Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Alexandre Dumas

  THEATER

  Dumas had his first commercial success as a playwright with the 1829 historical drama Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court). It is not surprising, then, that in 1848 he adapted his hit novel The Count of Monte Cristo for the stage. Unfortunately, the enormous, meandering work required substantial adjustments to meet the rigorous demands of the stage—adjustments Dumas failed to make. Not bothering to reduce the scale of the story, Dumas adapted his seventy-one-chapter epic into a twenty-act play that took two days and a cast of one hundred to perform. Too ambitious for the traditional stage, the production was not a success.

  James O’Neill, father of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill, made his entire career playing Edmond Dantès onstage. Beginning in 1883 in New York, he starred in The Count of Monte Cristo for more than thirty years, amassing a substantial fortune and performing for audiences all over America to great success. This version of the play, written by actor and manager Charles Fechter, eventually became a 1913 movie with James O’Neill in the lead role.

  With O’Neill’s earnings from the play, his family purchased a home in New London, Connecticut, and, echoing Dumas, named it “Monte Cristo Cottage.” The 1840s house, a registered national landmark, now serves as a museum dedicated to the life and works of Eugene O’Neill. In the long run, James O’Neill came to regret taking the part that defined his career. He admitted to his son that the big-money role kept him from achieving his true dream: to become a respected Shakespearean actor.

  FILM

  Playing off the popularity of the Monte Cristo franchise, Hollywood has produced countless renderings of the classic novel, dating back to the invention of the movie camera. Even the lackluster Monte Cristo sequels have found their way onto the screen, and screenwriters have penned a few Monte Cristo continuations of their own. Of them, only a few have survived past their own time: a 1934 version starring Robert Donat; a 1974 television version with Richard Chamberlain as Dantès and Tony Curtis as Mondego; a 1998 six-and-a-half-hour version for French television starring Gérard Dépardieu; and a 2002 feature film starring James Caviezel as Dantès, Guy Pearce as Mondego (Count Morcerf), and Richard Harris as Abbé Faria.

  Without exception the remakes are typical fare of the action and romance genres. At the same time, the 2002 film, directed by Kevin Reynolds, is refreshingly free of the flashy special effects, gratuitous gore, and deep irony featured in so many post-1960 Hollywood movies. The novel’s landscape and action—châteaux, cliffs, piracy, and thrilling sword fights and prison escapes—provide the excitement in these lively productions. Dumas’s classic remains pleasurable by virtue of its old-fashioned innocence.

  Comments & Questions

  In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

  COMMENTS

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  I read in Tacitus leisurely with an uncommonly good French translation and began to read Monte Cristo at 6 one morning and never stopped till 11 at night!

  —from a letter to Bryan Waller Procter (September 1853)

  George Saintsbury

  If . . . there is one book of Dumas’s which deserves especial attention, both, because of its immense popularity and because of the clearness with which it exhibits the limits of its author’s powers, that book is the Comte de Monte Cristo. Monte Cristo is said to have been at its first appearance, and for some time subsequently, the most popular book in Europe. Perhaps no novel within a given number of years had so many readers and penetrated into so many different countries.

  —from Fortnightly Review (October 1, 1878)

  Andrew Lang

  There was in you that reserve of primitive force, that epic grandeur and simplicity of diction. This is the force that animates ‘Monte Cristo,’ the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing.

  —from Letters to Dead Authors (1886)

  New York Times

  Of all the 1,200 volumes which bear upon their title pages the name of Alexandre Dumas, even now his posterity has discriminated between the spurious and the original. There is no doubt that the elder Dumas was the greatest story teller of the nineteenth century, and that his fame will be long kept alive through the incomparable “Count of Monte Cristo,” the D’Artagnan stories, and that series of three novels which reveal the intrigues and incidents of the mediaeval Court life of France.

  —October 5, 1901

  Harper’s Weekly

  It is a hundred years since gallant old Alexandre was born; and nearly sixty years since The Three Musketeers and Monte Cristo were written, but grave and laborious persons can still read those romances joyously thirteen hours a day or more when sick abed or otherwise warranted in such self-indulgence. As for the lazy boys, they read them just as greedily as ever. It is one of the standing compensations for being born into this world of perplexing conditions that for each newcomer D’Artagnan, Porthos, Athos, and Monte Cristo are waiting, unimpaired, and claimed for the guardsmen that they were just as good as new. [They have] never been especially improving companions, but the world has been the happier for knowing them, and was never a bit the worse for their acquaintance, and certainly it does well to cleave to them and count their remarkable inventor among the immortals.

