Adventure · Revenge
The Count of Monte Cristo
Betrayed on his wedding day and buried alive in a fortress prison, Edmond Dantès returns rich, patient and merciless.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Arrested at his betrothal feast
Edmond Dantès is nineteen, a sailor from Marseille about to be made captain and to marry Mercédès. Rivals envy him, and a letter of false accusation does the rest. Arrested at his own betrothal feast, he is thrown without trial into the Château d’If, a fortress prison on a rock in the bay. After years alone he hears scratching in the wall: an old prisoner, the Abbé Faria, is digging an escape tunnel. Faria becomes his teacher in mathematics, history and languages, and within six months Dantès is speaking Spanish, English and German. “To learn is not to know,” Faria warns him. What Dantès does with everything he learns is the rest of this enormous novel, which Alexandre Dumas published in 1844.
Why it works for learners
Despite its length, the novel is built from vivid, separable episodes: the arrest, the prison, the escape, the treasure, and then a long, intricate game played out in Rome and Paris. Dumas writes in dialogue-rich scenes with clear motives, and most chapters end on a question. The vocabulary is broad and useful: law, prison, money, banking, society, travel, poison, love. The hardest part is keeping track of a large cast, several of whom change their names; the sentence translation helps whenever one of them stops you.
Which level to start at
B1 is a good start: a retelling at this level gives you the whole revenge plot in a size you can finish. B2 restores more of the society scenes and the slow-burning schemes. C1 is substantial but rewarding. C2, the complete novel, runs to over a thousand pages in print: choose it if you want to live inside the book for months.
Read next
- The Three Musketeers, Dumas’s other great adventure
- Les Misérables, another prisoner who builds a new life
- Captain Blood, an innocent man condemned, and what he does next