The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

by Tom Reiss

  A subsequent order explicitly authorized the release of “Deodato Dolomieu,” identified as a “member of almost all the European Academies and Professor of Natural History in Paris.” Sadly, Dolomieu’s fate was neither to be set free nor to stay imprisoned with Dumas and Manscourt in Taranto. His arrival there had been discovered by some Sicilian Knights of Malta, bitter at Dolomieu’s role in persuading them to surrender their fortress island to Napoleon. Despite the fact that he had not intended to betray the Knights, they blamed him for collaborating in Napoleon’s double-dealing. An international “republic of letters” mobilized on Dolomieu’s behalf. Pleas for the scientist’s release came from every nation in Europe including Great Britain. A letter from famed British explorer and botanist Joseph Banks to the British consul in Naples evokes the ferment: “You have no idea how much sensation his confinement has made in the Literary world here, and how anxious men of Science feel in all parts of Europe for his Liberation.” From Egypt Conté and two other savants wrote a letter on behalf of the Institute pleading for Dolomieu’s release: “When Citizen Dolomieu signed on, by order of his government, to the expedition, he thought of it as the occasion for a literary voyage. He never could have imagined the invasion of Malta.”

  But none of this could keep the Knights of Malta from exacting their revenge. Dolomieu was transferred from Taranto’s fortress to a dungeon in Messina, Sicily, where he was cruelly kept in solitary confinement for nearly two years. During his imprisonment, using a pen of whittled wood dipped in ink crafted from lamp-smoke, he passed the time writing a treatise on geology in the margins and between the lines of the few books his jailers allowed him. He published it as Mineralogical Philosophy after his release, and it is remembered in the annals of science as a landmark work of geology. Dolomieu died a few months after its publication.

  General Dumas’s imprisonment in the fortress of Taranto would, of course, be used by his son as the basis for the experiences of his falsely imprisoned hero Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Dumas, Dantès would disembark from a ship expecting to get on with his life only to find himself trapped, a pawn of others’ machinations and schemes that had nothing to do with him, in a medieval fortress-prison with no chance of a trial and no way to communicate his fate to the outside world. But the travails of Dolomieu in the Messina dungeon would be equally crucial to the novel: Dolomieu would become the Abbé Faria, the genius-of-all-trades who tunnels into Edmond’s cell by mistake and befriends him. The Abbé teaches Edmond the secrets of science, philosophy, religion, and fencing, and gives him the map to the treasure that will be his fortune.

  Like Dolomieu, Faria keeps his spirits up by composing his academic masterpiece in charcoal on found objects. “When you visit my cell, my young friend,” Faria tells Edmond, “I will show you an entire work, the fruits of the thoughts and reflections of my whole life … I little [imagined] at the time that they would be arranged in order within the walls of the Château d’If.” He writes part of his treatise on one of his shirts, and for a pencil uses a piece of wood covered with soot that has been “dissolved with a portion of the wine brought to me every Sunday; and I assure you a better ink cannot be desired. For very important notes, for which closer attention is required, I have pricked one of my fingers, and written the facts claiming notice in blood.”

  IN the archives of the city of Taranto, I found a document dated May 8, 1799, specifying that Dumas and Manscourt would be locked in the Taranto fortress until such time as they could be turned over “to His Eminence Cardinal D. Fabrizio Ruffo, servant of His Majesty Ferdinand IV, may God bless Him always.”

  The order remanding Dumas and Manscourt to indefinite detention without trial was penned in the typical, elaborate eighteenth-century latticework of blue ink swirls and dips and dots. But following the trail of General Dumas had by then definitively cured me of seeing any romantic associations between fine quill penmanship and a sense of humanity.

  The order went on for seven pages, outlining the directive from the “Commander of the Fifth and Sixth divisions of the Christian troops of the Kingdom of Naples”—the Holy Faith Army—that the two French generals be handed over to the “Illustrious Knight, Sir Giambattista Teroni, Military Commander of the Royal Fortress.” The document was witnessed by a medieval-sounding litany of local nobles, but there were also non-noble witnesses, like a local real-estate attorney.

  All these people confirmed that, as of May 13, the prisoners were in good condition, but since there was nowhere else in Taranto they could be safely put, they would be “kept in the fortress tower … well guarded, together with one of their servants, also French, who has been vouchsafed to serve them.” (Even the most malicious jailer, especially if he worked for the forces of Church and Crown, did not think to deprive a gentleman of his lackey.)

  So, in full accordance with all this flowing ink, Dumas was moved into a cell in the fortress, where he slept on straw atop a stone bench. In winter, cold and damp would enter through the one tiny barred window. Dumas and Manscourt were kept apart, but they were allowed to meet for certain periods each day under supervision. “We felt the necessity to spend all the money we had left and to sell our belongings to subsidize our insufficient provisions,” Dumas would recall, “as we were forced to supply ourselves with everything” to assure their continued survival during imprisonment.

