In the Review’s April 9 issue, on the occasion of the eight-episode PBS adaptation, Michael Dirda revisits Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, “simply the classic novel of revenge”:

The Hound of the Baskervilles might have been more spookily atmospheric, Journey to the Center of the Earth more wondrous, and King Solomon’s Mines even more adventure-packed, but The Count of Monte Cristo offered an overweight, near-sighted kid from a working-class family something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

Dumas, who “lived intensely and on a grand scale,” had a genius for “transmuting dry historical records into vibrant page-turners.” In the Mémoires tirés des archives de la police de Paris of 1838, he found an ideal historical record—“about an unjustly imprisoned shoemaker”—for a vibrant 1,243-page novel of “incarceration, escape, and revenge.”

Below, alongside Dirda’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Dumas and the French Romantics.

Michael Dirda
Dantès’s Inferno

When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, it offered something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

Peter Brooks
Behind the Iron Mask

“Alexandre Dumas…stands alongside Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac as one of the most extravagantly fertile narrative producers of all time. The three of them make of the first half of the French nineteenth century an extraordinary moment for fabulation.”

—May 23, 2013

Graham Robb
The Pens of the Musketeer

“In the list of most frequently translated authors, Dumas appears in eighteenth place, between Pope John Paul II and Arthur Conan Doyle. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Les Trois Mousquetaires account for over one third of these translations, but practically all his other works are available in several languages. As Victor Hugo told Dumas’s son in 1872, ‘The name of Alexandre Dumas is more than French, it is European; it is more than European, it is universal.’”

—March 20, 2008

Richard Holmes
The Fantoms of Théophile Gautier

“The rapid, mandarin brilliance of Gautier’s prose was widely recognized and admired, together with his famous facility. ‘It’s all a question of good syntax,’ he would say. ‘I throw my sentences into the air…and like cats I know they will always land on their feet.’ He was also known for his adventurous travel books (dashed off during summer vacations), his love of Mediterranean cooking, his interest in opium, and his uninhibited love of the female nude (ideally in marble, but if necessary in the bath).”

—August 14, 2008

Simon Leys
Giant

“What has contributed to obscure Victor Hugo’s role as the decisive pioneer of modern French poetry—down to its most elitist and hermetic twentieth-century expressions—is the vulgar institutionalization of his colossal fame that took place at the end of his life.”

—December 17, 1998

V.S. Pritchett
The Disconcerting Sibyl

“The spell imposed by George Sand on European and Russian readers and critics in the nineteenth century is understandable; her people and landscapes are silhouettes seen in sheet lightning. For ourselves, what has been left is her notorious life story and the throbbing of her powerful temperament.”

—August 17, 1978

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