In brief
In February 1815 Edmond Dantès, nineteen, brings the Pharaon into Marseilles with a captaincy promised and a wedding days away. A jealous shipmate and a rival in love denounce him as a Bonapartist agent, and a young magistrate, Villefort, finds that the letter Dantès carries is addressed to his own father and buries him in the Château d’If to protect his career. Fourteen years later Dantès escapes in a dead man’s shroud, with an education and the secret of a treasure from the old priest in the next cell. Nine years after that he appears in Rome, then Paris, as the Count of Monte Cristo, and sets about dismantling the three men, now a peer, a baron and the king’s attorney.
It is about 460,000 words in this translation, and the pleasure of watching it run is real. It is also stranger than its reputation. The revenge succeeds completely, a child dies of it, and the avenger spends his last chapters trying to work out whether he has been a servant of God or an impostor.
The argument
The Count states his ambition to Villefort’s face in their first long conversation: “I wish to be Providence myself, for I feel that the most beautiful, noblest, most sublime thing in the world, is to recompense and punish” (ch. 48). He had already said it more nakedly, sailing away after rescuing his old employer Morrel from ruin: “I have been Heaven’s substitute to recompense the good—now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!” (ch. 30). The novel is an experiment on that sentence. Give a wronged man unlimited money, perfect information and all the time he needs. Can he do justice?
For a thousand pages the answer seems to be yes, and the method is the book’s cleverest idea. The Count almost never strikes a blow. He finds what each enemy did on the way up and lets it come back: Fernand’s betrayal of his patron at Yanina, Danglars’ greed, the newborn son Villefort buried in a garden at Auteuil. Each man is destroyed by a true fact. That is also the Count’s alibi, because he has only to arrange for the truth to arrive. But the arranging includes hiring a false nobleman, bribing a telegraph operator and giving Madame de Villefort a long, attentive lesson in poisons (ch. 52). She learns it well. When her husband discovers what she has done, she kills herself and takes her small son with her (ch. 111).
That is where the experiment breaks. Faced with the dead boy, the Count runs from the house “for the first time doubting whether he had the right to do as he had done”, and says to Maximilian Morrel: “God grant I may not have done too much already” (ch. 111). He goes back to Marseilles and to the Château d’If, and asks: “can the end which I proposed be a mistaken end?” (ch. 113). This is the finest thing in the novel, and Dumas cannot leave it alone. Within pages the Count is handed Faria’s manuscript, reads its epigraph about trampling lions, and exclaims, “here is my answer.” The doubt is closed by a coincidence of the kind that has served him all along.
His farewell letter admits a little more. He is a man “who, like Satan, thought himself for an instant equal to God” (ch. 117). For an instant is doing a great deal of work there, after a scheme of nine years. And even the farewell is an act of management: he has let Maximilian believe Valentine dead and brought him to the edge of suicide so that he may enjoy having her back. “We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.” The man who has renounced playing God is still directing the scene. The famous moral, “Wait and hope”, is an odd one from somebody who waited and then did everything else.
The shape of the book
Under a quarter of the novel is the part everyone remembers. Marseilles, the prison, the escape and the treasure move at tremendous speed through the first thirty chapters, and end on the rescue of Morrel (ch. 30). Then comes the boldest cut in the book. The next chapter opens in 1838, in Florence, among young men of fashion who have never heard of Dantès (ch. 31). We see the Count only from outside now, through Franz d’Épinay on the island and in Rome, then through the Paris drawing rooms. The reader knows who he is and what he wants, and does not know how, which is exactly the right amount.
The long Paris section braids three households, the Morcerfs, the Danglars and the Villeforts, and adds the young people who must be saved from their fathers’ ruin. What looks like digression turns out to be fuse. Bertuccio’s Corsican vendetta story (ch. 44) seems a colourful interlude until the baby dug up in that garden stands in the dock twenty years on as the forger and murderer Andrea Cavalcanti, and names his father, who is prosecuting him (ch. 110). Haydée’s history of Yanina (ch. 77) waits until she walks into the Chamber of Peers to testify (ch. 86).
