrera. Everything a young sailor could want is within reach. The French writer Alexandre Dumas built an enormous book on that moment of good fortune. Its story runs across France, Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean from 1815 to 1839, and it wrestles with hope, justice, vengeance, mercy and forgiveness. How does a man lose everything and come back as someone nobody recognizes? What does it cost him to take revenge? And where did Dumas find a story that held a whole continent in suspense?

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• 2. A Letter at La Réserve

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  At the inn La Réserve, three men sit down with three different grievances against Dantès. Danglars, the ship's supercargo, resents the captaincy that went to a younger man. Fernand Mondego, Mercédès's cousin and suitor, wants a rival out of the way. Gaspard Caderousse, a tailor and neighbor, mostly watches.

  Caderousse has already shown his character with money. He pressed old Louis Dantès for 140 francs of a loan, and the father then lived on only 60 francs during Edmond's three-month voyage to Smyrna. Danglars drafts an anonymous letter accusing Edmond of being a Bonapartist agent. Caderousse objects, and Danglars calms him by pretending to throw the page away. Fernand quietly picks it up and mails it to the crown prosecutor. The accusation has a thread of truth to hang on. Leclère's dying wish sent Dantès to Elba with a package for General Bertrand and a letter for Noirtier de Villefort, a Bonapartist in Paris.

  The gendarmes arrive in the middle of the engagement feast and lead Edmond away. He goes willingly, certain he has done nothing wrong. Across town, the deputy crown prosecutor Gérard de Villefort is celebrating his own betrothal to the noblewoman Renée de Saint-Méran. Guests press him about his father, the notorious Bonapartist Noirtier, and Villefort loudly denounces that politics, since the royalist cause under the restored Louis XVIII is his path to advancement.

  He questions Dantès and finds him honest, and he is ready to set him free. Then he asks who the letter was meant for. When Dantès names Noirtier, Villefort freezes. A father's Bonapartism could ruin his career. He burns the letter, falsely assures Dantès of his freedom, and arranges for him to be taken to the island prison of the Château d'If. On the boat, Dantès tries to leap into the water and is forced to his knees with a gun pressed to his temple.

  Inside the fortress, he begs to see the governor, threatens a guard, and is thrown into the deepest dungeon. Its only other prisoner is an old Italian abbot, Abbé Faria, whom the guards think mad for offering them ridiculous sums to let him go.

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• 3. From Dungeon to Count

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  Six years of solitary confinement have brought Dantès to the edge of suicide when a tunnel breaks through his wall. Abbé Faria had been digging toward the outside and miscalculated, so his escape route ended in Dantès's cell. After getting over his first suspicion, the abbé helps the younger man work out who put him there.

  For the next eight years the dungeon becomes a university. Faria teaches languages, history, culture, mathematics, chemistry, medicine and science. Growing fond of his pupil, the abbé suffers the first of three hereditary attacks of catalepsy. He then tells Dantès where a vast treasure lies hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. It belonged to his former employer, Cardinal Spada. When Faria dies, Dantès takes the dead man's place in the burial sack, and the guards throw it into the sea.

  Dantès cuts his way out and swims to a nearby island. Claiming to be a shipwrecked sailor, he is picked up by smugglers from Genoa. Months later he finds the treasure, and he buys both the island and a count's title from the Tuscan government. A poor smuggler named Jacopo helped him survive after the escape. Dantès rewards that loyalty with a ship and crew of Jacopo's own.

  Having sworn vengeance on Danglars, Fernand and Villefort, he returns to Marseille disguised as the Abbé Busoni, an Italian priest. There he finds Caderousse, now an innkeeper, who regrets his silence. Caderousse describes what became of everyone. Louis Dantès died of starvation. Mercédès eventually resigned herself to marrying Fernand, who rose to lieutenant-colonel in the army. Danglars became a speculator, married a rich widow and was made a baron. Morrel tried and failed to free Dantès, and his firm is now close to bankruptcy.

  The false priest rewards Caderousse with a diamond but does not reveal who he is. The gift ruins the man. Caderousse arranges to sell the stone to a jeweller, kills the jeweller to keep both stone and money, and is sentenced to the galleys. His wife, Madeleine, known as La Carconte, who had urged him toward the murder, dies in the struggle.

  Morrel is saved in a different way. Posing as a banker, Dantès buys up Morrel's debts and grants him a three-month reprieve. On the last day, Morrel is about to take his own life when he learns that the debts are paid and that one of his lost ships has returned with a full cargo. Dantès had secretly rebuilt and loaded it.

