Edmond Dantes is nineteen, about to be made captain, and about to be married. Four men who want what he has put him in a cell in the Château d'If without a trial, and the world forgets him for fourteen years. When he comes back he has another name, a fortune out of a rock in the sea, and a plan that takes years to close.
This is the complete novel: all 117 chapters, unabridged, in a new English translation made directly from Dumas' French for this edition. Nothing has been cut, condensed or modernised away, and the translation is printed here for the first time.
THE TEXT
Alexandre Dumas published The Count of Monte Cristo as a newspaper serial between 1844 and 1846, written in collaboration with Auguste Maquet. Much of what circulates in English descends from anonymous Victorian versions, and a reader who wants the whole book should count the chapters: this edition has all 117, in Dumas' order, with the digressions, the Roman bandits, the hashish, the poisonings and the long middle that impatient abridgements remove.
THE CRITICAL APPARATUS
Written for this edition and printed nowhere else:
A critical essay, "The Long Calculation: Reading The Count of Monte Cristo", on how the novel converts suffering into arithmetic: the substitution at the Château d'If, the accounting that governs the revenge, and what happens to the avenger when the ledger finally balances.
An author biography, "About Alexandre Dumas", which separates the documented life from the legend: the general's son from Villers-Cotterêts, the collaborator Maquet and the question of authorship, the fortunes made and lost.
Annotation in these volumes means this apparatus at the end of the book. There are no footnotes at the foot of the page.
A novel about a man who waits, for readers who are not in a hurry.
