More than half a century ago, on a sunny and breezy afternoon, I took the excursion boat from the Vieux Port in Marseille out to the small island that serves as the bare and rocky home of the forbidding Château d’If. I remember marveling that I should be about to visit the prison where Edmond Dantès had been incarcerated for fourteen years before seizing a dangerous opportunity to escape, wrapped in a sack as a dead man, then cast into the waters of the Mediterranean. To be certain that the body would never rise to the surface, guards attached a heavy cannonball to the sack. But as all the world knows, Edmond Dantès did rise again, transformed from an innocent young sailor into that courtly yet implacable avenger, the Count of Monte Cristo.

For most readersAlexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is simply the classic novel of revenge. For me, however, it was an inspirational self-help manual. At the age of ten or eleven, I’d read a highly abridged children’s edition, a Golden Picture Classic priced at 50 cents. Though little more than a précis of the actual book, this oversized paperback, printed on the pulpiest of papers, marked a watershed in my young life. The Hound of the Baskervilles might have been more spookily atmospheric, Journey to the Center of the Earth more wondrous, and King Solomon’s Mines even more adventure-packed, but The Count of Monte Cristo offered an overweight, near-sighted kid from a working-class family something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

The book’s opening chapters might be summed up by inserting its hero’s name into the first sentence of Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Edmond Dantès, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” The year is 1815 and Dantès, a guileless nineteen-year-old sailor from Marseille, is about to marry his sweetheart, Mercédes, when he is suddenly plucked from his wedding feast, accused of being a spy for Napoleon, and, without explanation, sentenced to life in solitary confinement in the Château d’If. Following six years of vainly protesting his innocence, Dantès resolves to starve himself to death. But after refusing to eat for several days, the would-be suicide detects a scratching inside his dungeon wall. An elderly prisoner named the Abbé Faria, hoping to burrow through the bricks and mortar to the outside, has miscalculated and tunneled into the adjoining cell.

During the next eight years, the two prisoners work together on another escape tunnel while the learned cleric teaches his new disciple ancient and modern languages, history, and the social graces. It was this section of the novel that most captured my imagination, as it does for many others. So potent is this notion of reinvention through learning that it’s become one of storytelling’s favorite tropes, underlying such differing later works as The Great Gatsby; Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion and its musical recreation, My Fair Lady; and the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro.

In the novel’s unabridged translation by Robin Buss,¹ the Abbé Faria tells his pupil that he long ago whittled down a collection of 5,000 volumes to the 150 works that truly mattered:

I devoted three years of my life to reading and rereading these hundred and fifty volumes, so that when I was arrested I knew them more or less by heart. In prison, with a slight effort of memory, I recalled them entirely. So I can recite to you Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus,…Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Bossuet; I mention only the most important.

Like a precursor to Mortimer J. Adler, the good abbé was a firm proponent of an education based on the “Great Books.” As for me, shortly after finishing my Golden Picture Classic version of Dumas’s novel, I started to sneak into the adult section of the library, beginning a lifelong effort to educate myself.

Like The Odyssey and Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of those books people think they know even if they’ve never read it, at least not in its entirety. Most of the commonly available translations in English are abridged. More often than not, we simply recall some children’s edition, or a worn Classics Illustrated comic, or one of the fifty or so film and television adaptations, ranging from a silent one-reeler in 1908 to this spring’s eight-episode Masterpiece series on PBS.

The original text, after all, is very long—Buss’s English version runs 1,243 pages of clear but fairly small type, making it almost twice the length of Dumas’s previous blockbuster, that boisterous and swashbuckling epic of eternal friendship, The Three Musketeers. Amazingly, both books, along with several others of comparable lengths, were published during the years 1844–1846, Dumas’s anni mirabiles.

Though focused on the relentless Edmond Dantès, The Count of Monte Cristo is at the same time a sprawling, digressive work, covering a quarter-century of French history, evoking the culture of three cities—Marseille, “white, warm, throbbing with life”; Rome, a labyrinth of romance and mystery; and Paris, a morass of duplicity and corruption—and featuring dozens of characters ranging from smugglers and brigands to international bankers and self-important aristocrats.

