Vengeance is a Dish Best Served Cold (The Count of Monte Christo - Alexandre Dumas)

Name: fromage

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	The Count of Monte Christo - Alexandre Dumas
Date:	31/10/01 (1170 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A timeless classic, Gripping plot, Tremendous prose

Disadvantages: Borders on the silly in places

Numbered rightly among the timeless classics of which almost everyone has heard, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ is revered as an adventure yarn par excellence. While others of his works may perhaps be even more famous, ‘The Three Musketeers’ in particular having benefited from numerous film interpretations, this is the work for which Dumas deserves to be remembered. It is a huge book, crammed with plots and sub-plots, replete with classical references, and strung together by the fantastic coincidence, unbelievable derring-do, and highly romantic styling that typified French literature at the time.

‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, as most will already know, is a revenge story. In terms of its importance to the sub-genre, it may perhaps be considered THE revenge story – it is hard to conceive that it will be bettered: it sets down a blueprint and also a standard. The concept of the wronged hero, robbed by human agents of his life and hopes, also sacrificing his humanity to return against the odds as an agent of vengeance, is an irresistible subject to an author and reader of adventure stories.

And the story is as compelling as one could want. Edmond Dantes is our wronged hero, a successful young sailor whom we first meet in the southern port of Marseille at the age of nineteen years. Edmond, besides being on the verge of a fantastic career, is blessed with an embarrassment of virtues. He is handsome, honest, and courageous, indeed:- ‘His whole demeanour possessed the calm and resolve peculiar to men who have been accustomed from childhood to wrestle with danger’.

Aside from his personal gifts he has a doting father whose paternal affection extends so far that he is be willing to starve himself to avoid inconveniencing him. Best of all he has a beautiful fiance, Mercedes: ‘a lovely young girl with jet black hair and the velvet eyes of a gazelle’ (could there be conceived a more eloqu
ent way than that of expressing the concept ‘big, soft, and brown’?), her arms ‘modelled on those of the Venus of Arles’ (I’m afraid I’m too much of a philistine to get that allusion, but I expect they’re very nice), and legs ‘shapely, bold and proud’. Such an abundance of blessings could hardly do other than invite misfortune, and in a short space of time Edmond is betrayed and brought low by various parties, each motivated by their own blend of spite, envy, and ambition.

So Edmond is consigned to the Chateau D’If, a terrible prison on an island off the coast, a ‘prison shrouded with deep terror’, which ‘for three centuries… nourished Marseille with its gloomy legends’. There he meets the Abbe Faria, an extraordinary gentleman who, over ten years or so of incarceration educates Edmond to the height of human accomplishment, and more importantly, illuminates him as to the identity of his persecutors, namely the wicked Danglars, the jealous, passionate Fernand, and the selfish, ambitious Villefort. The Abbe Faria’s last gift is most important of all, being the location of a vast fortune, with which Endond Dantes, having escaped from the Chateau D’If, soon sets about planning and executing his merciless revenge.

It would be easy to get lost in retelling the story, simply because it is so good. It is, I should say, wildly improbable in places (although, one could argue that the level of coincidence in meetings and actions is a sign that Edmond’s mission for revenge is truly divine and what appears as chance is actually God granted serendipity). But to go further may be to deny someone the pleasure of discovering it, and besides, how could anyone fit a thousand plus pages of adventure into a review? But I will talk a bit about what makes the book more than just a great boy’s own adventure story.

First of all, as a writer, Dumas is i
nventive, clever, and fun. I used a lot of his words in my plot synopsis above, because they are far better than my own could be. When it comes to realising his characters and their surroundings Dumas is both lively and imaginative. One gets the impression that he approached his writing with gusto, keen to outdo himself with his own eloquence, not afraid to skip along the fine line between cleverness and bathos.

As an example, in transforming himself from Edmond Dantes, wretched escaped convict cursed by fate, to the Count of Monte Cristo, mighty bearer of God’s justice on the human plane, Edmond travels extensively in the orient, and brings an extremis of exoticism back with him. His boudoir, within his secret cave dwelling on the isle of Monte Cristo, is described thus ‘The whole room was hung with crimson Turkish hangings, brocaded with gold flowers. In a recess there was a sort of divan, and above it a display of Arab swords with vermeil sheaths and hilts shining with precious stones. From the ceiling dangled a lamp in Venetian glass, delightful in shape and colour, and his feet sank up to the ankles in the Turkish rug beneath them’. Such a descriptive tone could easily have served as inspiration for a Bond villain’s mountain / volcano / undersea hideaway.

His characters are similarly wrought. Larger than life is a more than fair way to describe them. No-one who matters in this book does anything with less than a life or death intensity. Lovers will be united forever or will blow out their own brains in despair. Dishonour is a worse fate than death, and deeds of courage, bravado, and derring-do are all that the younger characters seem to live for. Indomitable wills collide and shatter against each other all over the place.

Among my favourites in the cast are the spirited Albert De Morcerf, who is a noble yet believable young man, although his relationship with his mother does seem a little oedipal, thankfully
not overtly so. Villefort’s father Noirtier also stands out.

Noirtier, who is first introduced early in the novel as one of the movers and shakers of the revolution, a politician, once ‘hunted across the moorlands of Bordeaux by the Robespierre’s bloodhounds’, turned staunch and active supporter of Bonaparte (whose return from Elba occurs early in the novel), is an unwitting but nonetheless direct catalyst to the events which see Edmond imprisoned. This man of strength, vitality, and action is re-introduced later in the story, now paralysed by a stroke and able only to blink and move his eyes within their sockets. Dumas writes of him: ‘Sight and hearing were the only two senses which, like two sparks, still lit up this human matter, already three-quarters remoulded for the tomb.’

