Read by Kristin LeMoine, Gord Mackenzie, Betsie Bush, Jc Guan, J. M. Smallheer, Chip, wolvrin, Lizzie Driver, R. Francis Smith, Vicki Barbour · 128 chapters · 49 h 43
Marseille, 1815. Edmond Dantès is nineteen, newly promoted captain of a merchant ship, engaged to the woman he loves, and almost impossibly happy. Then a handful of jealous acquaintances put his name on a false accusation, and a single afternoon sends him to the sea-bound prison of the Château d’If. In the darkness of his cell he meets a fellow prisoner whose learning and secret change everything. Years later a very different man appears in Paris and Rome: rich, courteous, impossible to read, and moving with perfect patience among the powerful families of his day.
Alexandre Dumas’s great adventure novel is a story of justice, vengeance, mercy and forgiveness, told with huge energy across continents and decades. Here it comes in 128 short instalments and nearly fifty hours of voices, ideal for long walks, long drives and long winter evenings. Take your time with it; it rewards patience, just as its hero does.
Introduction
Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was one of the most widely read French writers of the nineteenth century. He wrote plays, travel books and historical novels, and had a particular gift for serial storytelling, in which chapters appeared in newspapers and readers waited eagerly for the next one. The Count of Monte Cristo was published in 1844, in the same period as The Three Musketeers, and the two books remain his best-known works. Like many of his novels, it grew from plot outlines worked out with a collaborator, Auguste Maquet, a fact that scholars have long discussed.
The story is set in France, Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1838, from the eve of Napoleon’s return from Elba to the reign of Louis-Philippe. That historical backdrop is not mere decoration: the politics of the age, with its shifting loyalties between Bonapartists and royalists, is what sets the plot in motion and gives it its edge. The novel has been adapted for the stage, cinema and television many times.
This recording divides the book into 128 sections and runs to roughly fifty hours. It was made by a large group of LibriVox volunteers, each taking a share of the chapters, so the voices change as the story moves from Marseille to Rome and on to Paris. Some chapters are offered in alternate versions, which is worth knowing if you listen in order.
Why listen today? Because this is a book about what injustice does to a person and what a person may do with time, money and knowledge. It is also, simply, very good company over a long stretch of days.
Public domain
Alexandre Dumas died in 1870: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
