The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alexandre Dumas · Le Comte de Monte-Cristo · a novel in 117 chapters, written with the collaboration of Auguste Maquet, whose share is credited and charged to the work · serialised in the Journal des Débats from August 1844 to January 1846, then issued in volumes; scored as the complete novel, unabridged, on Dumas’s French · read from knowledge in Robin Buss’s unabridged English (Penguin, 1996), used for sense; quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Revenge romance set in its readers’ present; a roman-feuilleton of imprisonment, initiation and return, written for serial publication
Mythos
Death and rebirth from the sea; initiation by a priest in a pit; the Odyssey’s unrecognised homecoming; Sinbad the Sailor and the djinn of the Arabian Nights; the avenging angel and the office of Providence
Phase
From the denunciation at La Réserve in February 1815, through fourteen years in the Château d’If and the treasure of Monte Cristo, to Rome at carnival and Paris in 1838, and the island of Monte Cristo in October 1838
Presentation
Fiction; 117 chapters, composed for the feuilleton, short paragraphs and rapid exchanges of dialogue; three movements by setting and time; a hero in successive disguises, known to the reader and not to his victims
Register
From the tragedy and initiation of the dungeon chapters, through the bandit romance of Rome and the comedy of manners of the Paris salons, to the melodrama of the falls and the doubt at a child’s body
Scale
The Hundred Days, the Restoration and the July Monarchy; the prison; the merchant marine; the bank, the Bourse and the telegraph; the Chamber of Peers and the court of assize; the Greek war and the fall of Ali Pasha of Janina; three families and their secrets
Governing Proposition
A young sailor of Marseille is denounced by men who envy him and buried for fourteen years in the Château d’If; a priest who digs through to his cell teaches him everything and leaves him a treasure; he escapes sewn into the dead man’s shroud and returns, rich and under another name, to the society his betrayers now govern. The wager of the novel is that a single crime can be made the engine of a whole society’s fall, each criminal undone in his own currency, and that the man who takes on the office of Providence to do it can be shown, at the last, to have gone beyond his warrant.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The whole book sits at one table. At La Réserve in Marseille, in February 1815, Danglars writes a denunciation with his left hand, Fernand takes the paper, and Caderousse, drunk, lets it pass. Its object is Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseille. Villefort, the careerist, burns the letter addressed to Noirtier. One clerk’s jealousy, one fisherman’s hand, one bystander’s drunken silence and one careerist’s fear make the engine of everything that follows.
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo was written by Alexandre Dumas with the collaboration of Auguste Maquet, whose share in plan and drafting is documented; it is credited and charged to the work, not separated from it. The novel was serialised in the Journal des Débats from August 1844 to January 1846 and then issued in volumes. The unit scored is the complete novel as published, in 117 chapters, on Dumas’s French. The abridgements through which much of the book’s presence has run are not the work.
It moves in three movements by setting and time. Marseille and the Château d’If, from February 1815 to 1829, take about the first fifth. Rome at carnival in 1838 is a smaller block. Paris in 1838, with Auteuil and Normandy, takes the larger half and more, and the book closes on the island of Monte Cristo in October 1838. Composed for the feuilleton and paid by the line, it favours the short paragraph and the one-line exchange, and the form shows the market in its length as plainly as it shows the design in its spine.
Movement II
Dantès is buried for fourteen years in the Château d’If. The dungeon chapters are the summit of the book: the scratching in the wall, and the old priest Faria coming up through the floor of the cell. Faria is a teacher in a pit. He gives the young man an education in the dark and the secret of a hidden treasure, and the pattern is initiation: knowledge and wealth handed down from below by a dying master.
Faria’s seizures return, and he dies. Dantès takes the dead man’s place in the sack, is sewn into the shroud and thrown into the sea, where the fortress buries its dead. It is the book’s death and rebirth, built into the plot and not laid over it: he is raised by smugglers, and he takes a new name from an island named for Christ. The grotto on Monte Cristo and the treasure follow, and the book rises with them.
The first acts of the returned man are reward. His father has died of hunger. Morrel has set a day for his death; on that day the Pharaon sails into Marseille. The scene is among the heights of the book, and it fixes the office Dantès has taken: he will dispense reward and punishment as Providence would, unseen.
