The Count uses these disguises to gain information about the characters whose lives he sets out to ruin.īefore his trip to Paris, the “Abbe Busoni” (really Dantes) meets with Caderousse and La Carconte at their inn. Dantes, for his part, assumes many disguises, including the Count of Monte Cristo (an explorer and celebrity of great wealth, erudition, and power, and of indeterminate national origin), the Abbe Busoni (a supposed Italian priest), and Lord Wilmore (an English banker). Caderousse, with his unpleasant wife, La Carconte, is manager of a broken-down inn. He has two children, one from his first marriage, named Valentine, and a second with Mme de Villefort, named Edouard.

Villefort has ascended to the position of crown prosecutor in Paris, and has married for the second time, after his first wife died. Fernand came into his own wealth as a solider-for-hire in the wars following 1815, then married Mercedes, purchased a noble title (“Count”), and had a son, Albert, whom Dantes first meets in Rome.

Danglars is now a wealthy banker in Paris, married to Hermine Danglars (who is having an affair with the much-younger diplomat Lucien Debray). But even those attachments of loving devotion pale when Dantes allows himself to consider the vengeance he will exact on those who have wronged him.ĭantes discovers, soon after finding the Monte Cristo fortune, that three of these four men have benefited from enormous good luck following the restoration of the French monarchy (the Royalists) in 1815. Dantes also wonders, with great urgency, what has become of his father and of Mercedes. Through ingenious methods, and following the instructions the Abbe has asked him to commit to memory, Dantes finds this fortune and begins spending it with one goal in mind: to punish the four men who put him in prison in the first place (Villefort, Danglars, Fernand, and Caderousse). He escapes and swims to freedom, first joining up with a gang of sailors, then making his way to the island of Monte Cristo, on which, Abbe Faria insists, an enormous fortune was buried by Italian nobles in the sixteenth century. When the Abbe dies of a stroke, Dantes winds himself in the old man’s death sheet and is thrown into the Mediterranean by guards. After planning for over a year, the two men try, and fail, to escape from Chateau D’If: the prison wardens, without learning of their plot, have fortified a weak point through which they might have been able to slip. The Abbe, a man of extreme erudition and great generosity of spirit, teaches Dantes everything he knows, from the languages and history of the world to science and philosophy. After digging furiously in the direction of the sound, and noticing that his inmate-neighbor has also been digging, Dantes meets the Abbe Faria. It’s at this crucial moment, however, that Dantes hears scraping on the other side of his prison wall. Finally, after many years in solitary confinement in a squalid dungeon, he decides to kill himself by refusing all food. In prison, Dantes is initially angry, then morose and withdrawn. Dantes, not understanding what he has done wrong, finds himself trapped in the dreaded Chateau D’If, a prison in the Mediterranean, where he suffers in near-silence for fourteen years. de Villefort is initially sympathetic to the young man’s plight, but when he realizes that Dantes has been carrying a message from Napoleon to Villefort’s own father, Noirtier (who is himself a Bonapartist sympathizer), Villefort decides to allow Dantes to be framed for Bonapartist allegiances so that Noirtier’s sympathies will not become public. Happenstance brings these three men together, and at Danglars’s insistence, they hatch a plot to frame Dantes as being supportive of Napoleon Bonaparte, the deposed emperor of France.ĭantes is arrested for alleged treason while at his feast of betrothal to Mercedes.

Furthermore, Fernand, a fisherman in the city’s Catalan district, is envious of Dantes’s engagement to Fernand’s cousin, the beautiful young woman Mercedes. The promotion also makes Dantes’s father’s neighbor, a tailor named Caderousse, jealous. Morrel, who owns and operates the ship (and who is therefore Dantes’ boss and mentor) promotes Dantes to captain, which upsets the ship’s cargo manager, Danglars. He is first mate on the ship Pharaon, which docks in Marseille in 1814. Edmond Dantes is a nineteen year-old with a bright future.

The count of monte cristo movie summary