The Count and I (and my brother)
Spoiler warning for The Count of Monte Cristo!
My brother and I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, when we were children. Well I remember how upset he (at twelve years old) was about all the nefarious doings in the first chapters! When I rang him up to tell him that I was re-reading the book, and to chat about it, he was upset all over again. His heart's in the right place. And what a capacious memory he has! He recalled almost the entire cast, large though it is.
He also remembered how confused I was by the absence of the titular count in the first thirty chapters or so, where the main character appears to be one Edmond Dantès. Back then I was sceptical about his explanation of names vs. titles, but meanwhile I have discovered (and conceded) that he was right. We were both rather disappointed to find that hardly any of the characters are nobly born – they all acquire their titles by merit or money. At that age, we believed in an inherent kind of nobility, transmitted by blood. It took us until after The Lord of the Rings to get over that. Now I want to find out more about Dumas, his political views, and those of his contemporaries. Can anyone suggest a good biography?
On re-reading, the first chapters of The Count of Monte Cristo made me long for Marseille, where my brother now lives. The descriptions of locale are detailed and precise. Dominic told me how astonished he was when he moved there that so many street names seemed familiar. When I first visited him, we kept crossing the book’s itineraries.
“And that,” he said, pointing across the bright blue bay, “that is the Chateau d’If!” We both shuddered.
“Do you remember how we tried to make ink from wood ash and elderberry juice?”
We had been deeply impressed by Abbé Faría, the scholarly priest who takes Edmond under his wing when imprisoned at the Chateau d’If, and the ingenuity he displays in making everything he requires. But Mum had decided during our Robinson Crusoe phase (or was it as early as Moomin?) that we needed a set of outdoor clothes, destined to gather stains and go to rags and to be changed in the porch before coming in, so the elderberry stains didn’t matter.
Mum is of the “let them read what they want” school of thought. I had never doubted her, but my re-read made me re-consider.
The Count of Monte Cristo is not precisely an historical novel, since the period in which it is set – 1815 to 1839 – was living memory at the time Dumas wrote the story, which he completed in 1844. At our first reading, my brother and I didn’t pay much attention to the historical context, although we had been to Elba on holiday and knew about Napoleon. Dumas’s references to Byron went completely over our heads: his works and his characters are often mentioned, and apparently the Countess G–, a recurrent minor character, is identified with Byron’s former lover, the Contessa Guiccioli.
Learning all this raised a bit of a niggle at the back of my mind; my brother was astonished. “You mean this Byron fellow you’re always going on about comes up in the book? And Ali Pasha is an historical figure? He really existed?” He did; and Mark Mazower in his magisterial study The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe begins his chapter on “Ali Pasha’s Ancien Regime” with a quotation from The Count of Monte Cristo.
The reason I’m reading Mazower’s book is that my own work in progress (only a novel) is partly set in the Peloponnese in 1818. In his back story, my hero travelled with Byron in Greece in 1810. Veli Pasha has a cameo appearance: he was the son of Ali Pasha, whose fictitious daughter Haydée (herself named after one of the characters in Byron’s Don Juan) is a character in Dumas’s novel. I have often wondered why the teenage me took so readily to Byron; why Ali Pasha seemed such a familiar figure; why I was drawn to reading about Greek independence. Is it because my brother and I read The Count of Monte Cristo when we were children? Are there other influences that formed my tastes all unnoticed? Was their influence limited to odd bits of knowledge and literary predilections, or did it extend to views and values? That’s what I found so disconcerting. The Count of Monte Cristo is all about revenge.
There, however, I think I can rest easy. It strikes me as almost comical that Dumas’s hero should spend years with a priest without gaining the least insight into so basic a Christian principle as forgiveness. To me, kindness and charity have always been the finest among the Christian virtues, and not just the Christian ones either. The other night I went to the opera to hear Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail and went home humming the final act’s “Nichts ist so hässlich als die Rache . . . Nothing is as ugly as revenge.”
