Count Of Montecristo

The Count of Monte Cristo
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Level 3 Retold by Karen Holmes Series Editors: Andy Hopkins and Jocelyn Potter

Contents

Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

The Ship Comes Home
Father and Son Mercedes

Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7
Chapter 8

The Judge The Prison
Underground

Number 27
Faria's Room

Chapter 9

The Story of the TreasureChapter 10 The Death of Faria Chapter 11 The Grave of the Chateau d'If Chapter 12 The Young Amelia Chapter 13 Monte Cristo Chapter 14 Treasure Chapter 15 At Marseilles

Activities

Introduction
Dantes stood up and looked in front of the boat. A hundred metres away, he saw the black and frightening shape of the rock where the Chateau d'If stands. The prison was about 300 years old. 'People tellmany strange stories about this place, 'Dantes thought. 'Prisoners go there and never return. Is this the end of all hope?'
Edmond Dantes is a successful young seaman. He has a loving father and a beautiful lover, Mercedes, who is going to marry him. Soon he is going to be the captain of his own ship. What can go wrong in his life? Edmond has enemies who hate his success. They tell the governmentthat he is helping Napoleon. Napoleon wants to return to France as its ruler. On the day of Edmond's wedding to Mercedes, he is taken to the prison at the Chateau d'If and thrown into a dark, frightening underground room. Is this the end of his life as a free man? Another prisoner, Faria, tells Edmond about some treasure on the island of Monte Cristo. The two men try to escape from the prison, butFaria dies from a serious illness. Will Edmond escape? Will he reach the island of Monte Cristo and find the treasure? And will he ever return to his father and Mercedes in the city of

Marseilles?
This exciting adventure story takes place in France in the 1800s. Some of the people and places in it are real. When the writer Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802, Napoleon became ruler of France. Formany years he fought wars across Europe, and France became a very strong country. But in 1814, Napoleon's enemies sent him away from France to the island of Elba. These enemies — Prussia, Russia, Britain, Austria, Sweden and other countries — brought the Bourbon
V

kings back to rule France. Many French people did not like these new rulers, and Napoleon knew this. In 1815, the year when TheCount of Monte Cristo begins, he returned to his home country. Napoleon escaped from Elba and sailed to Cannes, in the south of France. His friends joined him there and he went to Paris. The king, Louis XVIII, left the country. Napoleon reached Paris on 20th March and became the ruler of France for one hundred days. Then he lost a great fight at Waterloo and he was sent to the island of St Helena.He died there in 1821. We read about another real person in this book - Cesare Borgia. The Borgia family played an important part in Italian history. Cesare Borgia was born in 1475. His father, Roderigo Borgia, became Pope* Alexander VI in 1492. Cesare was a politician and a soldier. He fought for, and won, many Italian cities, but he was a hard and unkind ruler. After his father died, Cesare wentto prison. Later, he escaped to Spain and fought for the King of Navarre. The prison of the Chateau d'If stands at the entrance to the old French port of Marseilles. As Edmond Dantes says, in the past this was a prison for 'important people, enemies of the king'. Today it holds no prisoners, but visitors can go there. Many of these visitors have read The Count of Monte Cristo.

Dumas enjoyedtravel and adventure. He joined Garibaldi in
Sicily in 1860. He was part of Garibaldi's fight to make Italy into

'one great country'. This is the same 'great country' that Faria dreams of in The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas wrote this book in 1844. He got the idea from a true story about a French shoemaker who was going to marry a rich woman. His enemies lied about him and he went to prison....