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

cultures and the gateway to the Arab Maghreb, is a good deal more flattering than Murray’s
Handbook
. Dumas was allegedly thanked by a Marseillais cab-driver for promoting the city.
    Apart from this novel depiction of France’s major sea-port, however, Dumas offers his readers a Rome, and an Orient, that are very much what they would expect: the first colourful, tuneful, proud and cruel, the second decadent and opulent. But he adds those little details that compel belief in what he is describing: the precise information about Carnival etiquette, the street-by-street itinerary of a drive round the walls of Rome, the horrifying description of a Roman execution, sketches of character or scenery that he has culled from his own memories of staying at Signor Pastrini’s hotel when he visited Rome in 1835. His passages on sailing ships spare us none of the technicalities of sails and masts; his descriptions of the effects of opium convince us that he had experienced them. And, in much the same way, he adds touches of erudition: a quotation from Horace, a reference to
Hamlet
– all of which are meant to reassure us that we are in reliable hands. At times he even allows himself the luxury of a longer purple passage (perhaps a sunset over the Mediterranean) to show that he can do that, too.
    All this helps to justify his claim that he has transformed Peuchet’s material into something infinitely more valuable. Peuchet’s account of the Picaud case, he wrote, was ‘simply ridiculous… [but] inside this oyster, there was a pearl. A rough, shapeless pearl, of no value, waiting for its jeweller.’ And, of course, the essential transformation that the jeweller makes to Peuchet’s story lies in the character of the Count.
    To begin with, we have Edmond Dantès, a man who could well be first cousin to the shoemaker, François Picaud. Betrayed by a jealous rival and an ambitious colleague, sent to the fortress prison of If by a magistrate who cannot afford to let the facts come out, Dantès goes through a kind of burial and resurrection. Educated by Abbé Faria and possessor of a limitless fortune, he can re-emerge into the world, not as the cobbler Picaud, content to stab or poison those responsible for his misfortune, but as an instrument of divine justice. Dumas’ first, vital departure from Peuchet is to make Monte Cristo only indirectly the avenger: his ‘victims’ are all, in reality, destroyed by their own past misdeeds which Monte Cristo uncovers.
    As the man who brings the truth to light and uses the discovery to punish the wrongdoer, Monte Cristo is the forerunner of the detective, that central figure in modern popular fiction. In fact, there is more than one reference in the novel to deductive methods that resemble those pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe (‘A Manuscript Found in a Bottle’, ‘The Gold Bug’, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’) – for example, in the way in which Abbé Faria deciphers the will showing where the treasure was hidden, Dantès’ own analysis of where exactly it is concealed on the island and, earlier, Faria’s explanation of Dantès’ imprisonment. Note that, like the intellectual exercises of Monte Cristo’s opium-taking successor later in the century, Sherlock Holmes, 2 these deductions at first amaze those who have not been able to follow the logic behind them or who do not have the expertise to know, for example, when something has been written with the left hand by a right-handed person. But, of course, Faria is not really a Holmesian detective: the stereotype in Dumas’ mind is that of the eighteenth-century
philosophe
, a believer in the power of reason and a student of human nature. What Faria lacks (ironically, since everyone around thinks him mad, insanely obsessed with his fictitious treasure) is the Holmesian neuroses: the brooding violin and the opium stupor. These come from a different fictional archetype.
    So does Monte Cristo, even though he is not averse at times to