The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (208 page)

To some, Napoleon’s foreign conquests and grandiose style seemed to herald a new era of glory for France; to others, including some in the countries annexed to France, he appeared to be carrying forward the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality; to French liberals, he appeared an increasingly autocratic tyrant; and by monarchists, of whatever country, he was seen as merely an upstart and a usurper. His disastrous Russian campaign (1812) led ultimately to his abdication in April 1814 and his exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba, where he was allowed to retain his title of Emperor and sovereignty over its inhabitants. Meanwhile the Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, was restored to the throne.

In March 1815 (the time when the novel begins), Napoleon escaped from Elba. The army rallied to him, the king fled and the empire was restored for the brief period known as the Hundred Days, which ended (18 June 1815) with the victory of the allied coalition at Waterloo. Napoleon again abdicated and was exiled to the Atlantic outpost of St Helena.

Louis XVIII regained his throne and was succeeded on his death (1824) by his brother, Charles X. This undistinguished Second Restoration ended in 1830 with the July Revolution, which installed another branch of the royal family, under King Louis-Philippe. Most of those who lived through this period found it stale and inglorious after the excitements of the Revolution and the victories of the empire, and its writers (Stendhal, Musset, Vigny, Lamartine, Hugo) reflect this sense of disillusionment in various ways. In fact, the Restoration was a time of considerable intellectual ferment, from the realm of academic, scientific and historical enquiry to the expansion of the periodical press, theatres and other forms of popular entertainment, and the ideological battles over Romanticism in literature and the arts.

2
.
Joséphine
: Joséphine de Beauharnais (1763–1814), Napoleon’s first wife, whom he divorced in 1809 because she could not bear him an heir.

3
.
the Cross of Saint Louis
: Under the royalist regime, the state decoration equivalent to the orders of the Legion of Honour (which Napoleon instituted in 1802).

4
.
the exile of Hartwell
: Louis XVIII, as Count of Provence, lived at Hartwell in Buckinghamshire from 1809 to 1814. Dumas portrays him (in the next chapter) as a pedantic classical scholar, incapable of managing his country’s affairs.

5
.
the 9th Thermidor and the 4th April 1814
: The first of these dates, given according to the republican calendar which replaced the Christian calendar in France from 1703 to 1806, was the day on which Robespierre fell; the second was that of Napoleon’s abdication. To a monarchist, both would have been happy events.

6
.
a Girondin
: A member of the moderate party under the Revolution, which was opposed to the Terror and was overthrown by Robespierre in
June 1793. This seems to be an error by Dumas: elsewhere, it is made clear that Noirtier is a member of the more extreme sect, the Jacobins.

7
.
two thousand leagues
: Approximately 8,000 kilometres. A league is about 4 kilometres (or 2½ miles).

8
.
the poor Duc d’Enghien
: Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon, Duc d’Enghien (1772–1804), went into exile at the time of the Revolution and lived in Germany as one of the leaders of the anti-revolutionary armies. In 1804 he was kidnapped (almost certainly on Napoleon’s order and in contravention of international law), tried in Vincennes on a charge of conspiracy, and shot. He became a martyr of the opposition to Napoleon.

9
.
Aesculapius
: Roman god of healing and medicine.

1
.
carbonari
: Members of a secret society formed to combat the annexation of northern Italy by France under Napoleon and, later, to struggle for freedom from Austria. A meeting (of twenty members) was called a
vente
.

1
.
the Château d’If
: The island fortress, made famous by Dumas’ novel, had in reality only one notorious prisoner, the Comte de Mirabeau, who was sent there under the Royalist regime for debt.

2
.
the abbé
: Originally (like the English ‘abbot’) this meant the head of a monastery; but after the Middle Ages it came to be used of any ecclesiastic, usually one who had not taken priestly vows.

1
.
the fatal stamp of which Virgil speaks
: Virgil,
Aeneid
, IV, ll. 70–74, referring to a deer wounded by a hunter’s arrow.

2
.
Hoffmann
: Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822), German author and composer, the writer of a series of fantastic tales which greatly influenced the Romantic movement (and inspired Offenbach’s opera,
Tales of Hoffmann
).

1
.
Louis-Philippe
: Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (1773–1850), became king after the Revolution of July 1830 (see note 1 to
Chapter
VI
).

2
.
Gryphius
: An edition of Horace’s poems published in Lyons in 1540. The details are supposed to reinforce the idea of Louis as a pedantic old man, more interested in his books than in affairs of state.

3
.
‘Canimus surdis’
: ‘We sing for the deaf’. A misquotation of Virgil,
Eclogues
, X, 8: ‘We do not sing for the deaf’.

4
.
Pastor quum trahiret
: ‘As the shepherd was hurrying’; Horace,
Odes
, I, 15, line 1. This refers to Paris’ abduction of Helen, Paris having been brought up by shepherds.

5
.
‘Mala ducis avi domum’
: ‘Under evil auspices you are leading home’; Horace,
Odes
, I, 15, line 5. Again, this refers to Paris carrying Helen off to Troy (her abduction being the cause of the Trojan War).

6
.
bella, horrida bella
: ‘Wars, frightful wars’; Virgil,
Aeneid
, IV, line 86. Like the previous quotations, this is an indirect comment on the political situation and the threat of war, perhaps suggesting that Louis has a better understanding of events than it appears.