  By now he is wearing a whole wardrobe of names. As Sinbad the Sailor he rescues the Morrel family and deals with smugglers and brigands. As Lord Wilmore, an Englishman, he performs random acts of generosity, and the Count regards Wilmore as a rival. Even the clerk of the banking firm Thomson & French is one of his masks. Years earlier, the new governor of the Château d'If found Dantès's name too tedious to learn and simply called him Number 34 after his cell. After the escape he was known as the Maltese Sailor. Only Mercédès ever recognizes Edmond Dantès, and everyone else believes he drowned. In the guise of Busoni and again as Wilmore, he even tells an investigator that the Count's real name is Monsieur Zaccone.

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• 4. Revenge by Design

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  In 1838, the fabulously wealthy Count of Monte Cristo appears in Rome at Carnival time, and his campaign begins with a staged kidnapping. The bandit Luigi Vampa, who is the Count's ally, seizes Viscount Albert de Morcerf, the son of Mercédès and Fernand. The Count then rescues the young man and earns his trust. Albert introduces him to Paris, and there the Count meets Mercédès for the first time in 23 years, along with Danglars, Fernand and Villefort.

  In Auteuil, a suburb of Paris, the Count buys a house with a dark history. His servant Bertuccio explains that Villefort once had an affair there with Danglars's wife. She bore a child, and Villefort buried the infant alive to hide it. Bertuccio rescued the baby, named him Benedetto, and had his sister Assunta raise him. Benedetto grew into a criminal, murdered Assunta and was sentenced to the galleys.

  The Count arranges his pieces with care. He persuades Danglars to extend him a credit of six million francs. He discusses poisons with Villefort's second wife, Héloïse, and lets her borrow some. He lets his ward Haydée see Fernand, who betrayed and murdered her father, Ali Pasha of Janina, and stole his fortune. Dantès had bought Haydée out of slavery. As Lord Wilmore, he frees Benedetto and Caderousse from the galleys. He then has Benedetto pose as an Italian nobleman, Viscount Andrea Cavalcanti. Finally, he bribes a telegraph operator to send a false message, and Danglars loses hundreds of thousands of francs.

  The plan spreads far beyond its targets. Villefort's daughter Valentine is engaged to Franz but secretly loves Maximilien, the son of Morrel. Her grandfather Noirtier ends the engagement by revealing that he killed Franz's father in a duel. Héloïse begins poisoning members of the family so that her own son, Édouard, will inherit everything. In secret, Noirtier gives Valentine a drug that builds a limited resistance to the poison. Caderousse blackmails Benedetto, then tries to rob the Count's house and is caught by the Abbé Busoni. As Caderousse leaves, Benedetto stabs him. Before dying, he dictates a statement naming his killer, and the Count reveals his true identity to the dying man.

  Fernand falls next. The Count anonymously leaks his betrayal of Ali Pasha to the newspapers, and at the Chamber of Peers inquiry Haydée testifies as an eyewitness. Albert blames the Count and challenges him to a duel. Mercédès comes to beg for her son's life, and the Count agrees not to kill Albert. She understands that he means to let Albert kill him, so she tells her son the truth, and Albert publicly apologizes. Mother and son disown Fernand, give up their titles and wealth, and leave. Albert enlists as a soldier. Mercédès moves into Dantès's old house in Marseille. Fernand confronts the Count, learns who he is, and shoots himself.

  At the party for Cavalcanti's engagement to Eugénie Danglars, police arrive to arrest Benedetto for murdering Caderousse. Eugénie, who is implied to be a lesbian, has already run away from Paris with her friend Louise d'Armilly.

  Villefort's fall comes through poison. Valentine barely survives Héloïse's first attempt, and Maximilien begs the Count to protect her. The Count fakes her death so the poisoner believes she has succeeded. Villefort deduces that Héloïse is the killer and offers her a choice between a public trial and private suicide. Then he goes to prosecute Benedetto. In court, Benedetto announces that he is Villefort's son and that he was buried alive, a truth he learned from Bertuccio. Villefort admits his guilt and runs home, but he is too late. Héloïse is dead, and she has poisoned Édouard too. The Count reveals himself to Villefort, who goes insane. Dantès tries and fails to revive the boy, and he begins to ask whether his revenge has gone too far.

