Franz and Albert Montcerf take a sightseeing trip to Rome and decide to risk being attacked by brigands by taking a risky path outside the city...

Publication
The Count of Monte Cristo was originally published in the Journal des Débats in eighteen parts. Serialization ran from 28 August 1844 to 15 January 1846. The first edition in book form was published in Paris by Pétion in 18 volumes with the first two issued in 1844 and the remaining sixteen in 1845.[11] Most of the Belgian pirated editions, the first Paris edition and many others up to the Lécrivain et Toubon illustrated edition of 1860 feature a misspelling of the title with "Christo" used instead of "Cristo". The first edition to feature the correct spelling was the L'Écho des Feuilletons illustrated edition, Paris 1846. This edition featured plates by Paul Gavarni and Tony Johannot and was said to be "revised" and "corrected", although only the chapter structure appears to have been altered with an additional chapter entitled La Maison des Allées de Meilhan having been created by splitting Le Départ into two.[12]

Front page of translation into Judeo-Tunisian Arabic, 1889
English translations
The first appearance of The Count of Monte Cristo in English was the first part of a serialization by W. Harrison Ainsworth in volume VII of Ainsworth's Magazine published in 1845, although this was an abridged summary of the first part of the novel only and was entitled The Prisoner of If. Ainsworth translated the remaining chapters of the novel, again in abridged form, and issued these in volumes VIII and IX of the magazine in 1845 and 1846 respectively.[12] Another abridged serialization appeared in The London Journal between 1846 and 1847.

The first single volume translation in English was an abridged edition with woodcuts published by Geo Pierce in January 1846 entitled The Prisoner of If or The Revenge of Monte Christo.[12]

In April 1846, volume three of the Parlour Novelist, Belfast, Ireland: Simms and M'Intyre, London: W S Orr and Company, featured the first part of an unabridged translation of the novel by Emma Hardy. The remaining two parts would be issued as the Count of Monte Christo volumes I and II in volumes 8 and 9 of the Parlour Novelist respectively.[12]

The most common English translation is an anonymous one originally published in 1846 by Chapman and Hall. This was originally released in ten weekly installments from March 1846 with six pages of letterpress and two illustrations by M Valentin.[13] The translation was released in book form with all twenty illustrations in two volumes in May 1846, a month after the release of the first part of the above-mentioned translation by Emma Hardy.[12] The translation follows the revised French edition of 1846, with the correct spelling of "Cristo" and the extra chapter The House on the Allées de Meilhan.

Most English editions of the novel follow the anonymous translation. In 1889, two of the major American publishers Little Brown and T.Y. Crowell updated the translation, correcting mistakes and revising the text to reflect the original serialized version. This resulted in the removal of the chapter The House on the Allées de Meilhan, with the text restored to the end of the chapter called The Departure.[14][15]

A young, adventurous Baron named Franz DiPinay ventures onto the island of Monte Cristo when the boat he had hired to take him elsewhere comes ashore after spotting a campfire on the beach. Franz becomes the first to be entangled in the intricate web of revenge that Dantes has planned-

Reception and legacy
The original work was published in serial form in the Journal des Débats in 1844. Carlos Javier Villafane Mercado described the effect in Europe:

The effect of the serials, which held vast audiences enthralled ... is unlike any experience of reading we are likely to have known ourselves, maybe something like that of a particularly gripping television series. Day after day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else.

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The Montecristo Cuban cigar brand is allegedly named after the fondness of cigar rollers for listening to the novel read by a lector during their work.
George Saintsbury stated that "Monte Cristo is said to have been at its first appearance, and for some time subsequently, the most popular book in Europe. Perhaps no novel within a given number of years had so many readers and penetrated into so many different countries."[19] This popularity has extended into modern times as well. The book was "translated into virtually all modern languages and has never been out of print in most of them. There have been at least twenty-nine motion pictures based on it ... as well as several television series, and many movies [have] worked the name 'Monte Cristo' into their titles."[ The title Monte Cristo lives on in a "famous gold mine, a line of luxury Cuban cigars, a sandwich, and any number of bars and casinos—it even lurks in the name of the street-corner hustle three-card monte."

Modern Russian writer and philologist Vadim Nikolayev determined The Count of Monte-Cristo as a megapolyphonic novel

The novel has been the inspiration for many other books, from Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur (1880),[22] then to a science fiction retelling in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination,[23] and to Stephen Fry's The Stars' Tennis Balls (entitled Revenge in the U.S.)

Fantasy novelist Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances series have all used Dumas novels (particularly the Three Musketeers series) as their chief inspiration, recasting the plots of those novels to fit within Brust's established world of Dragaera His 2020 novel The Baron of Magister Valley follows suit, using The Count of Monte Cristo as a starting point ] Jin Yong has admitted some influence from Dumas, his favorite non-Chinese novelist.[28] Some commentators feel that the plot of A Deadly Secret resembles The Count of Monte Cristo, except that they are based in different countries and historical periods.

Background to elements of the plot
A short novel titled Georges by Dumas was published in 1843, before The Count of Monte Cristo was written. This novel is of particular interest to scholars because Dumas reused many of the ideas and plot devices in The Count of Monte Cristo.[5]

Dumas wrote that the germ of the idea of revenge as one theme in his novel The Count of Monte Cristo came from an anecdote (Le Diamant et la Vengeance[6]) published in a memoir of incidents in France in 1838, written by an archivist of the Paris police.[7][8] The archivist was Jacques Peuchet, and the multi-volume book was called Memoirs from the Archives of the Paris Police in English.[9] Dumas included this essay in one of the editions of his novel published in 1846.[10]

Peuchet related the tale of a shoemaker, Pierre Picaud, living in Nîmes in 1807, who was engaged to marry a rich woman when three jealous friends falsely accused him of being a spy on behalf of England in a period of wars between France and England. Picaud was placed under a form of house arrest in the Fenestrelle Fort, where he served as a servant to a rich Italian cleric. When the cleric died, he left his fortune to Picaud, whom he had begun to treat as a son. Picaud then spent years plotting his revenge on the three men who were responsible for his misfortune. He stabbed the first with a dagger on which the words "Number One" were printed, and then he poisoned the second. The third man's son he lured into crime and his daughter into prostitution, finally stabbing the man himself. This third man, named Loupian, had married Picaud's fiancée while Picaud was under arrest.[6]

In another of the true stories reported by Ashton-Wolfe, Peuchet describes a poisoning in a family.[10] This story is also mentioned in the Pléiade edition of this novel,[8] and it probably served as a model for the chapter of the murders inside the Villefort family. The introduction to the Pléiade edition mentions other sources from real life: a man named Abbé Faria existed, was imprisoned but did not die in prison; he died in 1819 and left no large legacy to anyone.[8] As for Dantès, his fate is quite different from his model in Peuchet's book, since that model is murdered by the "Caderousse" of the plot.

An Englishman from a firm to which Morell owes money stops by for a long talk with Morrell...who is awaiting news of his ship.

The innkeeper takes time to give the traveller answers regarding persons of the past whom he knew well....

A solitary priest approaches a small empty tavern near the banks of a river and inquires of the owner, who name we know.

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