7
.
prurigo
: Various types of skin disease, characterized by intense itching, are known under this name.

8
.
two Virgilian shepherds
: Some of the
Eclogues
(or
Bucolics
), Virgil’s pastoral poems, are written as dialogues between shepherds (e.g. the first, fifth, seventh, eighth and ninth), with the speakers responding to one another in carefully balanced passages.

9
.
grognards
: ‘Grumblers’, ‘gripers’, ‘grousers’; the name given to the loyal old guard of Napoleon’s army.

10
.
Molli fugiens anhelitu
: ‘Thou shalt flee, panting and weak’; Horace,
Odes
, I, 15, line 31. Nereus is prophesying that Paris will flee from the Greek hero Diomedes.

11
.
‘Justum et tenacem propositi virum’
: ‘The man who is firm and just in his intentions’, Horace,
Odes
, III, 3, line 1.

1
.
Arcole, Marengo and Austerlitz
: Battles in which Napoleon defeated the successive coalitions against him.

1
.
the Hundred Days
: See note 1 to
Chapter
VI
.

1
.
one of Marcellus’ soldiers
: The geometer Archimedes directed the defence of his native city of Syracuse against the Romans, led by Marcellus. When Syracuse fell (
212 BC
), ‘the Roman general gave strict orders to his soldiers not to hurt Archimedes, and even offered a reward to him who brought him alive and safe into his presence. All these precautions were useless: he was so deeply engaged in solving a problem, that he was even ignorant that the soldiers were in possession of the town; and a soldier, without knowing who he was, killed him…’ (Lemprière,
Classical Dictionary
, 1828).

2
.
Abbé Faria
: In creating this fictional character, Dumas has drawn on the personality of a real Portuguese cleric, José-Custodio de Faria (1756–1819), an eccentric figure in Parisian society in the early years of the century because of his experiments with hypnotism and magnetism. A student of Swedenborg and Mesmer, he lectured on hypnotism in Paris from 1813 onwards.

1
.
Martin’s Babylonian scenes
: The English artist John Martin (1789–1854) specialized in vast and spectacular canvases of biblical subjects, including
The Fall of Babylon
(1819). They were well known from lithographs.

2
.
Ugolino
: Dante’s
Inferno
, XXXII, 124–9. Count Ugolino Della Gherardesca was the leader of the Guelph (pro-papal) faction in Pisa, but fell victim to a conspiracy led by Archbishop Ruggieri. In 1289, with his sons and grandsons, he was walled up in the Torre della Fame in the Piazza dei Cavalieri where, according to Dante, he resorted to cannibalism and as a punishment was condemned for eternity to gnaw at Ruggieri’s skull.

3
.
Belshazzar’s feast
: Interrupted by a mysterious hand, writing the three fateful words on the wall, which the prophet Daniel interpreted as meaning the end of Belshazzar’s reign as King of Babylon. See Daniel 5. The feast was another of John Martin’s subjects, in a painting of 1821 (see note 1).

1
.
Duc de Beaufort… Latude from the Bastille
: Dumas used the escape of the Duc de Beaufort from Vincennes (1643) in his novel
Twenty Years After
. Abbé Dubuquoi escaped from the Bastille after being imprisoned in 1706, and Jean-Henri Latude twice escaped from the prison at Vincennes, after being arrested in 1749 for sending a box of powder to Madame de Pompadour, but was recaptured and spent a total of thirty-five years in prison. On his release, he wrote his memoirs, which made him famous.

2
.
Lavoisier… Cabanis
: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94) was a celebrated chemist. The physician Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) influenced a number of writers, including Stendhal, with his theories on the nature of human psychology.

1
.
lead us to wrongdoing
: Dumas shows Faria as essentially a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who believed that human beings are born free and virtuous, but are corrupted by society.

2
.
Descartes
: The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who developed a pre-Newtonian theory of physics based on vortices of material particles, an extension of the atomic theories found in classical writers from Epicurus to Lucretius.

1
.
Cardinal Spada
: Cesare Spada, who purchased his cardinal’s hat from Pope Alexander IV, was poisoned with his nephew Guido by the pope in 1498. The sinister byways of Italian history held a peculiar fascination for French writers at the start of the nineteenth century, particularly for liberals who saw political capital to be made out of relating past papal misdeeds. But there is more to it than that: Stendhal, who tells similar stories in his
Chroniques italiennes
and
Promenades dans Rome
, admired the mixture of refinement and savagery that he perceived in Italian culture, and was fascinated by its reversals of expectations (noble bandits, degenerate nobles). The Italian scenes in Dumas’ novel are an interesting reflection of
the image of Italy in his time and suggest the appeal of a country that French visitors often found liberating after Restoration France.

1
.
alguazils
: Policemen, constables.

2
.
a Genoese tartan
: A small, single-masted boat.

3
.
Phrygian cap
: The red cap, a symbol of liberty during the Revolution, was modelled on the Phrygian cap worn by freed slaves in antiquity.

1
.
Doctor Pangloss
: The optimistic philosopher in Voltaire’s novel
Candide
, ridiculed because of his belief that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ – and consequently that progress is impossible.