The ruin then runs in sequence, and each fall is worse than the last. Morcerf shoots himself (ch. 92). Villefort loses wife, son and reason (ch. 111). Danglars, last and least, is left alive, with white hair (ch. 116). By the time the Count reaches his third enemy he no longer wants what he came for.
The voice
Dumas was a playwright before he was a novelist, and the book is mostly talk: duels of courtesy in which one speaker knows far more than the other, and the reader is in on it. The narration is quick and sometimes careless. What it does supremely well is the curtain line. The escape ends a chapter with two plain sentences: “Dantès had been flung into the sea, and was dragged into its depths by a thirty-six-pound shot tied to his feet. The sea is the cemetery of the Château d’If” (ch. 20).
The prison chapters have a different music. Faria, reasoning from a few questions, works out who denounced Dantès and why, in a small masterpiece of deduction (ch. 17). He also gives the novel its idea of education: “to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other.”
The Count’s own style is a performance of the Byronic and the Oriental: the cave of treasures, the green hashish preserve offered to Franz as “the ambrosia which Hebe served at the table of Jupiter” (ch. 31), the mute Nubian, the Greek slave. Much of the glamour rests on a fantasy of the East.
Money, wires and print
Its villains are made by post-Napoleonic France, through war contracts, army promotions and timely changes of loyalty. The Count fights them with the tools of 1838. He opens at Danglars’ bank by demanding unlimited credit, and when the banker balks, names a sum for the first year: “suppose we say six millions” (ch. 46). Danglars gives way because refusing would reveal he is less rich than he pretends.
The best episode is the telegraph. The Count bribes an operator on the optical line to send a false signal of revolt in Spain, Danglars sells on the news and loses heavily when it is denied (ch. 60, ch. 61). It costs twenty-five thousand francs, and the Count calls it finding out “how a gardener may get rid of the dormice that eat his peaches.” Morcerf is brought down by the press, with a paragraph about Yanina that his son’s friend can retract in his own paper but not in a government one (ch. 84, ch. 86). Whoever controls the wire or the paragraph can ruin a man without touching him.
Danglars’ end is the same joke told in bandit’s Italian. Held in the catacombs by Luigi Vampa, he is sold a fowl for a hundred thousand francs (ch. 115). When he has paid out almost all he stole, the Count comes in person and names himself: “I am he whose father you condemned to die of hunger” (ch. 116).
The people
Edmond Dantès
The young sailor is almost too simple: competent, loyal, happy. Everything subtle in the Count has been done to him. His masks, Sinbad, the Abbé Busoni, Lord Wilmore, are the most entertaining thing about him and the saddest, because beneath them there is less and less.
Mercédès
She married Fernand believing Dantès dead, and alone knew the Count by his voice. Hers is the one judgment he cannot buy off. When she comes veiled at night to beg for her son’s life, he says, “Mercédès is dead, madame”, and she answers by naming him (ch. 89). She wins, and the duel that should have killed Albert ends in a public apology (ch. 90). She finishes alone in Marseilles, in the house that belonged to Dantès’ father (ch. 112), having given up her husband’s money. Dumas gives her fewer pages than she deserves.
Danglars, Fernand and Villefort
Envy, desire and fear, each with a career attached. Danglars writes the denunciation with his left hand at a tavern table, for the sake of a post at sea (ch. 4). Fernand posts it for the sake of a woman. Villefort, who is cleverer than either and knows Dantès is innocent, does the worst thing out of pure ambition (ch. 7).
Faria
The mad priest whose madness is only that he is right about the treasure. He is the novel’s father figure and its moral yardstick, sorry to have solved the crime “because it has instilled a new passion in your heart—that of vengeance” (ch. 17). A real Abbé Faria existed, and Dumas took little more than the name.
