Rare are the novels that hold the reader awake until the first lights of dawn; few are the heroes who are hard to leave as they charm us and fascinate us; few are stories that possess a strength of magnetation as they lastingly mark the individual and collective imagination. Accused of a bonapartist plot, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is imprisoned in the jails of the castle d'If. He spends fourteen years there, ruminating his revenge and preparing for his return. Under the mask of the enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo, he will never stop punishing his enemies. At the risk of losing it? An exceptional novel, a universal masterpiece, The Count of Monte Cristo is presented here in an edition that allows us to understand the genesis, the stakes and the references.