  Danglars is left with a ruined reputation and 5,000,000 francs held in trust for hospitals. When the Count demands that sum under their credit agreement, Danglars embezzles the hospital fund. He flees to Italy with the Count's receipt and 50,000 francs of his own. Dantès repays the 5,000,000 francs from his own account. Leaving Rome, Danglars is kidnapped by Luigi Vampa, whose bandits force him to pay outrageous prices for food and water until the stolen money is gone. Dantès anonymously returns the money to the hospitals. Danglars repents, and a softened Dantès lets him go with his 50,000 francs.

  Maximilien, believing Valentine dead, considers suicide. Dantès reveals who he is and persuades him to wait one month. On the island of Monte Cristo, Dantès reunites him with Valentine and explains everything. He leaves the couple part of his fortune and sails east with Haydée, who has declared her love for him. The last line of the book reads: "all human wisdom is contained in these two words: 'Wait and Hope'."

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• 5. Sources of the Story

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  In Nîmes in 1807, a shoemaker named Pierre Picaud lived the story that Dumas said planted the seed of his novel. Picaud was engaged to a wealthy woman until three jealous friends falsely denounced him as a spy for England. He was kept under a form of house arrest at Fenestrelle Fort, where he served a rich Italian cleric who came to treat him like a son and left him a fortune. Picaud spent years plotting. He stabbed the first enemy with a dagger marked "Number One" and poisoned the second. The third, Loupian, had married Picaud's fiancée, so Picaud lured Loupian's son into crime and his daughter into prostitution before stabbing Loupian.

  The tale, titled Le Diamant et la Vengeance, was written by Jacques Peuchet, an archivist of the Paris police. It appeared in 1838 in the multi-volume Mémoires tirés des Archives de la Police de Paris. Dumas included the essay in one of the 1846 editions of his book. Peuchet's records also describe a poisoning within a family, which probably inspired the murders inside the Villefort household.

  Real life diverged from the novel in places. An Abbé Faria did exist and was imprisoned, but he did not die in prison. He died in 1819 and left no large legacy to anyone. Picaud's fate also differs, since the real man was murdered by the counterpart of Caderousse. Dumas had also tried out many of these ideas in a short novel called Georges, published in 1843.

  Two other hands shaped the book. Like many of his novels, it grew from plot outlines suggested by his collaborator and ghostwriter Auguste Maquet. And Dumas first wrote part of the story, including the events in Rome and the return of Albert and Franz d'Épinay to Paris, in the first person from Franz's point of view.

  Politics ran through Dumas's own family history. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a Haitian of mixed descent, became a successful general during the French Revolution. Dumas's attitude to Bonapartism was conflicted. In 1840 the body of Napoleon I was brought to France and placed in the church of Les Invalides, which renewed public devotion to the Bonaparte family. Dantès himself begins the book as a plain French citizen, caught between the royalist Villefort, Villefort's Bonapartist father, and the loyalty of his late captain, in an era of fast-changing governments.

  A personal promise also lay behind the title. In his 1860 paper "État civil du Comte de Monte-Cristo", Dumas wrote that while living in Florence in 1841 he sailed around the island of Montecristo in a small boat. With him was a young prince, a cousin of Louis Bonaparte, who would later become Emperor Napoleon III. Dumas promised to write a novel with the island's name in its title. At that moment Louis Bonaparte was a prisoner in the citadel of Ham. Dumas visited him there but left that out of his account, though the novel mentions Ham when the governor of the Château d'If is promoted to the castle there.

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• 6. Serial Sensation

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  On the 28th of August 1844, the Journal des Débats printed the first of eighteen installments of the story, and serialization ran until the 15th of January 1846. The first book edition came from the Paris publisher Pétion in 18 volumes, with two issued in 1844 and the other sixteen in 1845. A spelling error crept in. Most Belgian pirated editions, the first Paris edition and many others up to an illustrated edition of 1860 print the title with "Christo" instead of "Cristo". The correct spelling first appeared in the 1846 L'Écho des Feuilletons illustrated edition, with plates by Paul Gavarni and Tony Johannot. That edition also added a chapter called La Maison des Allées de Meilhan by splitting an earlier one in two.

  The effect on readers was enormous. Describing the serial's impact, the scholar Carlos Javier Villafane Mercado wrote of audiences held enthralled: "Day after day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else." George Saintsbury judged that "Monte Cristo is said to have been at its first appearance, and for some time subsequently, the most popular book in Europe."

