Dumas had his novel. Maquet’s principal contribution was to advise him to bring the backstory—the impending marriage, the betrayal, the imprisonment—into the foreground, so that readers would more readily identify with the hero, who otherwise risked seeming too cold and sinister. It followed that the hero’s revenge could not consist of simply butchering his adversaries; he had to limit himself to setting in motion their own self-destruction, which would take an appropriate form for each character. Given the themes of betrayal and unjust imprisonment, there is little question that Dumas drew upon the experiences of his father, a strong, proud man beaten down and eventually killed by more than a year of confinement—an imprisonment that might as well have been the work of Napoléon (he was, strictly speaking, an indirect cause), especially since his withholding of the elder Dumas’s pay hastened his end. Interestingly, the Bonaparte family had, however indirectly once again, through the trip to Pianosa with young Prince Napoléon, given Dumas the incalculable fillip that ensured the book’s penetration of the readership’s unconscious: its title, beckoning like a dark cave filled with diamonds and gold.
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) began serialization in the Journal des Débats in 1844 and was published in book form in 1846, shortly after The Three Musketeers, and arguably did even better than its predecessor. The effect of the serials, which held vast audiences enthralled, each member separately but simultaneously, is unlike any experience of reading we are likely to have known ourselves, maybe something like that of a particularly gripping television series. Day after day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else; one then-famous man, reading in bed, woke up his wife to announce that Edmond Dantès had escaped from the Château d’If. The Count of Monte Cristo was translated into virtually all modern languages and has never been out of print in most of them. There have been at least twenty-nine motion pictures based on it (many in the silent era, but one as recently as 2002), as well as several television series, and many movies that worked the name “Monte Cristo” into their titles, capitalizing on the aura of the novel without sharing any but the most cursory aspects of the story. The name has been given to a famous gold mine, a line of luxury Cuban cigars, a sandwich, and any number of bars and casinos—it even lurks in the name of the street-corner hustle three-card monte. The name exudes adventure, mystery, and vast wealth, and it triggers a Pavlovian response in great numbers of people who have never read the book. For better or worse, The Count of Monte Cristo has become a fixture of Western civilization’s literature, as inescapable and immediately identifiable as Mickey Mouse, Noah’s flood, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
Dumas can be given credit, or blame, for initiating many of the conventions of modern popular narrative; without him the history of motion pictures—quite apart from merely those based upon his works—might have been very different. Edmond Dantès, the titular Count, could well have fathered the entire race of superheroes, or at least those who do not owe their inspiration to heroes of the classical era, such as Hercules. In particular, he prefigures Batman, like him a mere mortal, albeit equipped with vast wealth and an unquenchable thirst for justice—or revenge, whichever is closer to hand. Like a superhero, Dantès, once launched on his quest, simply cannot put a foot wrong. He is distant, implacable, godlike, almost diabolical, were it not that the wrongs done to him have given him license to rectify matters to a biblical extent; not having been involved in the original misdeed does not exempt the offspring and relatives of evildoers from the force of his wrath.
Dumas, known for his bonhomie, his inability to hold a grudge, his eagerness to resolve conflicts in the most amicable way, was obviously exorcising decades of buried resentments in his creation of Dantès. His father’s experiences may have supplied some of the original impetus, but otherwise his father’s character and a transposition of his story is given to the paralyzed but still powerful Noirtier, who holds an entire household in his sway even as he is unable to do more than communicate by moving his eyes. The character of Dantès, though, may be the most naked vehicle for wish fulfillment ever devised by a novelist. The primary allure of the book lies precisely in its being pure, guileless, unbuttoned fantasy, the creation of a Walter Mitty with no inhibitions and a boundless sense of entitlement. It is a very good thing that Maquet convinced Dumas to lay the first part of the story on rather thick; the latitude given the hero in the rest of the book requires a formidable counterweight to be palatable.
What Abbé Faria gives Dantès is no mere workaday fortune, but one comparable to the holdings of Baron Rothschild, the Croesus of the day. In addition, he has taught him three or four languages, history, art history, chemistry, medicine, and an advanced course in poisons, all by whispered conversation in a dark cell and without benefit of pencil and paper, let alone texts. When Dantès emerges from prison, he is so far from broken by fourteen years of darkness, insufficient food, and lack of exercise that he is not merely strong, but ageless. His contemporaries are middle-aged and in decline, but he might as well be a contemporary of their grown children. His beloved, Mercédès, says as much: “See how misfortune has silvered my hair. I have shed so many tears that dark rings encircle my eyes; my forehead is covered with wrinkles. You, on the contrary, are still young, Edmond; you are still handsome and dignified. That is because you have preserved your faith and your strength: you trusted in God, and He has sustained you” (p. 576). She is thereby complicit in the novel’s most breathtaking departure from convention: Instead of finding love at long last with his intended, Dantès casually throws her over for his Oriental slave girl, and Mercédès concedes the justice of this—she agrees with Dantès and Dumas in considering herself guilty, less for having married the villain Fernand than for having failed to wait the whole, endless fourteen years.
