I also love its memorable, melodramatic crises, like the moment when Mercédès bursts through the polite fictions surrounding "the Count" to utter her despairing, agonised plea: "Edmond, you will not kill my son?"īut I think I find Dantè's narrative most addictive because it's a forerunner of the classic superhero stories – in essence, I'm sitting on the sand reading the world's heaviest comic. In part, this is because of its unrestrained richness – it's full of emeralds hollowed into pillboxes, diamond-bedecked horses, picturesque bandits and letters of unlimited credit. Donning myriad disguises and aliases, Dantès sets out to wreak havoc among those who cost him so dear.ĭespite its plethora of plot strands, places, and characters, and its layers of detail, rendered with a miniaturist's anxious exactitude, The Count of Monte Cristo remains compulsively readable. Mercédès, his betrothed, believing him gone forever, has married Fernand, his arch-rival, and borne him a son. The years of his youth are lost his father has died in penury. Staging a daring escape, Dantès finds the treasure, but his life is irrevocably changed by his imprisonment. Here he receives an extensive education from the Abbé Faria in the next cell acquires an aristocratic, unearthly pallor, allowing him, later, to masquerade as both a lord and a vampire and is told the location of an unimaginable treasure – a barren island known as Monte Cristo. But, framed by his jealous rivals as a Bonapartist traitor, he is arrested on his wedding day and summarily imprisoned.ĭantès is incarcerated in the notorious Chateau d'If for 14 years.
Rich in nature's blessings, handsome, clever and well-made, he is about to be named captain of his ship, and to marry his Catalan fiancée, Mercédès. In 1815, Edmond Dantès, a 19-year-old merchant sailor, returns to port in Marseilles.
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