Above all, it is vastly entertaining. Yet if you read the unabridged novel today, it quickly grows clear why so much has been cut to make it suitable for the young or acceptable in a Hollywood film. As Buss writes in the introduction to his translation:

There are not many children’s books, even in our own time, that involve a female serial poisoner, two cases of infanticide, a stabbing and three suicides; an extended scene of torture and execution; drug-induced sexual fantasies, illegitimacy, transvestism and lesbianism; a display of the author’s classical learning, and his knowledge of modern European history, the customs and diets of the Italians, the effects of hashish, and so on.

That’s quite an inventory, yet the last phrase—“and so on”—isn’t just a rhetorical flourish. Dumas’s novel also includes rape, mercy killing, starvation to death, a beheading, a woman half incinerated by her foster son, a mute and paralyzed man who can only communicate through eye blinks, an enslaved Nubian who has had his tongue cut out, sudden-onset insanity, suggestions of an unhealthy attachment between two mothers and their sons, and the unknowing betrothal of a sister to her brother.

If some of these elements call to mind Jacobean tragedy or racy soap opera, that’s no coincidence. Born in 1802, Alexandre Dumas initially made his name—and the first of several fortunes—as a playwright, indeed one of the pioneers of romantic French drama. Only in the 1840s did he begin publishing fiction, most of which depended on his flair for both dialogue and breath-taking coups de théâtre. (In Dumas’s best-known play, Antony, the hero stabs his married mistress to death to protect her honor.) Yet just as Balzac aimed to portray every aspect of contemporary French society in his multivolume Comédie humaine, so Dumas loosely planned to chronicle all of French history between the Renaissance and the Napoleonic era. He came close. The once-standard Michel Lévy edition of his complete works comprises three hundred volumes, most of them novels about France’s past.

Dumas also managed to publish much besides historical fiction: travel books (about Switzerland, Russia, Spain), tales of the supernatural (The Wolf-Leader, Castle Eppstein, The Corsican Brothers), a garrulous, immensely long memoir of his youth, serious works of history and biography, and, posthumously, a huge dictionary of gastronomy.

Given such plenty, the prodigious author was often accused of operating a fiction factory and exploiting the work and talent of others.² But as has been frequently pointed out, none of Dumas’s research assistants and coauthors—not even the best, Auguste Maquet, who worked with him on The Count of Monte Cristo and suggested the entire first section of the novel—ever achieved anything of note on their own. To a large extent, Dumas needed help because he simply lacked a creative imagination.

His particular genius lay in transmuting dry historical records into vibrant page-turners through his mastery of dialogue, pacing, and dramatic confrontation. Dumas would first talk over a book with an assistant, perhaps ask him to do some research and prepare an outline, then follow up with further discussion of the action and plot, this time in more detail. Only when he had settled the whole arc of the novel in his own mind did Dumas put pen to paper: as he once said, “As a rule I do not begin a book until it is finished.” He then wrote fast, a single draft on blue paper, never bothering about accents, commas, and punctuation, working long hours at a time. As Andrew Lang has said, Dumas’s “career was one of unparalleled production, punctuated by revolutions, voyages, exiles, and other intervals of repose.”

Generous to a fault, the lover of many women, and an inveterate punster, Dumas lived intensely and on a grand scale, but these days if people know anything about him, it’s that he was Black. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the child of an enslaved Haitian and a French aristocrat. A man of immense physical strength and charisma, Thomas-Alexandre rose through the ranks of the French army to become a much-admired general. Had he not fallen out with Napoleon, the emperor would have been the godfather of the novelist. Instead, as we are reminded by Tom Reiss in his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, The Black Count (2012),³ the general—en route home from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1799—was arrested in Italy and incarcerated for nearly two years in a dungeon-like prison. Reiss and others believe that Dumas partly drew on Thomas-Alexandre’s experiences in depicting Edmond Dantès’s suffering and despair in the Château d’If.