  The doors to Dumas’s and Manscourt’s cells were often left unlocked during those first weeks, for they led into a heavily guarded interior courtyard from which it was judged impossible to escape. When I inspected the cell where Dumas had likely been kept—the Taranto fortress is currently the property of the Italian navy—the distance from that interior courtyard to the outer walls, with a number of wide parapets and guard towers in between, seemed to confirm this judgment.

  The cell was bigger than I expected, and that somehow added to the feeling of doom I had inside it, even when I was visiting with a clutch of cheerful, elegant Italian naval officers dressed in their impeccable whites. It could have been a storeroom—indeed, that’s how it was currently being used—but the admiral pointed to the small window in one wall with its heavy, corroded iron grating. “That’s how we know it was a prison cell.” The window looked out onto the interior courtyard, and the only thing Dumas would have seen from it, aside from more gray stones, were his Holy Faith guards, armed with open bottles of red wine and an assortment of plundered weaponry. The admiral had just shown me a pair of corroded buttons festooned with the symbols of the French Republic, from 1796 or ’97. “We found these digging in one of the adjoining cells … perhaps from Dumas?”

  The prisoners were allowed to have wine themselves, if they could pay for it, as well as whatever spirits their guards happened upon. Their food was irregular, often consisting of no more than biscuits, though once a week they got local fish. Everything depended on the mood of the jailers. The prisoners were sometimes allowed to take baths, in an old metal tub.

  They were permitted one constitutional around the courtyard each day, so long as they stayed within a demarcated area of thirty square yards. This “promenade” was crucial to General Dumas, the athlete and outdoorsman, for keeping up some semblance of psychological, if not physical, well-being. But what really kept his mind together was the thought that he would awaken from this nightmare, that the surreal misunderstanding would be cleared up and he would be placed on a fast ship back to Toulon, where he would find a good mount to take him across France to Villers-Cotterêts and his family.

  Whenever the jailer brought his food, Dumas demanded to see the governor of the fortress. The Marquis de la Schiava had not yet visited his high-value prisoners. Dumas knew there must be a reason. Perhaps the cardinal had sent word that he and Manscourt were to be kept incommunicado.

  Dumas’s jailer smiled in what seemed a condescending way—but that may simply have been incredulity at the scope of his prisoner’s demands—and said he would make inquiries on Dumas’s behalf, through channels, to
Ruffo. More than that he could not do. And there would be a certain cost involved, to cover expenses.

  General Dumas’s son would spend years mulling over his father’s predicament in the Taranto fortress—to be imprisoned indefinitely, for unknown crimes, by men he never met—and reimagining his continual dead-end dialogues with his jailer. They expressed the same predicament that would one day concern Kafka, but these concerns arose eighty years earlier and in a form one can instantly grasp. In The Count of Monte Cristo Edmond entreats his jailer: “I wish to see the governor.”

  “I have already told you it was impossible.”

  “Why so?”

  “Because it is not allowed by the rules.”

  “What is allowed, then?”

  “Better fare, if you pay for it, books, and leave to walk about.”

  “But I wish to see the governor.”

  “If you bother me by repeating the same thing I will not bring you any more to eat.”

  “Well, then,” said Edmond, “if you do not, I shall die of famine, that is all.” …

  As every prisoner is worth sixpence a day to his jailer, he replied in a more subdued tone:

  “What you ask is impossible; but if you are very well behaved you will be allowed to walk about, and some day you will meet the governor; and if he chooses to reply, that is his affair.”

  “But,” asked Dantès, “how long shall I have to wait?”

  “Ah! A month—six months—a year.”

  “It is too long a time. I wish to see him at once.”

  “Ah!” said the jailer, “do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight.”

  IN the wild month of April 1799, though, Cardinal Ruffo hardly had time to consider the fate of his two high-ranking French prisoners. He was busy coordinating an alliance of his Holy Faith Army with the British, the Russians, and the Turks. British warships occupied Capri and other islands along the Amalfi coast and blockaded the Bay of Naples, starving the French-backed Parthenopean Republic of supplies. An Ottoman force landed near Brindisi, the main southern Italian port on the Adriatic, and joined the Holy Faith forces. It did not escape Ruffo’s detractors that the Catholic generalissimo was relying on the help of Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Muslim armies to carry on his crusade. But the menace of French ideas made the age-old disputes among religions seem quaint. At a time when all faced the threat of godless liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Holy Faith Army continued to recruit local toughs and brigands as they went.

  On June 13, the Holy Faith Army would enter Naples, where it flung itself into an orgy of atrocities. An army of toughs largely recruited from the surrounding countryside joined in what became a rising of the wretched against the educated—a repeat of the murderous autos-da-fé of January, only this time with a true, “religious” army leading them in the pillage.§ Ferdinand did not return to Naples himself until July, and even then, once the royal flotilla reached the bay, the king was too scared to disembark. He waited with his court at sea while the semi-official Holy Faith Terror continued on land. The massacres continued sporadically throughout the summer.

