From there, the Count gradually re-enters society, insinuating himself into the confidences of the younger generation, including the sons and daughters of Danglars, Mondego, and Villefort. By one lucky chance after another, Edmond makes it to land, finds out who done him wrong, digs up the Abbé’s insanely vast treasure, and begins to pass himself off as the Count of Monte Cristo (which is an uninhabited island in the Mediterranean, well suited to the needs of pirates, smugglers, and escaped prisoners hatching revenge). At least, so it is until Edmond-profiting by the death of the Abbé Faria, his next-dungeon neighbor, teacher, and friend-sews himself up inside the Abbé’s body-bag and gets tossed into the Mediterranean. So begins Edmond’s fourteen-year burial in the Château d’If, an island prison in which life is a living death, and from which death is the only escape. These two devise a plot to frame Edmond for treasonously conspiring with the exiled Emperor, aided by the cowardly silence of Edmond’s morally weak friend Caderousse and the ruthless ambition of a deputy prosecutor named Villefort, who-keen to secure his rise in career and society-would make the innocent Dantès vanish rather than see his own father exposed as a Bonapartist. Alas, he is not so well-loved by the Spaniard Mondego who loves Mercédès, nor by ship’s purser Danglars who envies his rise to command. Promoted to command by the death of his skipper, Edmond is loved by his crew, by the merchant ship owner, by his old father, and by the fair Mercédès, a Spanish maiden who has agreed to be his wife. Into the port of Marseilles, in the south of France, sails a young merchant captain named Edmond Dantès. The story begins on the eve of Napoleon’s return from his first exile on the island of Elba, the “hundred days” dramatized by so many other books I have reviewed. So, with gratitude to reader John Lee for lending his voice to so many characters, I can report that the complete, unabridged novel is most entertaining, thank you. More recently, the daily cross of commuting-under which I sometimes felt as though buried at the wheel of my car-prompted me to beguile the monotonous hours by “reading” an audiobook version of the story.
I, for one, got by on an illustrated, abridged children’s version of it when I was a boy, and later contented myself with repeated viewings of the film adaptation starring Jim Caviezel and Guy Pearce. And yet I would be surprised if one American in a hundred has actually read the novel, in translation or otherwise. Written in French in 1844, its influence is so widespread even in non-French-speaking countries that references, situations, and attitudes from it inform the make-believe playtime of countless American boys. Here is a book that is deeply embedded in western culture.