Noirtier and Valentine
Villefort’s father, an old Girondin and Bonapartist paralysed except for his eyes, is one of Dumas’s best inventions: a locked-in man who conducts a will and a marriage negotiation by blinking (ch. 58, ch. 59). His love for his granddaughter Valentine, poisoned and secretly preserved by the Count (ch. 102, ch. 105), gives the second half its tenderness.
Haydée
Daughter of Ali Pasha, sold into slavery through Fernand’s treachery and bought by the Count with an emerald. Her testimony is the novel’s most dramatic moment, and her love is the reward that lets him sail away. “I am very fortunate in belonging to such a master!” she says (ch. 77). The book does not much trouble over that sentence; a reader may.
How it was made
The germ was an anecdote in the memoirs of Jacques Peuchet, a Paris police archivist: a Nîmes shoemaker, Pierre Picaud, falsely denounced by friends in 1807, who inherited a fortune from a cleric in prison and spent years killing his betrayers.
The partner was Auguste Maquet, who worked with Dumas on this and on The Three Musketeers. By Dumas’s own later account, he had begun the tale with the young men in Rome, and it was Maquet who told him he was skipping the most interesting part, the love, the betrayal and the prison. If so, the opening that everyone remembers was a collaborator’s note. Maquet later sued for co-authorship and royalties, and the court sided with Dumas.
It ran in the Journal des Débats from August 1844 to January 1846, which had just had a sensation with Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. Dumas then spent the profits as his hero would have: the Château de Monte-Cristo, built near Paris between 1844 and 1847, was sold in 1848 because he had run short of money. Tom Reiss’s The Black Count (2012) proposes a deeper source: Dumas’s father, a general born in Saint-Domingue to an enslaved woman, was seized in Naples on his way home from Egypt and held for nearly two years, emerging broken.
Which English
The standard English text is an anonymous translation first published by Chapman and Hall in 1846, later corrected; that is what Project Gutenberg prints and what is quoted here. It is complete in its story, but it softens what Victorian readers would not take, most obviously Eugénie Danglars’ attachment to Louise d’Armilly, who leave Paris together in disguise (ch. 97). Worse are the abridgements. A 1955 Collins revision cut passages including the whole chapter “The Past”, and was reprinted for decades under respectable imprints. That chapter holds the Count’s crisis of conscience. Robin Buss’s Penguin translation (1996) restores what the Victorians took out and is the one to buy.
Readers and critics
George Saintsbury reported it as perhaps the most popular book in Europe in its day. Dumas was treated for over a century as an entertainer and a factory, and his ashes went to the Panthéon only in 2002. Umberto Eco, who knew the French closely, thought it at once among the most exciting novels ever written and among the worst written. Both halves of that judgment are correct.
Afterlives
Dumas and Maquet put it on stage themselves in 1848, in a version that took two evenings. Films run from the silent era through Rowland V. Lee’s of 1934, with Robert Donat, to Kevin Reynolds’s of 2002, which gives the story a happy ending it was built to refuse, and the long French film of 2024 with Pierre Niney. Its plot is one of fiction’s reusable machines: Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880), Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), the anime Gankutsuou (2004). The Cuban Montecristo cigar, launched in 1935, is said to be named for the book’s popularity with the factory’s readers.
How to read it
- Check that “The Past” is there. If chapter 113 under that name is missing, you have the cut text. Buss is the best modern choice; the Gutenberg text is complete in story and free.
- Do not give up in Rome. The change of hero in chapter 31 feels like a different book for about ten chapters.
- Watch the Count’s hands. Ask, in each disaster, how much he did and how much he only let happen.
Read next
- Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844). Written alongside it, and the same genius in a lighter mood.
- Homer, The Odyssey. The original of the man who comes home in disguise and settles accounts.
- Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835). The same Paris of money and rising men, seen without the fairy-tale exit.