Movement III
Nine years pass in a cut. In Rome at carnival in 1838 the Count appears, a man of fabulous wealth who calls himself Sinbad the Sailor and plays the djinn of the Arabian Nights. Franz has a hashish dream; Vampa’s bandits appear. The Roman block runs long for what it sets up, and its dream belongs to another book’s law; the serial’s paid length is plainest here.
Then Paris. The Count enters the society of the July Monarchy and finds his betrayers at its head: Danglars a banker, Fernand a peer, Villefort the crown prosecutor. The jealous clerk, the fisherman and the careerist of 1815 have become the money, the title and the law of 1838, and each holds his crime in that form. This is what the book discloses about its own society, and it is the strongest truth it tells.
The disguises multiply: Busoni, Lord Wilmore, Sinbad, the Count. The reader knows what the victims do not, and the Paris chapters become dramatic irony sustained over hundreds of pages, a long and almost leisurely execution. The cost is the salons: calls, visits and dinners repeat; Bertuccio’s Corsican vendetta, though it bears the weight of Benedetto, is told at full length; the Cavalcanti comedy and Debray’s affairs with Madame Danglars are spun out; the young men of the households are lightly drawn.
Movement IV
Each betrayer falls in his own currency. Danglars falls by money: a false signal on the telegraph moves the funds and ruins him, and the book shows in one episode how news is made into money. Caderousse falls by greed, and by another hand. Fernand falls by his past in Janina: Haydée, the Oriental princess of the Count’s household, testifies before the Chamber of Peers, and the peer is undone before his peers.
Villefort falls by the law and by his buried child. In his house the old Noirtier, who cannot speak, speaks by his eyes, and with Valentine makes a will and a refusal by that means alone. The design converges from three directions, the Cavalcanti, the house at Auteuil and Benedetto, on the court of assize.
At the assize Benedetto names his father: the crown prosecutor. Villefort, who has come to prosecute, is undone by his own crime, laid down across hundreds of pages. It is the plot’s masterpiece of architecture, threads of 1815 closed in 1838 without loss. It leans, as the book often leans, on the right witness and the right word, and its persons are made from outside; but the trap is sprung by the whole design and not by chance alone.
Movement V
Then the design exceeds itself. Édouard de Villefort, a child, dies, and Villefort, mad, digs in the garden at Auteuil. At the boy’s body the Count doubts: the avenger who took the office of Providence learns that he has gone beyond its warrant. It is the book’s best disclosure, and the archetype it built is here put on trial.
The book half retracts what it has found. The doubt is answered by consolation and by the happiness of the lovers, and the gentleness of the ending withdraws part of what the boy’s death raised. Eugénie Danglars leaves with Louise d’Armilly; the stock furniture, the poisoner and the foundling among it, has done its work; the moral reckoning is stated rather than left open. The satisfaction of the fantasy prevails over the condition it uncovered.
The book ends on the island of Monte Cristo in October 1838, with a last letter whose last words are the law of its form: “Attendre et espérer”, to wait and to hope. Fourteen years of waiting in the dark and the slow execution in Paris have taught the reader that patience. The wronged man returned rich and disguised has since become an archetype in the world’s fiction, and he remains Edmond Dantès of Marseille.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is a machine of necessity. One denunciation, written by Danglars with his left hand and posted by Fernand while Caderousse lets it pass, and Villefort’s burning of the letter to Noirtier, generate every later act. Each of the four betrayers is given his own fall in his own currency: Fernand by his past in Janina, Danglars by money, Villefort by the law and his buried child, Caderousse by greed. Little of the frame could be cut. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is length inside the frame: the serial was paid by the line, and the Roman block, Bertuccio’s vendetta told at Corsican length, the repeated calls of the Paris salons and the Cavalcanti comedy say at length what could be said briefly. Perhaps a fifth of the book.
