The Count of Monte Cristo

A story of betrayal and return

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas came out in installments in the Paris newspaper Journal des Débats from 1844 to 1846. It was a huge success and remains, with The Three Musketeers, his best-known book. Dumas wrote it with his collaborator Auguste Maquet. He took the idea from a true case in the police archives of Paris: a shoemaker falsely jailed by jealous friends who later took revenge.

The story runs from 1815 to 1839, from Marseille to the Château d'If, Rome and Paris. It falls into three parts: the betrayal and imprisonment, the escape and the finding of the treasure, and the long revenge in Paris. Many English editions are abridged. This summary follows the complete text, as in Robin Buss's 1996 Penguin Classics translation.

The main themes are justice and revenge, the role of fate or providence, patience, and the question of whether one man has the right to punish others. Dumas also paints the society of France after Napoleon, where money and titles let men with dark pasts rise to the top.

Marseille, 1815: the betrayal

On February 24, 1815, the merchant ship Pharaon sails into Marseille. Its captain has died at sea, and the young first mate, Edmond Dantès, brings it home. The owner, Monsieur Morrel, promises to make him captain. Dantès plans to marry his beautiful Catalan fiancée, Mercédès, and to care for his old father.

Before he died, the captain asked Dantès to stop at the island of Elba, where the exiled Napoleon lives, to deliver a package. There Dantès was given a letter to carry to a man in Paris. He does not know what is in it.

Two men envy him. Danglars, the ship's purser, wants the captaincy. Fernand Mondego, a fisherman, loves Mercédès. In a tavern, with their drunken neighbor Caderousse watching, Danglars writes an anonymous letter with his left hand accusing Dantès of being a Bonapartist agent. Fernand mails it.

Soldiers arrest Dantès at his betrothal feast. He is taken to the deputy crown prosecutor, Gérard de Villefort, who is ambitious and about to marry into a royalist family. Villefort sees that Dantès is innocent and nearly lets him go. Then he reads the letter Dantès was carrying. It is addressed to Noirtier, a Bonapartist plotter, who is Villefort's own father. If the letter came out, it would ruin Villefort's career. He burns it and sends Dantès, without trial, to the Château d'If, a fortress prison on a rock in the bay of Marseille.

Napoleon escapes from Elba and returns to power for the Hundred Days. Morrel petitions for Dantès's release. Villefort drafts the petition so that it labels Dantès a dangerous Bonapartist. When the king returns, the paper seals his fate.

The Château d'If: Abbé Faria

Dantès spends years alone in a dark cell. He passes from disbelief to despair and decides to starve himself. Then he hears scratching in the wall. It is another prisoner, Abbé Faria, an Italian priest whom the guards think mad because he keeps offering a treasure in exchange for his freedom. Faria has dug a tunnel, but his measurements were wrong and it ended in Dantès's cell.

The two become like father and son. Faria teaches Dantès languages, history, science, mathematics and philosophy. From the facts of the arrest, he works out who betrayed Dantès: Danglars wrote the letter, Fernand sent it, and Villefort buried him to protect his father. Dantès, who had never thought of these men as enemies, is filled with a desire for revenge.

Faria suffers seizures. Before the last one kills him, he tells Dantès the secret of his treasure: the fortune of the Spada family, hidden for centuries in a cave on the small island of Monte Cristo, off the coast of Italy.

When Faria dies, the guards sew his body into a sack. Dantès drags the body to his own bed and takes its place in the sack. He expects to be buried in earth and to dig his way out. Instead, the guards tie a cannonball to his feet and throw him off the cliff into the sea. He cuts the sack open with a knife and swims to a nearby island. He has been in prison for fourteen years.

The treasure and the rewards

Smugglers pick up Dantès, and he sails with them for months. When they stop near Monte Cristo, he pretends to be injured, stays behind and finds the treasure: gold, jewels and diamonds beyond counting.

Disguised as an Italian priest, Abbé Busoni, Dantès visits Caderousse, now a poor innkeeper. He gives him a diamond and learns what happened while he was in prison. His father died of hunger. Mercédès waited a year and a half, then married Fernand. Danglars and Fernand have grown rich. Morrel tried to help, and now his firm is near ruin.

Dantès, now posing as an Englishman from a bank, buys Morrel's debts. On the day the payments fall due, Morrel prepares to shoot himself. His daughter receives a red silk purse with the paid bill and a diamond for her dowry, and a new ship named the Pharaon, laden with goods, sails into the harbor. The note is signed Sinbad the Sailor. Dantès has rewarded the good. Now he turns to the guilty.

Rome and Paris: the count arrives

Years later, in 1838, two young Parisians visit Rome for the Carnival: Franz d'Épinay and Albert de Morcerf. Franz has already met a strange, pale, rich man on the island of Monte Cristo, who calls himself Sinbad. In Rome they meet the same man as the Count of Monte Cristo. When the bandit Luigi Vampa kidnaps Albert and demands ransom, the count frees him with a word. Albert, grateful, offers to introduce him to Paris society. The count accepts.

Albert's father is the Count de Morcerf, a general and a peer of France. He is Fernand Mondego, and Albert's mother is Mercédès. Danglars is now Baron Danglars, a powerful banker. Villefort is the crown prosecutor of Paris, feared for his severity. None of them recognizes Dantès.

The count dazzles Paris with his wealth and learning. He lives with a beautiful young Greek woman, Haydée, whom he bought as a slave. He opens an unlimited line of credit with Danglars. He visits Villefort's house, where Villefort's daughter by his first marriage, Valentine, loves Maximilien Morrel, the son of Dantès's old employer. Villefort's father, Noirtier, is now paralyzed and can speak only by blinking his eyes. Villefort's second wife, Héloïse, wants all the family's money for her young son, Édouard.

The count buys a house at Auteuil. His steward, Bertuccio, a Corsican, refuses to enter the garden. He confesses that years ago he stabbed Villefort there in a vendetta, as Villefort buried a newborn baby alive. Bertuccio dug the baby up and saved it. The child was Villefort's son by a married woman, who turns out to be Madame Danglars. The boy grew up to be a criminal, Benedetto. At a dinner party at Auteuil, the count tells the story of a buried child in the garden, and Villefort and Madame Danglars turn pale.

The count also takes up a young man he calls Andrea Cavalcanti, the son of an Italian nobleman, and introduces him to Paris. Andrea is Benedetto. Caderousse, out of prison, recognizes him and blackmails him. When Caderousse breaks into the count's house to rob it, Andrea stabs him. Dying, Caderousse learns that the count is Edmond Dantès.