«The Count of Monte Cristo», Alexandre DumasHe claims a hundred names. I found ten

A hundred names

The promised number. In chapter 92 the count tells Fernand, the man who once helped put him in prison and then married his fiancée, that he has a hundred names. I didn’t find a hundred. I wrote down every name the book calls its hero by and counted, for each, the chapters where it turns up. There are ten, from Edmond Dantès to Zaccone.

The title lives longest: the Count of Monte Cristo, 73 chapters out of 117. His real name turns up in 36 chapters, and 26 of them are among the first twenty-eight: the betrothal, the prison, the escape, the treasure. The other eight names are masks for a single outing: the smugglers call him the Maltese in one chapter, Major Brack is mentioned once, in a chat about the races, Zaccone lasts three chapters.

What’s more interesting is where the name isn’t. From chapter 51 to chapter 88 the hero’s real name doesn’t appear once: thirty-eight chapters in a row without an “Edmond” or a “Dantès”. The count is in Paris, among people who once knew him, and the book keeps quiet along with him.

Number 34

His first name was taken from him. The nineteen-year-old sailor is arrested at his own betrothal feast and sent to the Château d’If without a trial. A year later the prison gets a new governor, who, Dumas writes, finds it too tedious to learn the prisoners’ names and calls them by the numbers of their cells. And “the unhappy young man was no longer called Edmond Dantès—he was now number 34”.

Not far away sits number 27, the Abbé Faria, and the two prisoners dig towards each other. For years the abbé teaches Dantès languages, history and science, and tells him the secret of a treasure on the island of Monte Cristo. Dantès escapes sewn into a sack in place of his dead friend, fourteen years after his arrest.

Near the end of the book the count goes back to the Château d’If as a tourist. The keeper shows him the cell and tells him about the prisoner who escaped in a sack. “Was his name ever known?” asks the count. “Oh, yes; but only as No. 34.” And the narrator, who has long called the hero the count, calls him Dantès again on the way to the fortress.

Two men in masks

My favourite chapter is 69. Villefort, the crown prosecutor who once sent Dantès to the Château d’If, wants to know who the count is. He calls on the Abbé Busoni as an envoy of the prefect of police, and soon asks for the lamp to be shaded: “the light tries my eyes very much”. Both men in that room are hiding their faces.

“Do you know the Count of Monte Cristo?” the visitor asks. “You mean Monsieur Zaccone, I presume?” the abbé replies. Monte Cristo, he explains, is the name of an estate, or rather of a rock, not a family name, and the count is the son of a rich Maltese shipowner. Then the visitor goes to Lord Wilmore, an Englishman who can’t stand the count, and hears about the same Zaccone.

The abbé and the lord are both the count. He answers questions about himself in two borrowed voices and invents a third, “real” name for himself. Once the visitor has gone, Lord Wilmore takes off his light hair, his red whiskers, his false jaw and his scar in the bedroom. And Villefort goes home and, for the first time since the dinner at Auteuil, sleeps soundly: he has learned nothing at all.

Who’s this?

In Paris the count meets everyone who once knew Edmond. Danglars, who wrote the denunciation, is now a baron and a banker. Fernand, who put it in the post, is now the Count de Morcerf, a general and a peer of France. Villefort is crown prosecutor. Not one of them recognizes him.

All Paris wonders who the Count of Monte Cristo is. Countess G. is sure he’s a vampire, “Lord Ruthven himself in a living form”. His horse wins a race, and the countess receives a cup with a note signed “Lord Ruthven”. Albert’s mother, her son says, takes the count for Cagliostro. She herself recognized him long ago, by his voice alone: her name is Mercédès, and she was once Edmond’s fiancée.

The count names himself in chapter 83, to the dying Caderousse, his father’s old neighbour, who knew about the denunciation and kept quiet. He pulls off the abbé’s wig, leans down and whispers in his ear. What name he whispers, the book doesn’t say. For thirty-eight chapters in a row the name is missing even where it’s spoken.

“Edmond”

His name is given back by the one who remembered it. In chapter 88 Albert, Mercédès’ son, insults the count at the Opera and challenges him to a duel. That night a veiled woman comes to the count and says, straight away: “Edmond, you will not kill my son!” It is the first “Edmond” in thirty-eight chapters. The count steps back, cries out and drops his pistol.

“Mercédès is dead, madame… I know no one now of that name.” She calls him Edmond again and again, and then she asks: “when I call you Edmond, why do you not call me Mercédès?” And he says her name back.

A name for a name. That same night the count promises her that her son will live: “Well, he shall live!” And in chapter 92 Fernand demands his real name, the count puts on a sailor’s jacket, and Fernand, backing out of the room, cries it himself: “Edmond Dantès!” The last letter in the book is signed with two names at once: “Edmond Dantès, Count of Monte Cristo.”

Verdict

Read it. Not for the escape, everyone knows that already, but for the way a man with a hundred names waits for someone to call him by his real one. And for chapter 69, where a prosecutor under a false name questions a count under two false names about himself.

People usually read this novel as children, as an adventure about revenge and treasure. To me it’s about a name: prison takes it away, the hero hides it behind masks, and only someone who remembers can give it back. One point off for Major Brack: he turns up in one chapter, and I still had to count him.