The Count of Monte Cristo

Part One · Betrayed

On the twenty-fourth of February, 1815, the merchant ship Pharaon sailed into the harbor of Marseille, and the crowds on the quay noticed with concern that its captain was missing. He had died of a fever during the voyage, and the vessel had been navigated home by its first mate, Edmond Dantès, a handsome, cheerful young sailor of nineteen. The owner, a generous merchant named Monsieur Morrel, was so impressed that he promised to appoint Dantès captain. Edmond's happiness seemed complete, because he was also about to marry Mercédès, a beautiful young woman from the Catalan village outside the city, whom he had adored since childhood. But Edmond's good fortune had created enemies. Danglars, the ship's ambitious accountant, was consumed with jealousy over the captaincy, and Fernand Mondego, a fisherman who desperately loved Mercédès, detested his rival. In a tavern, while their intoxicated neighbor Caderousse looked on, the two conspirators devised a scheme to destroy him.

Before he died, the Pharaon's captain had requested that Dantès stop at the island of Elba, where the exiled emperor Napoleon was living, and collect a letter for a gentleman in Paris. Dantès, who understood nothing about politics, had obeyed his captain's dying wish innocently. Danglars, however, had observed everything, and he composed an anonymous letter with his left hand to disguise his writing, accusing Dantès of being a secret agent of Napoleon, and Fernand delivered it to the authorities. The next day, in the middle of Edmond's joyful betrothal feast, with Mercédès beside him and his elderly father beaming with pride, soldiers burst through the door and arrested him. He was brought before the deputy prosecutor, an ambitious young lawyer named Villefort, who quickly recognized that the prisoner was innocent and was preparing to release him, until he read the name on the letter from Elba. It was addressed to Monsieur Noirtier, a notorious conspirator, and Noirtier was Villefort's own father.

If anyone discovered that his father was conspiring for Napoleon, Villefort's brilliant career would be destroyed. So he burned the letter in front of Dantès, made him promise never to mention it, and pretended to be his protector, assuring him that he would be released by evening. Instead, that night, Dantès was rowed across the dark harbor to the Château d'If, a grim fortress on a rocky island, where the most dangerous political prisoners in France were buried alive. He was flung into a dungeon without a trial, without a record, and without any explanation, because Villefort had guaranteed that nobody would ever hear of him again. Weeks passed, then months. Napoleon escaped from Elba and temporarily recaptured his throne, and Monsieur Morrel courageously petitioned for Dantès's release, but Villefort cleverly transformed the petition into further evidence against the prisoner. When Napoleon was finally defeated, Edmond Dantès was completely forgotten, and the doors of the Château d'If remained closed.

Part Two · The Château d'If

For years Dantès endured his imprisonment, passing from indignation to hope, from hope to despair, and from despair to rage. He implored the inspectors for a trial, and they ignored him; he prayed, and then he cursed, and at last he resolved to die, and refused all food. He was lying feeble and motionless on his bed when, one night, he heard a faint, persistent scratching inside the wall, as though someone were excavating with a tool. Hope surged back into him, so he devoured his soup, recovered his strength, and began to dig toward the sound with the handle of his saucepan. After days of exhausting labor, the floor of his cell crumbled, and an emaciated old man with a white beard emerged from a tunnel. He was the Abbé Faria, an Italian priest and scholar who had been imprisoned for years for his political opinions, and he had devoted those years to tunneling toward the sea, only to miscalculate and arrive in Dantès's cell instead.

Faria's cell was a marvel of ingenuity, because out of fish bones, scraps of linen and fragments of wood he had manufactured pens, ink, paper and tools, and he had written an entire book on the history of Italy on strips torn from his shirts. The two prisoners became inseparable, and the elderly priest became Edmond's teacher. Over the following years Faria instructed him in mathematics, history, chemistry and several languages, until the uneducated sailor had become one of the most accomplished men in France. Faria also helped him to unravel the mystery of his imprisonment, deducing through careful questions that Danglars had written the accusation, that Fernand had delivered it, and that Villefort, after burning the letter, had buried Dantès alive to protect himself. Edmond sat in silence for a long time when he comprehended the truth. Faria regretted having explained it, because he perceived that he had planted a dangerous new emotion in his young friend's heart: a thirst for vengeance.

Faria suffered from a mysterious illness that attacked him in violent seizures, and after the second attack, his right arm and leg were paralyzed. Recognizing that he could never escape, he confided his greatest secret to Edmond. Centuries earlier, a wealthy Italian family named Spada had concealed an enormous treasure in a cave on the isolated island of Monte Cristo, and Faria, who had served as secretary to the last of the Spadas, had discovered the clue in an ancient document, half consumed by fire. Edmond suspected that his friend was delirious, until Faria produced the scrap of paper and demonstrated how he had deciphered it. The treasure was genuine, and if Edmond ever escaped, it would belong to him. Not long afterward, the third attack arrived, and Faria died in Edmond's arms, after urging him to be free and to employ the treasure wisely. The guards sewed the old man's body into a canvas sack and left it on his bed until the burial.

Dantès realized that the dead man's sack was his only doorway to freedom. Crawling through the tunnel into Faria's cell, he carried the body to his own bed and covered it, so that the guards would believe he was sleeping. Then he slit open the sack, climbed inside, sewed it closed around himself, and waited, clutching a knife he had kept concealed. At night the gravediggers arrived and carried him out of the fortress, complaining about his weight, and he imagined that they would bury him in a grave of earth that he could dig his way out of. Instead, they swung him back and forth and hurled him from the summit of a cliff, with a heavy cannonball fastened to his feet, because the sea was the only cemetery of the Château d'If. Dantès plunged into the icy water, dragged downward by the iron weight, but with the knife he slashed open the sack and severed the rope, and he burst to the surface, gasping, beneath a stormy sky.

