The Count of Monte Cristo
Notebook
Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo was serialized in the Paris Journal des Débats between 1844 and 1846, at the height of the roman-feuilleton boom that made Dumas the most widely read novelist in Europe. Its story — the sailor Edmond Dantès, imprisoned for fourteen years on a false denunciation, who escapes with a hidden fortune and returns as an inscrutable nobleman to ruin the three men who condemned him — fixed the pattern of the modern revenge narrative while pressing, through Dantès's own late misgivings, the question of whether any man may act as the instrument of Providence. This is the anonymous English translation first published in 1846, the version in which the novel has been read in English ever since.
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