  English readers met the story in pieces. W. Harrison Ainsworth's abridged serialization, The Prisoner of If, began in Ainsworth's Magazine in 1845. In January 1846 Geo Pierce published a one-volume abridgment under the title The Prisoner of If or The Revenge of Monte Christo. That April, Emma Hardy's unabridged translation began appearing in the Parlour Novelist. The version that came to dominate was anonymous, published by Chapman and Hall in ten weekly installments from March 1846, with illustrations by M Valentin. It appeared as a two-volume book in May 1846. For well over a century most English editions followed it.

  Later editors kept reworking the text. In 1889, the American publishers Little Brown and T.Y. Crowell updated it, corrected mistakes and removed the extra chapter. In 1955 Collins published a version that cut several passages, including an entire chapter titled The Past. In 1996 Robin Buss produced a new Penguin Classics translation. It modernized the language and restored material that Victorian social restrictions had softened, including references to Eugénie's lesbian traits. An Oxford edition by David Coward followed in 2008, and the 2009 Everyman's Library edition carried an introduction by Umberto Eco.

  Abridgments also tend to leave out the Count's fondness for hashish. Calling himself Sinbad the Sailor, he serves Franz d'Épinay a hashish jam and describes it as the ambrosia that Hebe served at the table of Jupiter. In Paris he carries an emerald box of small green pills made from hashish and opium, which he takes for sleeplessness. Dumas himself belonged to the Club des Hashischins.

  The novel travelled far. The first Japanese translation, by Kuroiwa Shūroku, was serialized in the newspaper Yorozu Chōhō in 1901 and 1902 under the title Shigai Shiden Gankutsu-ou, which means roughly "the King of the Cavern". That name stuck, and it reappears in the Japanese term for the Yoshida Gankutsu-ou incident, an early notorious miscarriage of justice in which an innocent man was imprisoned for half a century. In China, the first translation appeared in 1907. The novel was a favorite of Jiang Qing, and a 1978 translation became one of the first mass-popular foreign novels in mainland China after the Cultural Revolution. Another 22 Chinese translations have followed.

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• 7. Stage, Screen and Beyond

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  In February 1848, Dumas's own Théâtre Historique staged the story over two evenings, and the first night ran from 6 pm until midnight. Dumas and Auguste Maquet wrote four plays in all, with the later two, Le Comte de Morcerf and Villefort, following those two characters' fates in 1851. This version dropped Luigi Vampa, and it is the first to have Dantès shout "the world is mine!", a line later adaptations love to repeat. A London staging at Drury Lane that same year failed, and riots broke out in protest against French companies performing in England.

  The English stage took a different path. In 1868 Charles Fechter's version opened at the Adelphi in London in October. It made Albert the actual son of Dantès and killed off the three villains in new ways. The original run time was five hours, so Fechter shortened it, and despite negative reviews it enjoyed a respectable sixteen-week run. The play opened the Globe Theatre in Boston in 1870. In 1883, the manager John Stetson asked James O'Neill, the father of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, to take the lead. O'Neill performed the role more than 6000 times, and he came to despise it, feeling that it had trapped him in typecasting. That bitterness later turned up as a plot point in Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night.

  Film began early. A silent version starring Hobart Bosworth appeared in 1908, and James O'Neill filmed his stage role in 1913. Other notable versions include Kevin Reynolds's 2002 film with Jim Caviezel, a 2024 film with Pierre Niney, and a 2024 English-language series starring Sam Claflin. The story has been moved to new places and times. A 1982 Malayalam film set it in Kerala. The 2004 Japanese anime Gankutsuou, made by Gonzo, takes place in the 51st century. The Turkish series Ezel, the South Korean Miss Monte-Cristo and the American series Revenge all borrow its shape. The Simpsons even parodied it in 2007 as "The Count of Monte Fatso".

  Radio gave Orson Welles a turn as Dantès on the 29th of August 1938, and he played the role again on The Campbell Playhouse in 1939. Not every continuation was legitimate. In 1853 a Portuguese and French book called The Hand of the Deceased claimed to be a sequel and was falsely attributed to Dumas. It has been traced to the Portuguese writer Alfredo Possolo Hogan.

  The name Monte Cristo has spread well beyond books. According to the source's account, it lives on in a famous gold mine, a line of luxury Cuban cigars, a sandwich, and any number of bars and casinos. The book has also inspired other writers, including Lew Wallace in Ben-Hur in 1880, Alfred Bester in the science fiction novel The Stars My Destination, and Stephen Fry in The Stars' Tennis Balls. The most recent form in the record is audio. In May 2024, Little Lucky Productions premiered the first part of what it describes as the first fiction podcast adaptation of the novel, with a second part following that autumn.

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