Here he welcomes a French visitor dazzled to find a sumptuous establishment on a tiny island that is believed to be inhabited only by wild goats and visited only by pirates and smugglers. Dantès’s palatial hideaway on the isle of Monte-Cristo.
Whereas a Parisian veneer of elegance and wealth covers the other conspirators’ criminality and self-interest, here baseness appears in cruder, provincial form. Lowly French hotel owned by one of Dantès’s treacherous friends, situated between Nîmes and Beaucaire in southern France, west of Marseilles. In real life, Dumas celebrated the phenomenal success of this novel by building himself a château he named Monte Cristo, where he played host on a scale matching that of his fictional hero. Moreover, the island’s name–literally, “Christ’s Mount” in English–conveys religious connotations suitable for a protagonist who first pretends to be dead in order to escape prison, then is rebaptized in the sea, and finally hopes for rebirth in abandoning his vengeful path. Here Dantès discovers a treasure that the novel repeatedly links to the fabulous tales of the fifteenth century Arabian Nights Entertainments–an association typical of late-Romantic era Orientalism. In the novel, the island is thematically important as Napoleon’s birthplace and as home of the Italian blood feud known as the vendetta–related to both the count’s complex plot and his Corsican servant Bertuccio’s simpler vengeance. Mountainous French island in the Mediterranean–smaller than Sicily, Sardinia, and Cyprus–located 105 miles from southern France and 56 miles from northwestern Italy.
By making Dantès’s fellow inmate the Abbé Faria, imprisoned in 1808 for espousing Italian unity, Dumas parallels the reactionary injustices in Italy and France in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Like the Corsican outsider who conquered much of Europe, Dantès transforms himself from a plebeian into a fabulously powerful figure who dominates his world. His imprisonment also partially parallels Napoleon’s years of exile, first to Elba and later to St. Dantès’s fourteen-year imprisonment here–through reigns of three French kings–indicates the repressive injustice of the post-Napoleonic Restoration governments. Built in 1524 by King François I, the historical château eventually became a prison. Lying about two miles out to sea, the island presumably takes its name from its dominant tree, the cypress ( if in French). Fortified castle on If, one of several small islands in the bay of Marseilles. Dantès’s visit to this island enables his enemies to accuse him of Bonapartism. Largest town on the island of Elba, off the west coast of Italy, to which Napoleon was exiled in 1814. Its stop at Elba dooms him even while its name foreshadows the “Arabian” wealth and power that is later at his command. Like Gascony in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), this Marseilles provides the hero with southern liberalism, nobility of heart, and passion. Dumas depicts Marseilles as a romantic gateway to such exotic Mediterranean ports as Smyrna and Algiers, as host to a Catalan (Spanish) community–where the heroine lives–and as a loyal supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte during his hundred-day return from exile in 1815. Southeastern French city in a bay on the Mediterranean coast, popularizer of the French revolutionary anthem, “La Marseillaise,” and the home of Alexandre Dumas’s hero, Edmond Dantès. *Marseilles Count of Monte-Cristo, The (mar-SAY).
#Characters in the count of monte cristo serial
First published: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, 1844-1845, serial 1846, book ( The Count of Monte-Cristo, 1846)Īsterisk denotes entries on real places.