But Noirtier is not powerless. ‘The gesture of the hand, the sound of the voice and the attitude of the body may indeed have gone, but these powerful eyes made up for all: he commanded with them and thanked with them. He was a corpse with living eyes and, at times nothing could be more terrifying than this marble face out of which anger burned or joy shone.’ Noirtier, trapped in his chair, nonetheless triumphs again and again over his persecutors. I find this, like the author’s prose, stands precariously on the line between inspiring and plain daft. In the end you have to give it to Dumas, though. Reason may tell us that Noirtier would almost certainly be a broken, despairing, incontinent old man, but Dumas forces reason away from the front of the mind, and you find yourself happily believing that a living statue, through the force of will alone, really could retain both a ‘fearsome heart’ and the ability to achieve his ends.

Above the rest of the cast, however, by a clear mile, stands the Count, the angel of vengeance. After the harsh education of the Chateau D’If, followed by ten years in
the Orient (learning about various ways to torment the guilty, naturally), he returns to Europe, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, possessed of unearthly manners and poise, trained in every art of combat, and possessing an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything (from botany to advanced chemistry). The range of his abilities is ludicrous, and his individual skills are honed to ridiculous levels of accomplishment. The count is found at a firing range: ‘Instead of targets, playing cards had been fixed to the board. From a distance, Morcerf thought it was a complete pack from ace to the ten… bullets had replaced the absent symbols with perfectly precise holes at perfectly equal distances, passing through each card at the points where it should have been painted‘

And, of course, the Count is convinced that his is a God granted mission to exact earthly revenge. So he behaves accordingly. He treats money with contempt, but husbands time as though it were water in the desert. Time and again he will order a dozen teams of horses prepared in stages so that he can travel without wasting any time on the road. He cultivates acquaintances with no thought in mind other than to gain allies on his route to vengeance. When he makes friends it is almost in spite of himself, and regards them in general as a diversion from his goals. He is impeccably polite, almost too mannered, and above all aloof. He cuts an extraordinary figure, and it is impossible not to enjoy reading about him.

But aside from the icy resolve and inhuman abilities of the count, the naïve young sailor Edmond Dantes is never wholly forgotten. An ‘agent of providence’ he may have become in deed, and unassailable as his situation seems, enough of his character is left to ensure that the reader does not lose sympathy with him. The wounds of the past and the reawakening of old feelings in him, particularly when he is inevitably reunited with his beloved Mercedes, and eve
n the odd doubt, give an extra dimension to the Count without which the reader could well have ended up rooting for his victims.

The last thing I would like to say about Dumas’s writing is that aside from a facility for spectacular description and colourful characterisation, he can also be very witty. A couple of my favourite chapters feature some of the younger characters, including Beauchamps and Debray, the former a journalist, the latter a minister, introduced to the story as friends of Albert de Morcerf. When these characters are all together, their verbal sparring makes up in my opinion some of the best dialogue in the book. The three first meet together on the morning of the Count of Monte Cristo’s arrival in Paris, in Albert de Morcerf’s home. Albert to Debray:

‘But wait: I can hear Beauchamp’s voice in the antechamber. You can have an argument; that will pass the time.’
‘Argument about what?’
‘About the newspapers.’
‘Oh my dear man,’ Lucien said, with sovereign contempt, ‘do you think I read the papers?’
‘All the better: then you can argue even more about them.’
‘Monsieur Bauchamp!’ the valet announced.
‘Come in, come in acid pen!’ Albert said, getting up and going to meet the young man. ‘I have Debray here, as you see. He hates you without even reading you, apparently.’
‘He’s quite right,’ said Beauchamp. ‘I’m just the same. I criticize him without knowing what he does.’

The position of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ as one of the brightest stars in the firmament that is French literature is happily secure. It begs comparison with Victor Hugo’s greatest work, ‘Les Miserables’, due to similarities in scale, in plot and the fact that the two authors were contemporaries, although ‘Les Miserables’ was w
ritten some twenty years the later, and the styles of the writers could scarcely be more different. ‘Les Miserables is also centred around a convict, whose life is set upon a different path by a wise priest, who escapes from prison, obtains a fortune, then moves to Paris. I have to wonder to what extent Hugo’s novel was inspired by Dumas’s. Hugo’s work has in my opinion the greater resonance and intellectual weight, but perhaps if it weren’t for the influence of Dumas it would lack the abundance of adventure and plot which also make it compelling.

And while The Count of Monte Cristo may not be the ultimate thinking man’s novel, it is nonetheless a resounding success, and of far greater value than the vast bulk of adventure stories. The main and sub plots combine in a web of devious machinations, romantic entanglements, intrigues, and murders to offer the reader sometimes the pleasures of the whodunit, other times those of a love story, and occasionally moments of genuine atmospheric horror. There is even room for intellectual debate about whether Dantes really is an agent of The Lord as he claims (as I said before, the extraordinary coincidence and good fortune that assist him about his task would seem to point to this). If so, is his task administering revenge on earth so that his enemies are forced to acknowledge their crimes, enabling them to repent and enter heaven? Or is his purpose to double their torment, ensuring they suffer in both this life and the next? One thing is sure, for the reader at least, the vengeance of The Count of Monte Cristo is a tasty dish.

Summary: