The Count of Monte Cristo: A Readalong!
I read one of Dumas' other famous novels, The Three Musketeers, in 2022 and blogged about it as I went (the readalong blog is here, and my review is here). I had a great time reading it. This time, I'll be reading The Count of Monte Cristo with a small group of other readers, discussing the book weekly as we go, and I'll be blogging my thoughts on this post every couple of days. I find that it makes me even more engaged in the book when I'm annotating as I go, picking out favourite quotes and noting down my impressions.
The Count of Monte Cristo was written between 1844-46, and published serially, in 18 parts in the Journal Des Débats. It was then published in novel form. And did you know that Dumas had a co-writer for many of his works? His close collaborator was Auguste Maquet, who often came up with the plots of his novels, while Dumas wrote them. At the insistence of the publisher, Maquet's name was omitted, and this led to Maquet suing Dumas in 1851 for royalties. The court, however, ruled in favour of Dumas.
A note on translations and editions. I'll be reading the full edition, and one as close to complete as I can. I have an anonymous translation, which I usually means it's a variant of an 1846 translation by Chapman and Hall. It's the Canturbury Classics World Cloud Classics edition from 2013. It has 118 chapters and is over 1000 pages in small font, which indicates that it is not an abridged version. Regardless, most editions have some bowdlerization (where racy parts were removed in the 19th century), but apparently it's not uniform and hard to tell. There's a 1996 translation by Robin Buss that's modernised but slightly more inclusive of the text. My edition has 118 chapters, and many have 117 as they do not include a chapter called "The Past" near the end, but that chapter is easily downloadable as a pdf with a simple google search, so when it comes time I'll note that in this blog.
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The reading plan is to read over eight weeks, with 14 chapters per week. I'll be reading Monday to Saturday with a day off on Sunday, so that is 2-3 chapters per day.
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Day 1: Chapters 1-3
As he sails a freighter into Marseilles harbour after its captain was killed on the voyage, our hero Edmond Dantes is described as young and handsome: "He was a fine, tall, slim young fellow of eighteen or twenty with black eyes and hair as dark as a raven's wing. His whole appearance bespoke calmness and resolution peculiar to men accustomed from their cradle to contend with danger." Edmond is in line for captain of the ship, he's on great terms with his father, and he's going to marry his love Mercedes within a day or two. He's got nowhere to go but down: He's already made an enemy in the ship's accountant M. Danglars (who just seems to hate him for his youth and good fortune...), his neighbour M. Caderousse (not sure why), as well as his love Mercedes' forlorn and rejected suitor Fernand. Says Danglars: "Edmond's star is in the ascendant, and he will marry the splendid girl—he will be captain too, and laugh at us all, unless"—a sinister smile passed over Danglar's lips—"unless I take a hand in the affair." I feel that no good can come of this.
Day 2: Chapters 4-6
The conspiracy against Edmond is afoot. "When one thinks," said Caderousse, letting his hand drop on the paper, "there is here wherewithal to kill a man more sure than if we waited at the corner of a wood to assassinate him! I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper, than of a sword or pistol."
Edmond, too, feels a foreshadowing disquiet at his good fortune:
Danglers: "Why, what ails you?" asked he of Edmond. "Do you fear any approaching evil? I should say that you were the happiest man alive at this instant."
"And that is the very thing that alarms me," returned Dantes. "Man does not appear to me to be intended to enjoy felicity so unmixed; happiness is like the enchanted palaces we read of in our childhood, where fierce, fiery dragons defend the entrance and approach; and monsters of all shapes and kinds, requiring to be overcome ere victory is ours."
I found Chapter 6 full of political context, with new characters M. de Villefort, the magistrate; and his betrothed Renee de Saint-Meran discussing the matter of prosecuting Bonapartist traitors. The first section "Analysis" of this article helped my place the context of the novel's opening, 15 years after the end of the French Revolution, and as Napoleon is exiled on Elba but preparing for a brief escape and return. The tension between the Royalists and the Bonapartists was at its height.
https://www.enotes.com/topics/count-of-monte-cristo/in-depth
Day 3: Chapters 7-8
After Dantes has been arrested, his innocence is so convincing that M. Villefort truly believes he has done no wrong. Dantes is such a good young man, and I loved his declaration: "Alas, sir, I never had any opinions. I am hardly nineteen; I know nothing; I have no part to play. If I obtain the situation I desire, I shall owe it to M. Morrel. Thus all my opinions—I will not say public, but private—are confined to these three sentiments: I love my father, I respect M. Morrel, and I adore Mercedes. This, sir, is all I can tell you, and you see how uninteresting it is."
It's as he settles into the terrible Chateau D'If that despair and anger first take root in Dantes. This terrible fate, "all because he had trusted Villefort's promise." And the jailer's advice: "...do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight."
Day 4: Chapters 9-10
Though I don't feel sorry for Villefort, you've got to love Dumas' elloquent description of his plight:
"Then the first pangs of an unending torture seized upon his heart. The man he sacrificed to his ambition, that innocent victim immolated on the alter of his father's faults, appeared to him pale and threatening, leading his affianced bride by the hand, and bringing with him remorse, not such as the ancients figured, furious and terrible, but that slow and consuming agony whose pangs are intensified from hour to hour to the very moment of death."
Here's the Project Gutenberg illustration of Mercedes (with the scoundrel Fernand). What drama!
Dumas also gives a summary of where each person's actions and conscience lay, with Dantes in jail: Fernand, Morrel, Caderousse, and Danglars ("The life of a man was to him of far less value than a numeral, especially when, by taking it away, he could increase the sum total of his own desires. He went to bed at his usual hour, and slept in peace.") I'm contemplating a project to see just where (with the exception of Morrel) each of these men would land in the poet Dante Alighieri's nine circles of hell. I'm reading that too, currently, and it seems very fitting.
Day 5: Chapters 11-12
It is interesting to read the passages with King Louis XVIII. Dumas is writing this circa 1845 and the present action, as Napoleon escapes Elba, is in 1815. Dumas would have been in his early teens at the time. Thus, he's writing about events 30 years old. The French Revolution had just ended in 1799 so approximately 45 years before the book was written. That's like me writing about Regan, then the Clintons (and I should also say Pierre Trudeau, Mulroney and Chrétien), the fall of the Berlin wall, or Chernobyl. So I suspect that Dumas must have had a very distinct feeling for the time, and a notion of how these characters would have behaved.
Louis XVIII: "To fall," continued King Louis, who at the first glance had sounded the abyss on which the monarchy hung suspended—"to fall, and learn of that fall by telegraph! Oh, I would rather mount the scaffold of my brother, Louis XVI, than thus descend the staircase a the Tuileries driven away by ridicule."
And from a truly fictional character, the Bonapartist Noirtier, this chilling sentiment: "In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas—no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all."
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