Assignment

Assignment Advance Reading - Summary of Novel The Count Of Monte Cristo Chapter 5-8

In the middle of Dantes and Mercedes’s betrothal feast, royal guards burst in and arrest Dantes. Everyone is confused, especially Dantes, who has done nothing wrong, as far as he knows. Danglars offers to take over duties as captain of the Pharaon until Dantes is released, and Morrel gratefully accepts this offer.

In another part of town,this feast is in honor of an aristocratic couple: the young daughter of the Marquis of Saint-Meran and her fiance, Gerard de Villefort, the deputy public prosecutor of Marseilles. Villefort, we learn during the course of the lunch conversation, is the son of a prominent Bonapartist. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat and the subsequent reinstatement of King Louis XVIII, Villefort, an ambitious young man, has decided to ally himself with the royalists. He renounces his father and his father’s politics, and swears to the assembled guests that he will brutally punish any Bonapartist sympathizer who falls into his hands. The betrothal feast is interrupted when Villefort is called away to deal with a Bonapartist plot that has just been uncovered.

After dismissing Morrel’s efforts to intercede on his employee’s behalf, Villefort enters his office and finds the accused plotter, Edmond Dantes. He confronts Dantes with the allegations against him. Dantes admits that he is carrying a letter to Paris and that the letter was entrusted to him by Napoleon. He pleads innocent, however, to any political involvement, explaining that he is merely carrying out the dying wish of his ship’s captain. Dantes announces that he has no opinions other than his love for his father, his love for Mercedes, and his admiration for Monsieur Morrel.

Villefort has Dantes locked away in the Chateau d’If, a notorious prison reserved for the most dangerous political prisoners. There, Dantes demands to see the governor and violently threatens the guard when he is refused this privilege. As punishment, Dantes is sent down into the dungeon, where the insane prisoners are kept. The guard tells Dantes about one particular prisoner in the dungeon, a man who constantly promises the guards millions of francs in exchange for his liberation.