The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Summary
Edmond Dantes is a young sailor days from marrying Mercedes and taking command of his own ship when three men conspire against him out of jealousy and self interest: Danglars, who wants his post; Fernand, who wants Mercedes; and the prosecutor Villefort, who buries the case to hide a secret of his own family's. Dantes is thrown into the island fortress of the Chateau d'If without trial, and there he meets Abbe Faria, a fellow prisoner who spends years educating him and, dying, bequeaths him the location of a vast hidden treasure. Dantes escapes in Faria's place inside a burial shroud, recovers the fortune, and reinvents himself as the Count of Monte Cristo, a figure of calculated mystery who reenters Parisian society to dismantle Danglars, Fernand and Villefort one by one, using their own greed, vanity and guilt as the instruments of their ruin. Mercedes, now married to Fernand, recognises him and pleads for her son's life, and the Count's revenge, complete and terrible by the novel's second half, leaves him weighing what winning has actually cost him.
The pleasure of the book is architectural: Dumas plots years of patient, layered revenge and lets each scheme click into place with the satisfaction of a lock turning. It is long, but it moves, alternating imprisonment, adventure and drawing room intrigue, and Dantes's transformation from wronged sailor to omniscient avenger remains one of the most imitated arcs in popular fiction.
Dumas is said to have promised, while sailing past the real island of Monte Cristo in 1841 with a young prince aboard, that he would write a novel carrying its name.
Historical Context & Significance
Serialised in the Journal des Debats from August 1844 to January 1846 and issued by Pétion in eighteen volumes across 1844 and 1845, the novel was, by contemporary account, the most popular book in Europe on its release, with readers following each instalment as eagerly as a modern reader follows a running television season. Dumas drew loosely on a real case documented by the Paris police archivist Jacques Peuchet, the story of a shoemaker named Pierre Picaud who was falsely imprisoned and later took elaborate revenge on the men who framed him.
Its influence on adventure fiction runs forward through Ben Hur and Alfred Bester's science fiction novel The Stars My Destination, both direct descendants of the wronged man turned avenger. The novel has never been out of print, has been translated into nearly every modern language, and has generated more than two dozen film adaptations along with the Montecristo cigar brand, reportedly named for cigar rollers' fondness for having the book read aloud to them as they worked.