  MEANWHILE, in Taranto, Generals Dumas and Manscourt learned of the collapse of the Neapolitan republic in the way prisoners often learn of political events: the rules changed.

  “A guard came and told us that, now that the republic was gone and the French were out of the Kingdom, we would no longer be leaving our cells for daily promenades,” Dumas recalled. “Then workers came later the same day to bolt our doors shut.”

  But if they were now well and truly prisoners of war, they should be accorded “provisions worthy of prisoners of war and due our rank,” protested General Dumas. They should be allowed exercise. There was nowhere to go in the fortress courtyard, so to deny them their daily constitutional was simply abuse.

  “The guards responded to our demands with derision,” Dumas recalled. “I will not retrace here the evil and lewd threats of the cowardly soldiers encouraged by their own leaders which maddened us night and day, but I shall make known to the French government the full extent of the abuse that characterized the royal government of Naples and particularly the villains who represented them in Taranto.”

  If Dumas had been his old self, he might have overwhelmed one of the guards and attempted escape. The Holy Faith soldiers in the fortress were a well-armed but lackadaisical and unprofessional bunch, and the regular garrison of the fortress was even less formidable. Once manned by Swiss mercenaries, in more recent years the Taranto fortress had been staffed by Neapolitan soldiers recovering from wounds, many of them living in the fortress with their families, giving the place half an air of a veterans’ home. Was this a force to hold the man who had beaten back the Austrians at the bridge at Clausen? If Dumas could scale an ice cliff to take an enemy redoubt, could he not outwit his guards and rappel down a fortress wall?

  But Dumas was not the same man who had fought his way to glory over the past decade. He had left Egypt because he felt his health deteriorating, and after arriving in Taranto he had been hit with “a strange paralysis” in his face. While he was in quarantine, the Taranto authorities had assigned him a doctor, and he had “begun some treatments for it.” The doctor continued to see Dumas in his fortress cell. Then on June 16, at ten o’ clock in the morning, “having taken a glass of wine and a biscuit in the bath, according to the doctor’s orders,” Dumas fell to the floor, doubled over in pain.

  * As evidence of what these men valued, however, the passengers didn’t throw their own personal weapons overboard, for, based on a later inventory I found of the ship’s remaining contents, everyone was still personally very well armed, even as they foundered and bailed and fought the sea for dear life: at least thirty-seven double-barreled rifles, forty sabers, twenty-seven bayonets, twenty-one blunderbusses, twenty-six pistols, two combat axes, several Mameluke swords, and four wooden crates that contained thirty iron hand grenades each.

  † Passing through on one of his tours, Goethe wrote that Sir William Hamilton “has now after many years of devotion to the arts and study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely.”

  ‡ The reference was to one of the grisliest events in Italian history—the frenzied slaughter of French soldiers in Palermo in March of 1282 by local mobs angered at a supposed slight to a Sicilian woman’s honor. The mobs of that time, too, were doing the bidding of conservative forces who wanted to keep French influence out. Tall, blond Franco-Vikings of the north, the Normans, had first reached Sicily in the eleventh century and, by the thirteenth century, under the reign of a half-Norman genius named Frederick II, had brought tolerance and innovation to the island: poetry, science, and rational thought all flowered; there was even peace between Christians and Muslims. But the apocalyptic riots at the start of vespers at sundown on Easter Monday, 1282, ended all this, buried it along with the bodies of Frenchmen hacked to death by angry mobs. The legacy of the Sicilian Vespers turned the crossroads of Europe into one of its backwaters.

  § The Holy Faith Army had many of the worst aspects of the original crusader armies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, among them its habit, wherever it went, of murdering Jews. Its excuse was that Jews had supported the establishment of French-style republics, an accusation that was in the main correct. Wherever the French had established republics, whether in Milan, Naples, or Rome, the lot of Jews improved, so they supported the Revolution. Now, wherever the republics fell, persecution of the Jews started up again with new fervor.

  20

  “CITIZENESS DUMAS … IS WORRIED ABOUT THE FATE OF HER HUSBAND”

  BY the summer of 1799, Marie-Louise was frantic. With the slowness of communications and the continuing British seizures of the mails, it was usual for her to go many weeks without hearing from her husband. But she had received Alex’s letter dated March 1, explain
ing that he was leaving Egypt and expressing his fervent hope to follow his letter “very closely” into her arms. It had been three months since he had written those words. Even if his ship had been captured by the English, she would have had word by now. Generals of the Republic of France did not simply disappear from the face of the earth.

  She wrote to the Ministry of War to see if there had been news of her husband’s ship being captured, and though she received no reply, by the end of July Marie-Louise had somehow gotten an idea—perhaps from Dolomieu’s friends, who had received letters from him in June—of her husband’s plight: that he had been taken prisoner. She reached out to Alex’s colleagues, who did what they could to make inquiries.*