The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) Read Free Page A

place in Paris (apart from a few excursions elsewhere, all the novel between Chapters XXXIX and CIV is set in Paris), the sea is always present as a figure for escape and freedom, while the novel uses the southern origins of its characters as a means to evoke that exotic world of the Mediterranean littoral that had so fascinated French writers and artists since the 1820s. The Mediterranean is the point where the cultures of Europe meet those of the Orient, and the region had been in the forefront of people’s minds since the 1820s,because of the Greek struggle for independence and the French conquest of Algeria.
    Both of these are directly present in the novel: one of its young characters is a soldier who has just returned from Algeria, another sets off to fight in the colony. As for Greece, which rebelled against the Turks in the 1820s, it inspired much fervour among European Romantics, most famously Lord Byron. The story of Ali (1741–1822), Pasha of Janina (Jannina) in Albania, plays a direct part in the novel and also takes us into the Oriental world that fascinated the French Romantics. ‘The Orient,’ Victor Hugo wrote in the preface to his early collection of poems,
Les Orientales
(1829), ‘both as an image and as an idea, has become a sort of general preoccupation for people’s minds as much as for their imaginations, to which the author has perhaps unwittingly succumbed. As if of their own accord, Oriental colours have come to stamp their mark on all his thoughts and reveries…’ – as they also marked the paintings of Ingres and Delacroix. When we meet Haydée in Chapter XLIX , she is lying on a heap of cushions, wearing her native Albanian costume, smoking a hookah and framed in a doorway, ‘like a charming painting’.
    Italy was another Mediterranean land that held a powerful appeal for the Romantics, and in particular for Dumas. All the components of this appeal are in the novel: the classical world (the night visit to the Colosseum), the excitement of travel ( Chapter XXXIII , ‘Roman Bandits’), the cruel justice of the Papal states ( Chapter XXXV , ‘La Mazzolata’), colourful spectacle ( Chapter XXXVI , ‘The Carnival in Rome’), the Christian past ( Chapter XXXVII , ‘The Catacombs of Saint Sebastian’). The story of Luigi Vampa could have come directly from one of Stendhal’s
Italian Chronicles
, the description of the Colosseum at night from one of Byron’s or Shelley’s letters. There is also a good deal of wit – and the fruit of personal experience – in Dumas’ portrayal of the modern Romans and the day-by-day experience of the Grand Tour. Like all the most skilled popular writers, he offers his readers a mixture of the unfamiliar and the expected: references to places, people and events that will conjure up a whole complex of images and ideas – we have here the notion of Italy as it was perceived in France in the 1840s, through literature and art – combined with those intimate touches that allow readers to experience the sensations of being there. Reading Dumas, we know how it felt to be swept up in the crowd at the Carnival, totravel in a carriage through the Roman streets, to stay in a
pensione
. We can easily recognize the proud bandit, the bustling hotelier, the alluring woman in the Carnival crowd.
    All these are described with as much economy as possible in order to avoid holding up the narrative. This is one reason why the popular novel tends to reinforce rather than to challenge prejudices – although, in one case, Dumas’ novel reversed a prejudice, namely that Marseille was, in the words of Murray’s
Handbook for Travellers in France
(1847), ‘a busy and flourishing city… [but one that] has few fine public buildings or sights for strangers’.
The Count of Monte Cristo
, on the contrary, with its intimate topography of the area around the old port and its dramatization of Marseille as the focus of mercantile activity, the meeting-place of Mediterranean