Among the subjects taught to Dantès by the Abbé Faria are logic and psychology as essential to interpreting human action. Like a proto-Sherlock Holmes, Faria reviews the details of Dantès’s arrest and, through systematic questioning and deduction, determines the identities and motivations of the young man’s unsuspected enemies. In another scene, Faria reconstructs the missing words on a burnt paper fragment and so learns the location of a fabulous hidden treasure. Could Dumas have been aware of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” which was translated in 1845?

It’s worth pausing over these detective story elements, since The Count of Monte Cristo actually emphasizes intrigue and mystery far more than adventure. Its hero reopens a cold case, uncovers multiple additional crimes by the wrongdoers, then exposes their villainy to the world. Similar mysteries and Machiavellian schemes power many of Dumas’s other books. Most obviously, The Man in the Iron Mask—recently issued in a lively new translation by Lawrence Ellsworth⁴—revolves around the identity of an unknown prisoner whose face is never seen and who might be the twin brother of King Louis XIV. In Les Mohicans de Paris, Dumas even coined the classic police directive: “Cherchez la femme.”

Dumas’s plots and storylines typically draw on memoirs (the more scandalous the better), works of history, and actual police investigations. For example, in Mémoires tirés des archives de la police de Paris by the jurist Jacques Peuchet, Dumas found the germ of The Count of Monte Cristo. A chapter titled “Le Diamant et la Vengeance,” about an unjustly imprisoned shoemaker named François Picaud, offered a crude outline of what became Dantès’s incarceration, escape, and revenge. Still, where was the finesse, the artistry? To be satisfying in a novel, redress required more than a blockhead with a knife lurking in a dark lane. Instead of stabbing in cold blood like Picaud, the icily self-controlled Monte Cristo would subtly, unsuspectingly cause his major tormentors to destroy themselves.

By the time Dantès escapes from the Château d’If, he has already begun a kind of spiritual conversion, though not to anything saintly. During his years in prison he has acquired, besides gentlemanly manners and considerable learning, both patience and inscrutability. While the Abbé Faria’s treasure soon makes him rich, he nonetheless defers his dream of revenge for another nine years. In that time, merely alluded to by Dumas, he completes the effacement of outgoing and warmhearted Edmond Dantès and the full emergence of the imperious and sophisticated Count of Monte Cristo. In effect, the likable, high-spirited D’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers has become the calculating, iron-willed Cardinal Richelieu.

Dumas artfully signals this character change by a similar change in his narrative technique. Up until the discovery of the treasure, we are privy to Dantès’s thoughts, hopes, and despairs, but not afterward. We see how he presents himself in society, we hear his conversation and his commands to servants, we observe his actions and reactions, but nothing more. His interior life is shrouded. In particular, we know he is setting traps for his enemies, but not what they are or when and how he will spring them. Dumas keeps us in suspense to the last.

To justify his ruthlessness, the count regards himself as an agent of Providence, an envoy of God delivering just punishments. Be that as it may, his machinations as well as his munificent gestures wholly depend on capitalism’s equivalent of Aladdin’s lamp, an inexhaustible supply of money. During the years of the French revolution and empire, people lived and died for la gloire or for liberty or for Napoleon or simply out of love for France. But by 1838, the year that Monte Cristo first appears in Paris, it is time, as Cunégonde sings in Candide, to glitter and be gay. Money makes this meretricious, post-Napoleonic world go round. In 1843 then foreign minister François Guizot affirmed what everyone had long known: if you wanted to vote, have a say in government, or attain a position in society, you should first “enrichissez-vous,” get rich.

But how? In his 1835 novel Père Goriot, Balzac declared that behind every great fortune lies a crime. In The Count of Monte Cristo, that insight becomes an indictment of Dantès’s long-ago betrayers: the powerful Count de Morcerf (once the duplicitous military officer Fernand and now a titled politician), the investment banker Baron Danglars, and the chief prosecutor of Paris, Monsieur de Villefort. Significantly, none of these pillars of the establishment, the representatives of French government, finance, and law, recognizes Dantès. Why would they? Their other even greater acts of treachery have buried all memory of that young sailor, just as any residual guilt has long been obliterated by the abundant satisfactions of their wealth and social status.

