The Count of Monte Cristo

Dumas's novel, serialised in 1844–46, follows Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseille, betrayed by jealous rivals on the eve of his wedding and buried in the island fortress of the Château d'If by an ambitious prosecutor protecting his own secret. In fourteen years of prison, an old fellow captive, the Abbé Faria, educates him and reveals a hidden treasure; Dantès escapes sewn into a dead man's sack and thrown into the sea, and returns to Paris years later as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo, to reward his friends and punish, one by one, the men who destroyed him.

Written with Dumas's collaborator Auguste Maquet in newspaper instalments that held all France in suspense, it is one of the great adventure and revenge stories, and it also asks how far justice can go when one man takes it into his own hands. Among its characters is Haydée, the daughter of Ali Pasha of Janina, whose testimony brings down a traitor. Dumas's other great adventure is The Three Musketeers.

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was the grandson of a French nobleman and an enslaved woman of African descent in Saint-Domingue; his father became a general of the Revolution. Arriving in Paris as a clerk with little education, Dumas made his name in the theatre and then, with the collaborator Auguste Maquet, turned history into the most popular adventure novels of the century.

The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo were followed by dozens more, earning fortunes that Dumas spent as fast as they came, on travel, newspapers and a fantastic château. In 2002 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris among the great figures of France.