Part Three · The Treasure

Exhausted, he swam through the darkness to a barren island, and in the morning a passing ship full of smugglers rescued him, believing his story that he was a shipwrecked sailor. When he examined his reflection, he scarcely recognized himself, because he had entered the Château d'If at nineteen, and fourteen years had elapsed. Edmond labored among the smugglers until an opportunity arose to visit Monte Cristo, a desolate rocky island in the Mediterranean, where, pretending to be injured, he persuaded the crew to abandon him for a few days, and then followed Faria's instructions precisely. He located the hidden stone, opened the cave, and discovered, deep inside, chests overflowing with gold coins, glittering diamonds and precious jewels, more wealth than he could have imagined in a lifetime. Edmond Dantès was now one of the wealthiest men in the world, and he knelt in the cave and wept, remembering the old priest who had given him everything.

He returned to Marseille in disguise, and he learned the fate of everyone he had loved. His elderly father had died of starvation and grief, refusing nourishment after his son disappeared. Mercédès, after waiting for him for eighteen months, had married Fernand and moved to Paris. Only good Monsieur Morrel, who had struggled so hard to help, had remained loyal, and now Morrel himself was ruined, because his ships had been lost at sea, and with his debts due that very day, he faced bankruptcy and disgrace, and could see no escape. At the last moment a mysterious stranger paid all his debts, and as Morrel's family wept with joy, a new ship sailed into the harbor, an exact replica of the Pharaon, loaded with valuable cargo and bearing Morrel's name. The stranger signed his message only as "Sinbad the Sailor." Dantès observed from a distance, reflecting that he had rewarded the good, and that now he would punish the wicked.

Part Four · The Count

Nine years later, a fabulously wealthy and mysterious nobleman appeared in Paris, calling himself the Count of Monte Cristo. He was pale and elegant, spoke every language, seemed to know everyone's secrets, and fascinated the entire city. His three enemies had prospered magnificently: Fernand had become the Count of Morcerf, a celebrated general and a member of the government; Danglars had become a baron and one of the richest bankers in France; and Villefort had become the most powerful prosecutor in Paris. None of them recognized the count, because they believed Edmond Dantès had perished long ago. But Mercédès, now Fernand's wife and the mother of an honorable young man named Albert, recognized him the moment she heard his voice, although she remained silent. Patiently the count set his elaborate plans in motion, so that each enemy would be destroyed by the very crime he had concealed. Fernand, it emerged, had betrayed his commander in Greece, and had sold the commander's wife and daughter into slavery.

That daughter, a princess named Haydée, had been rescued by the count, and before the assembled government she testified to Fernand's treachery, so that he was publicly disgraced, and when his wife and son learned the truth, they abandoned him and his fortune, and Fernand left Paris alone, ruined and ashamed. The count exploited his secret knowledge to sabotage Danglars's investments, until the banker fled from Paris with stolen money, bankrupt. Villefort's punishment was the most terrible of all, because the count exposed a wicked crime from his past in a public courtroom, while Villefort's wife, who had been secretly poisoning her relatives to make her son wealthy, was discovered. Facing disgrace, she fled the city in the night with her innocent little boy, Édouard, and Villefort, alone in his empty house, lost his mind. When the count saw the frightened child carried away into the dark, he was horrified, because he had believed he was the instrument of Providence, and his revenge had wounded an innocent.

The count's certainty had already been shaken once. Before Fernand's ruin, his son Albert had challenged the count to a duel, and the count, the finest marksman in Europe, had intended to kill him. But the night before the duel, Mercédès visited him secretly. "Edmond," she said, addressing him by the name nobody had spoken in twenty-four years, and she implored him to spare her son. Edmond reminded her of the dungeon, of his father's death, and of everything her husband had done, and she answered that she had never stopped loving him, and that she had prayed for him every day. The count was overwhelmed, and he promised to let Albert live, although he believed that meant sacrificing his own life. In the morning, however, Albert apologized publicly, because his mother had revealed the truth about his father, and the two men did not fight at all. From that moment, the count began to question whether vengeance had ever belonged to him.

Part Five · Wait and Hope

After the death of little Édouard, the count's doubts became anguish. He returned to Marseille and visited his father's empty apartment, and he crossed once more to the Château d'If, where he stood in his old cell and in Faria's, examined the old priest's manuscript, and prayed for forgiveness, concluding that he had gone far enough. Danglars had fled to Italy, where bandits who served the count captured him and imprisoned him in a cave, charging him a fortune for every mouthful of food, until his stolen millions were exhausted and he was starving. Then the count appeared before him and revealed his identity. "I am Edmond Dantès," he said, "whom you betrayed." But he did not kill him. Instead he pardoned him, as he hoped to be pardoned himself, and released him with a little money, and the banker's hair, the story says, had turned completely white. The count returned the stolen millions to the hospitals of Paris that Danglars had robbed.

Meanwhile, the count had been protecting the happiness of two young people. Maximilian, the son of good Monsieur Morrel, loved Villefort's daughter Valentine, whom her stepmother had attempted to poison, and the count had secretly preserved her life with a medicine that made her appear dead. Maximilian, believing she was lost, was heartbroken beyond all comfort, so the count asked him to wait one month, and then to meet him on the island of Monte Cristo. On the appointed day, in the count's underground palace inside the island, Maximilian discovered Valentine alive. The count bequeathed them his fortune and a letter, explaining that he was sailing away with Haydée, who loved him, in search of a new life. All human wisdom, he wrote, was contained in two words: "Wait and hope." The young couple hurried to the shore, and far out on the shimmering Mediterranean they glimpsed a white sail disappearing over the horizon.