  There has not been before or since an immortal of quite the same quality as the elder Dumas. A big man, with a vast capacity for turning food and drink into energy, the son of a general of the empire renowned for prodigious feats of physical strength and of an African mother of one of the North-African tribes, he got by birth an imagination of extraordinary vigor, geared to a physique abundantly able to sustain it. A story-teller has need of stories to tell and of vigor to put into the telling of them. Dumas had both in superlative measure. While he had wherewith to fill his stomach, the activities of his brain never flagged. In his prime he could work enormously—think, plot, plan adventures for his heroes, and put all into written pages as it came hot from his mind; an enviable man, fit to make sigh the halting scribes who bite their pen-handles and wait for fresh blood to feed their brains and make their reluctant ideas put on their garb of language. “Brave, kind, gallant old Alexandre,” Thackeray called him. He was all that. That he should have been an absolutely conscientious writer was too much to expect. He was a child always, and an incorrigible bohemian, squandering freely the riches of his imagination as he freely squandered the money that his books brought in. The story of his own life is almost as much out of the common as the stories he wrote. It came out that when his own powers of invention failed to provide due means for his astonishing hospitalities and benefactions, he bought manuscripts from workmen of inferior talent, worked them into his own tales, and sold them as his own. The discovery made some scandal, but even now it is debated whether it is not as fair in literature as in other callings for the master-hand to profit as far as possible from hired labor. Great painters have done the like, and as for the playwrights, from Shakspere down they have been used to get their material where they could find it, and fashion it according to the needs of their case.

  Dumas’s first success was a play. He was born in Villers-Cotterets, Aisne, France, on July 24, 1802, and went to Paris twenty years later to seek his fortune. He began to find it in 1828, when his play, “Henry III.,” was produced, and proved very successful. Some literary critics hold that his best work is in his plays, some of which have held their place and are still produced in European theatres. The Three Musketeers, of which there are thirty vo
lumes, came along in 1844 and 1845, followed close in the latter year by the twelve volumes of Count of Monte Cristo. The Count’s fortune, which seemed so prodigious thirty years ago, has dwindled by comparison with American fortunes of our day. As a capitalist, Monte Cristo is small potatoes when measured up beside Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Carnegie, but his adventures are more stirring than any of theirs that have been written.

  —July 26, 1902

  QUESTIONS

  1. “There is no doubt that the elder Dumas was the greatest story teller of the nineteenth century,” wrote a critic in the New York Times. George Saintsbury describes The Count of Monte Cristo as “the most popular book in Europe,” and it has never not been popular in England, America, and the Continent. The question is why? What is it about the novel that has made it so popular? What does it do for the reader that is so satisfying?

  2. Western literature begins with the Iliad, a tale of revenge. It continues with the Odyssey, which ends with the revenge killing of more than one hundred of Penelope’s suitors. The theme remained popular through medieval romance and epic, Elizabethan drama, and the novel, from its inception to the latest potboiler. Film noir and westerns are often based on the revenge plot—and so is The Count of Monte Cristo. Why is this plot so popular? Is the avenger, in this case Edmond Dantès, a stand-in for the reader, in whose mind Dantès avenges the slights and injuries we all suffer? If you hit the lottery for $100 million, would you avenge yourself against those who have harmed you? Or would having all that money be its own revenge against whatever indignities you have suffered?

  3. Can a system of values be extracted from this novel? Is Dumas as a moralist conventional or original?

  4. Dumas does not spend much time on psychological analysis, but do the words and deeds of his characters reveal complex and believable inner lives? Or is Dumas trying for something other than the representation of psychological depth?

  For Further Reading

  OTHER WORKS BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS

  Les Trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers), 1844.

  Vingt ans après (Twenty Years After), 1845.

  Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (The Viscount of Bragelonne ) , 1848-1850. Louise de la Vallière, 1848-1850.

  L’Homme au masque de fer (The Man in the Iron Mask), 1848-1850.

  La Tulipe noire (The Black Tulip), 1850.

  Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge (The Chevalier of Maison-Rouge), 1845.

  MEMOIRS

  Dumas, Alexandre. My Memoirs. Translated and edited by A. Craig Bell. Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1961.

  Goodman, Jules Eckert. The Road to Monte Cristo: A Condensation from the Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956.

  BIOGRAPHIES AND CRITICAL STUDIES

  Bell, A. Craig. Alexandre Dumas: A Biography and Study. London: Cassell, 1950.

  Gorman, Herbert. The Incredible Marquis: Alexandre Dumas. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1929.

  Hemmings, F. W. J. The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979.

  Maurois, André. Alexandre Dumas: A Great Life in Brief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

  607

  ———. The Titans: A Three-Generation Biography of the Dumas. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957.

  Ross, Michael. Alexandre Dumas. Newton Abbot, UK: David and Charles, 1981.

  Schopp, Claude. Alexandre Dumas: Genius of Life. New York: Franklin Watts, 1988.