The count makes sure that all three will experience a return of the repressed. He has made it his business—we never learn how precisely—to learn their sins and shames. Because he passes as a fellow member of the era’s billionaire boys’ club, he can grow close to his enemies, indulge and entertain them, even win their affection. Only toward the conclusion of his dark crusade does he wonder if he might have gone too far. By then we realize that The Count of Monte Cristo is more than a chronicle of revenge. It is a tale of redemption.

Whereas the count initially pursues an Old Testament style of retribution—lex talionis, let the punishment fit the crime—the novel as a whole honors a more Christ-like New Testament morality. For the most part, only the virtuous, in particular those who renounce wealth, power, and social status, are “saved.” Loosely speaking, these are the young people. They reject their corrupt fathers, all beneficiaries of the Bourbon Restoration, and adopt the older Revolutionary watchwords of liberty, fraternity, and the pursuit of individual happiness. Valentine de Villefort, the prosecutor’s daughter, would rather be poor with the man she loves than be a rich prize in an arranged marriage; Albert de Morcerf, the politician’s son, joins with his mother in giving their jewels and possessions to charity after the Count de Morcerf’s treacheries come to light; and Eugénie Danglars, the banker’s daughter, cuts her hair and dresses as a man—“Monsieur Léon d’Armilly”—so she can flee Parisian society and start a new life in Italy as an opera singer with another woman.

Eugénie’s name change is only one of many in TheCount of Monte Cristo, a book profoundly concerned with identity. The count himself adopts numerous aliases (and disguises), including Prisoner No. 34, Lord Wilmore, Sinbad the Sailor, and the Abbé Busoni. But as Monte Cristo, he usually appears less or more than human. His pallor—years without sunlight leave their mark—seems unnatural. To shake the count’s hand is like touching a corpse. He possesses “sharp, white teeth” and “a strange laugh” and can apparently see in the dark. At meals he scarcely picks at the food and never drinks anything but water. When glimpsing Monte Cristo at the opera, the Countess G—shudders, convinced that he is Lord Ruthven, the Byron-like, blood-sucking fiend of Polidori’s The Vampyre. In his turn, young Albert de Morcerf calls him ageless and reports that his mother wonders if he might actually be the supposedly immortal occultist the Count of Saint-Germain. In fact, Madame de Morcerf, who is Dantès’s Mercédes, simply can’t understand why Monte Cristo looks so young, no older than thirty-five. She knows that her lost love—whom she alone recognizes—must be at least forty-two. Does this age discrepancy imply that the count, a professed student of chemistry, regular user of hashish and other drugs, and expert on mysterious toxins unknown to science, has discovered an elixir of youth?

Metaphorically, of course, all these speculations are correct: Monte Cristo has deliberately made himself a seemingly emotionless zombie as well as an impassive monster feeding on the lifeblood of his victims. But for a few—those who live clean, honorable lives—he isn’t a figure of dread and terror. The Morrel family calls him an “angel,” even their “savior,” and they literally go down on their knees before him. Why? Because Old Morrel had worked tirelessly, if in vain, for the release of young Dantès and the count repays his debts, in this case by secretly saving the man’s shipping company from bankruptcy. When all seemed lost, a stranger had spoken enigmatically to Julie, Morrel’s daughter: “‘Mademoiselle,’ the foreigner said. ‘One day you will receive a letter signed by…Sinbad the Sailor. Do precisely as this letter tells you, however strange its instructions may seem.’” A miracle ensues.

So, devil or angel? Hero or antihero? Certainly, among the count’s immediate precursors is that criminal mastermind of many faces, Balzac’s Vautrin, as well as Eugène Sue’s Rodolphe of Gerolstein, the secret righter of wrongs in the most popular novel of the century, The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843). Later avatars would include half of literature’s superheroes with secret identities but also Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s murderous archvillain, Fantômas.