Dumas may have known Entführung; it premiered in Paris in 1801. My brother and I knew it when we first read Monte Cristo: our parents had taken us to the Met to see it.
That was another disconcerting discovery. I wasn’t sure where and when or even whether I’d heard Entführung, but as soon as the overture began, I remembered Mum explaining the plot. That must have been how I first heard of white slavery. One of the characters exclaims: “A fig for your pasha! Girls aren’t goods or gifts! I am an Englishwoman, born to freedom, and I will defy anyone trying to force their will on me!” The hero of my work in progress is a veteran of the 1816 bombardment of Algiers, an attempt by Britain and the Netherlands to put a stop to the Barbary states’ practice of enslaving Europeans. Not that this put a stop to white slavery: Mazower describes how, after 1821, Greek captives were sold on slave markets in Egypt and elsewhere. Dumas’s Haydée was a slave, redeemed by the Count of Monte Cristo.
Curiously, the Entführung I heard the other night began with Selim stepping in front of the curtain with a text that is not in the libretto: “There is no greater pain than to remember happy times when we are in misery.” Or, in Dorothy Sayers’s translation: “The bitterest of woes / Is to remember in our wretchedness / Old happy times . . .”. This is from Dante’s Inferno, Canto V, and it is the epigraph to Byron’s Corsair: “ . . . nessun maggior dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria.”
My brother knows a lot about neurons and how brains work. “Fancy you remembering all that,” he said. “I know we went to the opera, but I can’t recall a thing about it.”
“Yes, but you remember Noirtier, and Luigi Vampa, and Bertuccio. Anyway, do you think all that is why I’m writing what I’m writing?”
“Sure. And here’s another thing: it’s why a robot could never write what you’re writing, although they’d write what they write a darn sight faster than you do. When’s it going to be finished? I want to read it!”
Sometimes my big brother says exactly the right thing. “I love you, Dominic,” I said.
“Steady on,” he replied.
My brother and I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, when we were children. Well I remember how upset he (at twelve years old) was about all the nefarious doings in the first chapters! When I rang him up to tell him that I was re-reading the book, and to chat about it, he was upset all over again. His heart's in the right place. And what a capacious memory he has! He recalled almost the entire cast, large though it is.
He also remembered how confused I was by the absence of the titular count in the first thirty chapters or so, where the main character appears to be one Edmond Dantès. Back then I was sceptical about his explanation of names vs. titles, but meanwhile I have discovered (and conceded) that he was right. We were both rather disappointed to find that hardly any of the characters are nobly born – they all acquire their titles by merit or money. At that age, we believed in an inherent kind of nobility, transmitted by blood. It took us until after The Lord of the Rings to get over that. Now I want to find out more about Dumas, his political views, and those of his contemporaries. Can anyone suggest a good biography?
On re-reading, the first chapters of The Count of Monte Cristo made me long for Marseille, where my brother now lives. The descriptions of locale are detailed and precise. Dominic told me how astonished he was when he moved there that so many street names seemed familiar. When I first visited him, we kept crossing the book’s itineraries.
“And that,” he said, pointing across the bright blue bay, “that is the Chateau d’If!” We both shuddered.
“Do you remember how we tried to make ink from wood ash and elderberry juice?”
We had been deeply impressed by Abbé Faría, the scholarly priest who takes Edmond under his wing when imprisoned at the Chateau d’If, and the ingenuity he displays in making everything he requires. But Mum had decided during our Robinson Crusoe phase (or was it as early as Moomin?) that we needed a set of outdoor clothes, destined to gather stains and go to rags and to be changed in the porch before coming in, so the elderberry stains didn’t matter.
Mum is of the “let them read what they want” school of thought. I had never doubted her, but my re-read made me re-consider.