  Spurr, Harry A. The Life and Writings of Alexandre Dumas. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1902.

  MISCELLANEA

  Endore, S. Guy. King of Paris: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

  Sartre, Jean-Paul. Kean, or Disorder and Genius, Based on the Play by Alexandre Dumas. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1954.

  a Marseilles was founded by sailors from Phocaea, in what is now Turkey.

  b To haul in sails using the brail, a rope.

  c Henri-Gratien Bertrand, Napoléon’s aide-de-camp and his most loyal follower.

  d Napoléon Bonaparte.

  e Anse des Catalans, Spanish district of Marseilles.

  f “He who has a partner has a boss” (Italian).

  g Main waterfront street of Marseilles; the name is derived from cannabis, Latin for hemp.

  h Old language of southern France.

  i The Prince of Condé led an unsuccessful royalist uprising against Napoléon.

  j Napoléon’s two greatest defeats up to that time.

  k Napoléon’s empress, whom he crowned in 1804 and divorced in 1809.

  l Mohammed.

  m During the French Revolution, the moderate Girondins opposed the radical Jacobins.

  n Joachim Murat, a general under Napoléon and later king of Naples.

  o Attorney general (French).

  p Presiding judge of a grand jury (French).

  q Marseilles is on the Mediterranean Sea, not the ocean.

  r Abbot (French), or an honorific applied to any priest.

  s Aeneas, hero of Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid (1st century B.C.).

  t One of the royal palaces in Paris.

  u Roman poet (65-8 B.C.).

  v Oppressive or annoying.

  w “We preach to the deaf ” (Latin).

  x A hemistich is a half line of verse; Venusia is the birthplace of Horace.

  y “When the herdsman carried off . . .” (Latin); the reference is to the abduction of Helen by Paris in Homer’s Iliad (9th-8th centuries B.C.).

  z With an evil omen (Latin).

  aa War, horrible war (Latin).

  ab Two of Napoléon’s greatest victories.

  ac A league is roughly 3 miles.

  ad Not the 19th-century invention of Samuel F. B. Morse, but an earlier relay system involving pivoting arms on posts.

  ae Napoléon’s final defeat, in 1815.

  af Beams made of stone.

  ag Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), secretary of the Florentine Republic and author of The Prince.

  ah Cesare Borgia (1476-1507), son of Pope Alexander VI and a ruthless politician.

  ai The end (Latin).

  aj Small, one-masted vessel.

  ak Siracusa, important ancient seaport in southeastern Sicily.

  al Ropes controlling a sail on the side away from the wind.

  am Seaman on a ship plying from port to port along a coast.

  an Hybrid language made up of elements of several tongues.

  ao Mountain of some 5,400 feet in Thessaly, Greece.

  ap Napoléon’s last battle before his defeat at Waterloo.

  aq Independent ruler of the Balkans, killed by his erstwhile allies the Turks in 1822.

  ar Guide for sightseers.

  as Literally, tears of Christ (Latin); here a reference to an Italian wine made from large green grapes.

  at Mutilated (Italian).

  au Beheaded (Italian).

  av Balkan stringed instrument, played with a bow.

  aw As you please (Italian).

  ax Female clowns.

  ay Peasant girl (Italian).

  az Masquerade (Italian).

  ba Racehorses (Italian).

  bb If the four thousand piastres are not in my hands by six in the morning Count Albert will have ceased to exist at seven o’clock.

  bc Come up (Italian).

  bd French cavalry unit originally composed of Algerian natives.

  be Turkish sword with an S-shaped blade.

  bf Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), Italian poet allegedly kidnapped by bandits whose chief apologized when he discovered his victim’s identity.

  bg Newspapers devoted to society gossip.

  bh Modern Greek.

  bi That is, in the colonization of Algeria and Morocco.

  bj Long Turkish pipe.

  bk Water pipe.

  bl Greek lyric poet (c.522-c.438 B.C.), one of the earliest known.

  bm First-century B.C. Persian monarch famous for having so saturated himself with poisons that he became im
mune to them.

  bn Poisonous white alkaloid generally derived from the seed of the tree Strychnos nuxvomica.

  bo Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), French neoclassical painter.

  bp Reference to the statue of Henri IV (king of France 1589-1610) on the tip of Ile de la Cité, adjacent to the bridge.

  bq Little count (Italian).

  br Marcus Gavius Apicius, 1st-century B.C. Roman gastronome.

  bs “I desire the impossible” (Latin).

  bt Lucius Licinus Lucullus (c.117-58/56 B.C.), Roman general and gastronome.

  bu River that separates France and Spain.

  bv Widespread killing of French Protestants on the night of August 23-24, 1572, instigated by Catherine.