The historical setting is a fundamental element of the book, an adventure story centrally concerned with themes of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy, and forgiveness.

Before he can marry his fiancée Mercédès, Edmond Dantès, a French nineteen-year-old first mate of the merchant ship Pharaon, is falsely accused of treason, arrested, and imprisoned without trial in the Château d'If, a grim island fortress off Marseille.

A fellow prisoner, Abbé Faria, correctly deduces that romantic rival Fernand Mondego, envious crewmate Danglars, and double-dealing magistrate De Villefort are responsible for his imprisonment.

On his deathbed, Leclère charged Dantès to deliver a package to General Bertrand (exiled with Napoleon), and a letter from Elba to a Bonapartist in Paris named Noirtier.

Knowing himself to be close to death from catalepsy and having grown fond of his pupil, Faria tells Dantès the location of a vast treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo.

When he is thrown into the sea, Dantès cuts through the sack and swims to a nearby island, where, claiming to be a shipwrecked sailor, he is rescued by Genoese smugglers.

At the end of the three months, Morrel is about to commit suicide when he learns that the debts have been mysteriously paid and that one of his lost ships has returned with a full cargo, secretly rebuilt and laden by Dantès.

He allows his ward, Haydée—the exiled daughter of Ali Pasha of Janina, whom Dantès purchased from slavery—to see Fernand, recognizing him as the man who betrayed and murdered her father and stole his fortune.

He manipulates the financial markets by bribing a telegraph operator to transmit a false message, causing Danglars to lose hundreds of thousands of francs.

Caderousse attempts to rob the Count's house but is caught by "Abbé Busoni" and forced to write a letter to Danglars, exposing "Cavalcanti" as an impostor.

The Count anonymously leaks to the newspapers Fernand's betrayal of Ali Pasha, and at the Chamber of Peers' inquiry into the accusations Haydée testifies against him as an eyewitness.

The bandits extort Danglars's ill-gotten gains out of him by forcing him to pay exorbitant prices for food and water; Dantès anonymously returns the money to the hospitals.

Having found peace, Dantès leaves the couple part of his fortune on the island and departs for the East to begin a new life with Haydée, who has declared her love for him.

The reader is left with a final line: "l'humaine sagesse était tout entière dans ces deux mots: attendre et espérer!"

The Count of Monte Cristo explores key themes such as justice and vengeance, focusing on Edmond Dantès' quest for revenge against those who wronged him.

[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.

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.

[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.

The 2009 Everyman's Library edition reprints the original anonymous English translation that first appeared in 1846, with revisions by Peter Washington and an introduction by Umberto Eco.

When he arrives in Paris, the Count brandishes an emerald box in which he carries small green pills compounded of hashish and opium which he uses for sleeplessness.

[17] The first Japanese translation by Kuroiwa Shūroku was entitled "Shigai Shiden Gankutsu-ou" (史外史伝巌窟王, "a historical story from outside history, the King of the Cavern"), and serialized from 1901 to 1902 in the Yorozu Chouhou newspaper, and released in book form in four volumes by publisher Aoki Suusandou in 1905.

Its influence can also be seen in how one of the first prominent cases of miscarriage of justice in Japan, in which an innocent man was charged with murder and imprisoned for half a century, is known in Japanese as the "Yoshida Gankutsu-ou incident" (吉田岩窟王事件).

[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.

In the novel, Dumas tells of the 1815 return of Napoleon I, and alludes to contemporary events when the governor at the Château d'If is promoted to a position at the castle of Ham.

In 1840, the body of Napoleon I was brought to France and became an object of veneration in the church of Les Invalides, renewing popular patriotic support for the Bonaparte family.

As the story opens, the character Dantès is not aware of the politics, considers himself simply a good French citizen, and is caught between the conflicting loyalties of the royalist Villefort during the Restoration, and the father of Villefort, Noirtier, loyal to Napoleon, a firm bonapartist, and the bonapartist loyalty of his late captain, in a period of rapid changes of government in France.

In "Causeries" (1860), Dumas published a short paper, "État civil du Comte de Monte-Cristo", on the genesis of the Count of Monte Cristo.

In a small boat, he sailed around the island of Monte Cristo, accompanied by a young prince, a cousin to Louis Bonaparte, who was to become Emperor Napoleon III of the French ten years later, in 1851.

The first, by Hailes Lacy, differs only slightly from Dumas' version with the main change being that Fernand Mondego is killed in a duel with the Count rather than committing suicide.