Both aspects of Monte Cristo war in the psychomachia that occurs on the evening before his duel with Albert de Morcerf, who has been compelled to challenge the man who brought about his father’s disgrace. A woman is announced late at night. It is the Countess de Morcerf, whose first words are: “Edmond! You must not kill my son!” The count steps back, gives a faint cry, and drops the pistol he is holding. “What name did you say, Madame de Morcerf?” At which point, Dumas pulls out all the stops:

“Yours,” she cried, throwing back her veil. “Yours, which perhaps I alone have not forgotten. Edmond, it is not Madame de Morcerf who has come to you, it is Mercédes.” “Mercédes is dead, Madame,” said Monte Cristo. “I do not know anyone of that name.”

I won’t say what happens next.

Charles Reade, the Victorian novelist who regarded himself as Dumas’s biggest fan, coined the mantra governing so much nineteenth-century fiction and drama, “Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait.” The Count of Monte Cristo does something like this, alternating episodes of high emotional intensity with bantering conversations or information-rich reminiscences. And it regularly sets up a suspenseful situation, then makes the reader impatiently, even breathlessly, await its resolution. What about laughs? The novel’s Grand Guignol horrors preclude the kind of antics and joie de vivre we associate with The Three Musketeers, but a vein of subtle irony flows through the book simply because the reader knows more than the characters in the count’s orbit. Thus, when Albert de Morcerf offers to introduce this strangely severe but charismatic stranger to Parisian society, Monte Cristo accepts, saying, “I assure you that I was only waiting for this opportunity to carry out some plans that I have been considering for a long while.” Ah, yes, for a long while indeed.

Even deeper below the novel’s surface flows an undercurrent of the mythic, of rites of passage and hero’s journeys. For example, when Monte Cristo attends a ball given by the Count and Countess de Morcerf, the latter realizes her guest hasn’t eaten or drunk anything. She then says, “I should have been pleased to see the count take something in my house, if only a pomegranate seed.” From those last two words should we infer that the house of Morcerf is a kind of Hades, to which Persephone/Mercédes has been rapt away by its evil lord to be its unhappy queen? Later, the countess—already aware that she is addressing her lost love, Edmond Dantès—points out that “there is a touching Arab custom that promises eternal friendship between those who have shared bread and salt under the same roof.” Monte Cristo merely replies that he is familiar with the custom. There will be no eternal friendship with the house of Morcerf.

Symbolism of every sort regularly thickens the narrative texture of TheCount of Monte Cristo. Consider the motif of death and resurrection, already inherent in the myth of Persephone. Like Christ, Dantès dies—at least figuratively—at age thirty-three, descends into the depths, then rises and is transfigured. Several other characters—an old man, a baby, a young woman—also appear dead but are brought back to life. Similarly, the villainous ascend on the stepping stones of their dead selves to titles, wealth, and power. The Count de Morcerf wants to forget that he was the treacherous Fernand, Monsieur de Villefort drops the first half of his name—it was originally Noirtier de Villefort—to distance himself from his rabidly Bonapartist father who chose to be known as plain Monsieur Noirtier.

The count himself is closely associated with what was then called the Orient, that is, a highly romanticized Middle East. He uses the alias Sinbad the Sailor and regularly displays the powers of a genie or enchanter. His underground retreat on the island of Monte Cristo—Turkish rugs, vases, jewels, scimitars—is likened by one visitor to something out of The Arabian Nights. When entertaining a guest there, the count wears Tunisian garb including a red skullcap, is served by a mute Nubian, and proffers hashish and opium as a nightcap instead of brandy.

Given Dumas’s family background, it is shocking to realize that the count’s entourage includes two enslaved people. Ali, the Nubian, knows his master’s tastes perfectly and is gratified by the absolute trust placed in him. Haydée is another matter. We first meet this lovely young woman reclining, like some Delacroix houri, on a divan smoking a hookah. She is reclusive and enjoys playing the guzla, but occasionally appears as the count’s companion at the opera, her exquisite Greek beauty being much remarked upon. When, however, Haydée reveals the full horror of her history to France’s Chamber of Deputies, she brings instant ruin to the man who destroyed her family and the people she loved. As Dumas writes, Haydée “took her leave of the counsellors and walked out with that bearing which Virgil described as the walk of a goddess.” That goddess might well be Nemesis, the bringer of retribution.

In the eight-part PBS adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, Haydée is Black instead of Greek. This is just one of several liberties that Bille August’s highly watchable series takes with the novel. Understandably, numerous characters are left out or their functions transferred to other people. The count is no longer a master of disguise, nor is he perceived as a vampire, angel, or anything other than a well-to-do gentleman. Caderousse, a murderer and blackmailer, is reconceived as one of Monte Cristo’s trusted agents, while Haydée loses much of her glamour and serves mainly as a weapon in the count’s quest for revenge. Baron Danglars’s ultimate punishment is reenvisioned and made significantly more severe.

Many of the series’s changes can be irritating, if relatively inconsequential. To call the prison the “Castle of If” instead of the Château d’If sounds weird. In the series Dantès is locked away for fifteen years instead of fourteen, then spends only five years instead of nine perfecting his new identity. I suppose a twenty-year separation keeps the two main characters, instead of just Mercédes, on the right side of forty. In the series, the count reveals his real name to both Caderousse and the Italian smuggler Jacopo, who is now his chief lieutenant and confidant. This is wrong. The Monte Cristo of the book never divulges his true identity to anyone, reserving the stiletto thrust that he is Edmond Dantès as the culmination of each act of vengeance. As he says to the Count de Morcerf, “Of my hundred names, I shall need to tell you only one to strike you down.”

Jeremy Irons—who in his younger days would have made a perfect Monte Cristo—is at first hardly recognizable as the Abbé Faria. It’s pure pleasure to watch him explain table manners to his young fellow prisoner. As the count, Sam Claflin conveys imperiousness and a streak of cruelty, but more surprisingly displays a high degree of emotional vulnerability. Ana Girardot, who plays Mercédes with beautiful understatement, projects an elegant persona that doesn’t quite hide her suppressed heartache. By the middle episodes, it’s clear the count is still in love with her and she with him. The show does keep the viewer guessing—will they or won’t they get back together?—but it obviously wants to deliver a happy ending. It’s just not the one that Dumas wrote.

When I asked a scholarly friend and cinephile to suggest a film version of Dumas’s book that stuck close to the original text, he strongly recommended the 1998 miniseries headlined by Gerard Dépardieu. Other films—starring Richard Chamberlain, Jim Caviezel, and most recently Pierre Niney—possess virtues of their own. Bille August’s adaptation stands out especially for the way it humanizes all the characters: despite the heinousness of their past or present crimes, the count’s victims come across as flawed human beings rather than utter blackguards. The Count of Monte Cristo himself is a plum role for any actor—did you know that James O’Neill, the playwright Eugene O’Neill’s father, toured the country in the role?—while Dumas’s story can seemingly support myriad interpretations. Yet none is a substitute for the book itself since all of them must, unavoidably, cut or modify so much of the plot.

Dumas never wrote a sequel to The Count of Monte Cristo, even though its final chapters plant the seed for one. Contemplating Mercédes and her son Albert, whose lives have been upended, the count asks himself, “How can I give those two innocent people back the happiness I have taken away from them? God will help me.” He later appears to have formulated some proposal involving Albert, and asks Mercédes: “If he accepts what I want to do, would you cheerfully do the same?” She tacitly agrees. But to what? As they part, Mercédes—resolved to a life of seclusion and prayer—bids the count au revoir, then, trembling, reaches out and touches his hand. Alone a few moments later, she murmurs her last words in the novel, “Edmond, Edmond, Edmond!”

A number of hacks did publish continuations with titles such as CountessMonte Cristo and Son of Monte Cristo. It is a sign of Dumas’s understanding of the human heart that at the end of this emotion-racked novel the count doesn’t consider marrying the now-widowed Mercédes. The rupture between them is too great; they have become different people from the young couple that once planned a life together. As for Monte Cristo’s own future, he seems more than a little doubtful about his capacity for any kind of happiness. Yet as he tells Haydée, “Who knows? Perhaps your love will make me forget what I have to forget.” As he himself recognizes, one can only wait and hope.