The Count of Monte Cristo

Front Cover
Wordsworth Editions, 1997 - Fiction - 894 pages

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury.

The story of Edmund Dantes, self-styled Count of Monte Cristo, is told with consummate skill. The victim of a miscarriage of justice, Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and empowered by a stroke of providence. In his campaign of vengeance, he becomes an anonymous agent of fate.

The sensational narrative of intrigue, betrayal, escape, and triumphant revenge moves at a cracking pace. Dumas' novel presents a powerful conflict between good and evil embodied in an epic saga of rich diversity that is complicated by the hero's ultimate discomfort with the hubristic implication of his own actions.

Our edition is based on the most popular and enduring translation first published by Chapman and Hall in 1846. The name of the translator was never revealed.

 

Contents

Marseilles the Arrival
3
Father and Son
9
The Catalans
14
Conspiracy
22
The Marriage Feast
27
The Deputy Procureur du Roi
37
The Examination
46
The Château dIf
53
The Two Prisoners
84
Number 34 and Number 27
91
A Learned Italian ΙΟΙ
101
The Abbés Chamber
109
The Treasure
124
The Third Attack
133
The Cemetery of the Château dIf
140
The Island of Tiboulen
144

The Evening of the Betrothal
59
The Kings Closet at the Tuileries
63
The Corsican Ogre
68
Father and Son
74
The Hundred Days
79
The Smugglers
150
The Island of Monte Cristo
156
The Secret Cave
161
The Unknown
167
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1997)

After an idle youth, Alexandre Dumas went to Paris and spent some years writing. A volume of short stories and some farces were his only productions until 1927, when his play Henri III (1829) became a success and made him famous. It was as a storyteller rather than a playwright, however, that Dumas gained enduring success. Perhaps the most broadly popular of French romantic novelists, Dumas published some 1,200 volumes during his lifetime. These were not all written by him, however, but were the works of a body of collaborators known as "Dumas & Co." Some of his best works were plagiarized. For example, The Three Musketeers (1844) was taken from the Memoirs of Artagnan by an eighteenth-century writer, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) from Penchet's A Diamond and a Vengeance. At the end of his life, drained of money and sapped by his work, Dumas left Paris and went to live at his son's villa, where he remained until his death.

Bibliographic information