Like his creator, Dantès loves to astonish people. As a critic of a century ago wrote, this is the trait of a parvenu. But of course Dantès is the very image of the nouveau riche! That, too, constitutes a portion of his appeal, to the nascent bourgeoisie of the 1840s as much as to the profit-driven middle class of our own day. He is the ideal of everyone who has ever declared that he will settle for nothing less than the best in life. He buys his noble title and takes it very seriously indeed. He hires the finest and most overqualified servants on the planet. He throws massively oversize banquets laden with rare fruits and obscure viands from the four corners of the earth—most of which will presumably be thrown away uneaten—and does not fail to point out the rarity and obscurity and difficulty of transport to the assembled company. At the opera he is less interested in the spectacle onstage than in measuring the effect he himself has on the audience. He buys Mme. Danglars’s horses for twice their value and returns them to her gratis, imagining that this constitutes a princely gesture rather than an insufferable bit of showboating. He carries the equivalent of a couple of ten-thousand-dollar bills in his wallet—a denomination few people have ever so much as seen. Granted that this particular flourish has its practical purpose in his campaign against Danglars, it fits in all too well with the pre tentions he maintains for other than strategic reasons. And, of course, he is drenched in Orientalism, at that time an unfailing indicator of money that is eager to be admired. He has a Turkish slave girl as his mistress, a Nubian footman, robes and water pipes and layered carpets and hashish; in today’s terms, he owns every single object cited in the latest issue of W or Town & Country.
In creating Dantès, Dumas did not harmlessly dissipate such ambitions in himself but instead tumbled into ruin in his attempt to materialize them. He built a castle outside Paris that he christened “Monte Cristo”—actually, as photographs show, it was a reasonably sized house that looked smaller than it was because of its monstrously overscaled eclectic ornamentation. It was more or less a Renaissance château with various Eastern trimmings (a minaret above the Henri II facade, for example, and a room after the fashion of the Alhambra alongside a salon in the style of Louis
XV) set in an English garden, complete with a folly—a miniature fortress in a moat, each stone of the fortress engraved with the title of one of his works. (For that matter, the main house boasted a frieze of busts along the outside, portraying men of genius ranging from Homer to Dumas.) To his house-warming in 1848 he invited 600 guests and had the affair catered by the best restaurant in Paris.
But if Dumas was profligate, he was hardly avaricious. What brought him low was, more than anything else, his generosity—he himself ate simply, but his cook was instructed to lay on the cutlets and sauces for anyone who happened to turn up. And turn up they did, strangers from all over Europe who wanted to meet the great man, who made no secret of his whereabouts. Dumas was one of the very first celebrities in the modern sense—posing for photos, signing autographs, touching the foreheads of supplicants like a secular saint. But Dumas had reached his apex. He had incurred massive debts in building the house, and added to them disastrously by opening a theater (devoted to his works) and founding a newspaper (to which he was nearly the sole contributor). That all three things occurred around the time of the 1848 revolution did not assist his efforts to raise money. Dumas continued to turn out serials for another half decade, but then his steam ran out. He spent the final fifteen years of his life in increasing debt, delusion, and irrelevance. He was a universally recognized monument, but people had stopped caring, and they did not resume doing so until after his death, in 1870.
No one pretends that the works of Dumas are high literature, or that he stands up to comparisons with Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal, or Flaubert. Nothing in his books encourages reflection, or forces recognition, or sounds significant depths. On the other hand, he had a genius for giving pleasure, and for ensnaring the attention of the reader. Once past the initial rumblings of the machinery, his books move into high gear and do not quit; to adapt a phrase applied to another writer, it is harder to stop reading his books than it is to start them. The structure of The Count of Monte Cristo is simplicity itself; it is a game. First Dantès is brought low—that is his motive. Then he meets Abbé Faria, who arms him. These things barely take us to the hundredth page of the abridged edition you are holding. The rest of the book is pure payoff, like watching a shuffled deck of cards reassemble itself into suits. At no point is there any question that Dantès will achieve his revenge—the only question is how. Along the way readers have the vicarious pleasure of imagining themselves with unlimited wealth and the power that it can buy. Of course, Dumas is sufficiently artful in the book’s lengthy dénouement that he distributes sympathy among a number of secondary characters, so that the reader is caught up in the travails of Valentine de Villefort and Maximilian Morrel and worries for them, but under the terms established early in the narrative the worry is needless; they are pure and will prevail. The treatment accorded Mercédès provides the one real shock, but we are shocked only because we do not necessarily subscribe to the way Dumas defines faith and loyalty. But in that aspect, too, Dumas addresses the needs and wishes, defensible or not, of every craven human being. If every great work of literature functions as a mirror for its readers as well as its author, then The Count of Monte Cristo is like the one owned by Snow White’s wicked queen—it flatters and cajoles.
Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. He is the author of Low Life, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts and coeditor, with Melissa Holbrook Pierson, of O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy (for album notes), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is Visiting Professor of Writing and the History of Photography at Bard College. He lives with his wife and son in Ulster County, New York.
Translator’s Note
The prevailing taste for brevity has made the spacious days of the stately three-volume novel seem very remote indeed. A distinct prejudice against length now exists: a feeling that there is a necessary antithesis between quantity and quality. One of the results is that those delightfully interminable romances which beguiled the nights and days of our ancestors in so pleasant a fashion are now given no more than a passing nod of recognition. Unfortunate as this is, one has to admit it with as much philosophy as may be available for the purpose. Life then had broader margins, and both opportunity and inclination are now lacking for such extensive indulgence in the printed page.
This, then, is felt to be sufficient apology for the present abridgement of one of the world’s masterpieces. It has been the object of the editor to provide the modern reader with a good translation and a moderately condensed version of Dumas’ narrative. This, while omitting, of necessity, some of the beauties of the original, has conserved the essentials of the story and condensed the incidents within what will be, from our point of view, more reasonable proportions. So the reader will miss no material part of that entertainment which the author, after his more leisurely fashion, intended him to enjoy.
Chapter I
MARSEILLES—THE ARRIVAL
On the 24th of February, 1815, the watch-tower of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples. three-master Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and
The usual crowd of curious spectators immediately filled the quay of Fort Saint-Jean, for at Marseilles the arrival of a ship is always a great event, especially when that ship, as was the case with the Pharaon, has been built, rigged, and laden in the dockyard of old Phocaeaa and belongs to a shipowner of their own town.
Meanwhile the vessel drew on, and was approaching the harbour under topsails, jib, and foresail, but so slowly and with such an air of melancholy that the spectators, always ready to sense misfortune, began to ask one another what ill-luck had overtaken those on board. However, those experienced in navigation soon saw that if there had been any ill-luck, the ship had not been the sufferer, for she advanced in perfect condition and under skilful handling; the anchor was ready to be dropped, the bowsprit shrouds loose. Beside the pilot, who was steering the Pharaon through the narrow entrance to the port, there stood a young man, quick of gesture and keen of eye, who watched every movement of the ship while repeating each of the pilot’s orders.
The vague anxiety that prevailed among the crowd affected one of the spectators so much that he could not wait until the ship reached the port; jumping into a small boat, he ordered the boatman to row him alongside the Pharaon, which he reached opposite the creek of La Réserve.
On seeing this man approach, the young sailor left his post beside the pilot, and, hat in hand, leant over the ship’s bulwarks. He was a tall, lithe young man of about twenty years of age, with fine dark eyes and hair as black as ebony; his whole manner bespoke that air of calm resolution peculiar to those who, from their childhood, have been accustomed to face danger.
“Ah, is that you, Dantès!” cried the man in the boat. “You are looking pretty gloomy on board. What has happened?”
“A great misfortune, Monsieur Morrel,” replied the young man, “a great misfortune, especially for me! We lost our brave Captain Leclère off Civita Vecchia.”
“What happened to him?” asked the shipowner. “What has happened to our worthy captain?”
“He died of brain-fever in dreadful agony. Alas, monsieur, the whole thing was most unexpected. After a long conversation with the harbour-master, Captain Leclère left Naples in a great state of agitation. In twenty-four hours he was in high fever, and died three days afterwards. We performed the usual burial service. He is now at rest off the Isle of El Giglio sewn up in his hammock, with a thirty-six-pounder shot at his head and another at his heels. We have brought home his sword and his cross of honour to his widow. But was it worth his while,” added the young man, with a sad smile, “to wage war against the English for ten long years only to die in his bed like everybody else?”
“Well, well, Monsieur Edmond,” replied the owner, who appeared more comforted with every momen
t, “we are all mortal, and the old must make way for the young, otherwise there would be no promotion. And the cargo . . . ?”
Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 3