Score: 7.5 / 10
What the book brings into the open can be stated: that the society of the Restoration and the July Monarchy was built by men who rose on betrayal; that the banker, the peer and the crown prosecutor of 1838 are the jealous clerk, the fisherman and the careerist of 1815; that money, title and law are the forms in which their crimes are kept. The telegraph episode, a false signal that moves the funds and ruins Danglars, is a sharp disclosure of how news becomes money. The best disclosure is that vengeance taken as Providence’s agent exceeds its warrant, shown at the death of Édouard de Villefort. But the book half retracts it in consolation, and its dominant mode is the satisfaction of a fantasy more than the statement of a condition.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The book rises often, and the heights are real. The Château d’If chapters are its summit: the scratching in the wall, Faria coming up through the floor, the education in the dark, the old man’s seizures, and the escape sewn into his shroud and thrown into the sea, where the fortress buries its dead. Then the grotto and the treasure; the Pharaon sailing into Marseille on the day Morrel has set for his death; Haydée’s testimony before the Chamber of Peers; Noirtier speaking by his eyes; Villefort, mad, digging in the garden at Auteuil. The elevation is often melodramatic, and the Paris middle runs flat for long stretches: the heights come thick in the first and last movements and thin between.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Here the book is strongest, and the myth is built, not evoked. Dantès dies and is reborn: buried in a dead man’s sack, cast into the sea, raised by smugglers, given a new name from an island named for Christ. His teacher is a priest in a pit who hands him knowledge and a hidden treasure, the pattern of initiation. The returned man unrecognised by those who wronged him is the Odyssey’s homecoming; the Count calls himself Sinbad the Sailor and plays the djinn. Above all he takes the office of Providence, the avenging angel, and the book makes that archetype load-bearing and then puts it on trial. The charge is the stock furniture: the poisoner, the foundling, the bandit chief, the Oriental slave-princess.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Dumas inherited the revenge tragedy, the Gothic, Scott’s historical romance and the new roman-feuilleton, in which Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842 to 1843) came first. His turn is to set the revenge romance in the present, in the Paris of the reader’s own banks, Chamber and newspapers, and to make the avenger a man who manufactures identities and runs a plot inside society by money and information, a figure later fiction took as its own. That is a real departure in kind. The stake was small. The serial, its cliffhangers and its paid length were a proven market, and Les Trois Mousquetaires had proved the path in the same year. The prose and the method of narration are conventional; the swerve is in the conception of the hero and the setting.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The form carries knowledge. The fourteen years in the dark, given in a few chapters, and then the long, slow, almost leisurely execution in Paris make the reader live the patience of revenge, and the book’s last words state the form’s own law. The disguises, Busoni, Lord Wilmore, Sinbad and the Count, make the reader an accomplice who knows what the victims do not, so that the Paris chapters are dramatic irony sustained over hundreds of pages; that irony is how the book knows its hero’s power and his isolation. The serial’s mosaic of households, each with its secret, shows a society knit by hidden crimes. Held at this figure because much of the form is the market’s: the length and the chapter shapes are the feuilleton’s, not the knowledge’s.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The book is returned to with delight, and the return yields more than plot: the theology of the avenger; the systems of money and information under the July Monarchy; the father figures, Dantès’s father dead of hunger, Faria, Noirtier and Morrel; the Orientalism of Haydée and the Count’s household; Eugénie Danglars’s flight with Louise d’Armilly; and the question of what the Count is when the revenge is done. Criticism has worked these seams, and the readings have grown. Held at this figure because the evidence of inexhaustibility is weaker than its reach: the novel is reread mainly for its action, the second reading of the Paris middle yields less than the first, and the moral reckoning at the end is stated rather than left open.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is the popular novel and the plot of revenge. The force is moderate: the book reorganised the possibilities of the popular novel, but not of the novel as an art, as Balzac and Flaubert did; it perfected and fixed a kind. Within French letters it made the roman-feuilleton a form of national reading. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Count is the pattern of the wronged man returned in disguise to destroy his enemies through wealth and design; Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956) takes the plot openly; the costumed avenger of popular fiction, the masked vigilante of the pulps and comics, and the long line of revenge thrillers stand on it; it reached the stage in Dumas’s lifetime and has been filmed and serialised in many languages, as far as Japanese animation in Gankutsuou (2004).
