The Cost of Revenge: Reading Monte Cristo Again

Everyone loves the first half of The Count of Monte Cristo: the innocent young sailor betrayed, buried alive in a sea-fortress, and the glorious escape and buried treasure that let him return as an avenging angel. We have called Edmond Dantès one of literature’s great figures. But read the whole vast novel and Dumas springs a trap on the reader who came for revenge.

Because the revenge, when it comes, is not clean. The Count’s elaborate machinery of retribution destroys the guilty — but it also kills an innocent child, and Dantès, who had believed himself the hand of God, is horrified to discover he is only a man, capable of the same cruelty as those he punished. The second half of the book is his slow, painful education: that vengeance, however deserved, corrodes the one who carries it out.

Dumas gives us the most satisfying revenge fantasy ever written and then, quietly, asks us to grow out of it. The final word is not triumph but ‘wait, and hope’ — the hard wisdom of a man who got everything he wanted and learned what it cost.

It is a page-turner that turns out to have a soul.

Read The Count of Monte Cristo — the Erato Press edition →