The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) Read Free

periodical press during the 1820s saw the invention of the
feuilleton
– not in the sense of a regular column by one writer, but of a novel published in instalments; Dumas claimed to have invented the
roman feuilleton
with
La Comtesse de Salisbury
, published in
La Presse
in 1836. By the early 1840s he was writing more novels than plays, mainly (but by no means exclusively) historical fiction which, as I have already mentioned, was one of the most popular genres; it was also taken seriously as a means of exploring the past. He did, incidentally, write a book for children at this time:
Le Capitaine Pamphile
(1839).
    Travel, to which he was addicted, helped to stave off boredom, providing the material for travel books, while translation filled in the remaining gaps in the working day. Like Balzac, he was a man of huge appetites: food, sex, work, sleep, pleasure, leisure, movement, excitement. In Italy, he found love, opera, colour and the Mediterranean: he visited Naples and Palermo in 1835, stayed a year in Florence in 1841 and returned in 1843 for a visit that included Sicily. The following year saw the publication of his first great historical novel,
Les Trois Mousquetaires/The Three Musketeers
, and on 28 August 1844
Le Journal des Débats
began publication of
The Count of Monte Cristo
. It was an immediate success, translated, adapted, pirated… in short, a popular novel.
    It was also, very clearly, a work of its time. The plot was inspired by the true-life story of François Picaud, which Dumas found in Jacques Peuchet’s
Police dévoilée: Mémoires historiques tirés des archives de Paris
… (1838), a collection of anecdotes from the Parisian police archives. 1
    Briefly, the story is this: Picaud, a young man from the south of France, was imprisoned in 1807, having been denounced by a group of friends as an English spy, shortly after he had become engaged to a young woman called Marguerite. The denunciation wasinspired by a café owner, Mathieu Loupian, who was jealous of Picaud’s relationship with Marguerite.
    Picaud was eventually moved to a form of house-arrest in Piedmont and shut up in the castle of Fenestrelle, where he acted as servant to a rich Italian cleric. When the man died, abandoned by his family, he left his money to Picaud, whom he had come to treat as a son, also informing him of the whereabouts of a hidden treasure. With the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Picaud, now called Joseph Lucher, was released; in the following year, after collecting the hidden treasure, he returned to Paris.
    Here he discovered that Marguerite had married Loupian. Disguising himself, and offering a valuable diamond to Allut, the one man in the group who had been unwilling to collaborate in the denunciation, he learned the identity of his enemies. He then set about eliminating them, stabbing the first with a dagger on which were printed the words: ‘Number One’, and burning down Loupian’s café. He managed to find employment in Loupian’s house, disguised as a servant called Prosper. However, while this was going on, Allut had fallen out with the merchant to whom he had resold the diamond, had murdered him and had been imprisoned. On coming out of jail, he started to blackmail Picaud. Picaud poisoned another of the conspirators, lured Loupian’s son into crime and his daughter into prostitution, then finally stabbed Loupian himself. But he quarrelled with Allut over the blackmail payments and Allut killed him, confessing the whole story on his deathbed in 1828.
    It is obvious both how directly Dumas was inspired by Peuchet’s account of this extraordinary tale, and how radically he transformed it; incidentally, he used another chapter of Peuchet’s book as the basis for the story of Mme de Villefort. One important step in the transformation from ‘true crime’ to fiction was to shift the opening of the tale from Paris to Marseille, giving the novel its Mediterranean dimension. Though most of the action still takes