The Count of Monte Cristo is not precisely an historical novel, since the period in which it is set – 1815 to 1839 – was living memory at the time Dumas wrote the story, which he completed in 1844. At our first reading, my brother and I didn’t pay much attention to the historical context, although we had been to Elba on holiday and knew about Napoleon. Dumas’s references to Byron went completely over our heads: his works and his characters are often mentioned, and apparently the Countess G–, a recurrent minor character, is identified with Byron’s former lover, the Contessa Guiccioli.
Learning all this raised a bit of a niggle at the back of my mind; my brother was astonished. “You mean this Byron fellow you’re always going on about comes up in the book? And Ali Pasha is an historical figure? He really existed?” He did; and Mark Mazower in his magisterial study The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe begins his chapter on “Ali Pasha’s Ancien Regime” with a quotation from The Count of Monte Cristo.
The reason I’m reading Mazower’s book is that my own work in progress (only a novel) is partly set in the Peloponnese in 1818. In his back story, my hero travelled with Byron in Greece in 1810. Veli Pasha has a cameo appearance: he was the son of Ali Pasha, whose fictitious daughter Haydée (herself named after one of the characters in Byron’s Don Juan) is a character in Dumas’s novel. I have often wondered why the teenage me took so readily to Byron; why Ali Pasha seemed such a familiar figure; why I was drawn to reading about Greek independence. Is it because my brother and I read The Count of Monte Cristo when we were children? Are there other influences that formed my tastes all unnoticed? Was their influence limited to odd bits of knowledge and literary predilections, or did it extend to views and values? That’s what I found so disconcerting. The Count of Monte Cristo is all about revenge.
There, however, I think I can rest easy. It strikes me as almost comical that Dumas’s hero should spend years with a priest without gaining the least insight into so basic a Christian principle as forgiveness. To me, kindness and charity have always been the finest among the Christian virtues, and not just the Christian ones either. The other night I went to the opera to hear Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail and went home humming the final act’s “Nichts ist so hässlich als die Rache . . . Nothing is as ugly as revenge.”
Dumas may have known Entführung; it premiered in Paris in 1801. My brother and I knew it when we first read Monte Cristo: our parents had taken us to the Met to see it.
That was another disconcerting discovery. I wasn’t sure where and when or even whether I’d heard Entführung, but as soon as the overture began, I remembered Mum explaining the plot. That must have been how I first heard of white slavery. One of the characters exclaims: “A fig for your pasha! Girls aren’t goods or gifts! I am an Englishwoman, born to freedom, and I will defy anyone trying to force their will on me!” The hero of my work in progress is a veteran of the 1816 bombardment of Algiers, an attempt by Britain and the Netherlands to put a stop to the Barbary states’ practice of enslaving Europeans. Not that this put a stop to white slavery: Mazower describes how, after 1821, Greek captives were sold on slave markets in Egypt and elsewhere. Dumas’s Haydée was a slave, redeemed by the Count of Monte Cristo.
Curiously, the Entführung I heard the other night began with Selim stepping in front of the curtain with a text that is not in the libretto: “There is no greater pain than to remember happy times when we are in misery.” Or, in Dorothy Sayers’s translation: “The bitterest of woes / Is to remember in our wretchedness / Old happy times . . .”. This is from Dante’s Inferno, Canto V, and it is the epigraph to Byron’s Corsair: “ . . . nessun maggior dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria.”
My brother knows a lot about neurons and how brains work. “Fancy you remembering all that,” he said. “I know we went to the opera, but I can’t recall a thing about it.”
“Yes, but you remember Noirtier, and Luigi Vampa, and Bertuccio. Anyway, do you think all that is why I’m writing what I’m writing?”
“Sure. And here’s another thing: it’s why a robot could never write what you’re writing, although they’d write what they write a darn sight faster than you do. When’s it going to be finished? I want to read it!”
Sometimes my big brother says exactly the right thing. “I love you, Dominic,” I said.
“Steady on,” he replied.
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