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over some 180 years. The form is whole: the text survives entire and has never been out of print. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any nineteenth century novel: read in French and in a great many translations, taught, adapted and used. The surface is not fixed to its moment beyond the period furniture; the plot has outlived the July Monarchy entirely. The figure is the usual one for a text read without break over this span, and the further tenth is withheld because much of the presence runs through abridgements and adaptations rather than the text, and because its standing in the academy, repaired since the later twentieth century, was long below its readership’s.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Two crafts are weighed, and they part. As architecture of plot the book is a master’s work: dozens of threads laid in 1815 and closed in 1838 without loss; the Cavalcanti, the house at Auteuil and Benedetto converging; the trial, where Villefort prosecutes his own son and is undone by his own buried crime, set up across hundreds of pages; dialogue that moves and characterises at speed. As prose the book is thin. Sentences are serviceable, exposition is often delivered in conversation, the paid line pads with repartee, coincidence is leaned on (the right letter, the right witness, the right overheard word), and the persons of the Paris households, Albert, Franz, Debray, Château-Renaud, are lightly drawn. A famous book with thin sentences is charged for them.
Score: 7.7 / 10
One law governs the whole: every crime returns on its maker, by the agency of a man who believes himself Providence’s hand, and the law is tested and kept. Take the two most distant elements: the Château d’If, written as a chamber of tragedy and initiation, and the Roman carnival or the Danglars drawing room, written as bandit romance and comedy of manners; or the Oriental fantasy of the Count’s household beside the bank, the Chamber and the courts. They obey one physics because the Count is the hinge: the fantasy is his instrument, and the society is his object. The strains are the hashish dream and the operatic Haydée, which belong to another book’s law, and the gentleness of the ending, which half withdraws the doubt the boy’s death raised.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Held, not listed. History: Napoleon’s return from Elba and the Hundred Days, the Restoration and the July Monarchy. The prison. Trade: the merchant marine and the firm of Morrel. Money: the bank, the Bourse and the telegraph. The state: the Chamber of Peers and the court of assize. The world beyond France: the Greek war and the fall of Ali Pasha of Janina. The family: three households, each with its marriage and its secret, fathers and sons through three generations. The sacred: Faria’s priestly teaching and the Count’s claim to act for God. One plot holds them together. What the book holds less is consciousness: the inner life of most persons is given from outside, and the poor of Paris and the labour that makes the money stand at the edge.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, with The Sublime and The Encompassed at 8.4. A text whole and never out of print for some 180 years, read in French and in a great many translations; a myth of death in the sack and rebirth from the sea, initiation in the dark and an unrecognised return, built into the plot and put on trial; a book whose dungeon chapters rise as high as any it holds; and a plot that holds the Hundred Days, the bank, the Chamber, the court and three families in one design.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.5: the frame is tight and the four falls are required, but the serial paid by the line, and perhaps a fifth of the book says at length what could be said briefly. Next above it, The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 7.6, for a departure in the conception of the hero made on a proven market with conventional prose, and a yield on return weaker than the book’s reach; then The Made at 7.7, a master’s architecture of plot carried in thin sentences.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.5 against a threshold of 7.5, exactly. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 7.7, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 falls short by two tenths, since the book fixed a popular kind and did not reorganise the novel as an art; The Unconcealment at 7.8 falls short by seven, since its disclosure is half retracted in consolation; and The Swerve at 7.6 falls short by nine, since the stake was small and the art of the novel conventional. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis falls below 7.5, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1, from a sum of 96.9, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires; the unmet gate would hold it there in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, written with the collaboration of Auguste Maquet, serialised in the Journal des Débats from August 1844 to January 1846 and then issued in volumes. The unit scored is the complete novel as published, in 117 chapters, and the scores are judged on Dumas’s French; abridged versions are not the work. The translation used, for sense only, is Robin Buss’s unabridged English (Penguin, 1996), chosen because it is complete; the anonymous English of 1846, long the standard, was known only in part. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file; the French is quoted once, in the book’s last words, which are certain, with an English gloss beneath them that is not a published translation. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact days of the first and last instalments, the length of the novel in words, the share of dialogue in its lines, the exact words of the line on the sea as the fortress’s cemetery, the words of the Count’s doubt at the boy’s body, and a claim that a later American novel of the ancient world drew on this one.