The Count of Monte Cristo Characters: Villefort, Danglars, Fernand, and the Rest

Spoilers for the whole of The Count of Monte Cristo, including what happens to each of the three.

Most character guides to this novel list the cast alphabetically and lose the thing that makes them worth learning. The three men who ruin Edmond Dantès are not interchangeable villains. Each one wants a different object, each takes a different share of the crime, and each is eventually destroyed by the exact thing he was protecting.

Two of the three sit at the same table in the playable Count of Monte Cristo, at the Auteuil dinner, which is the scene where the pattern becomes visible from the inside.

🖋️ The three men, and the shares they take

The conspiracy occupies a single chapter and about one page of actual plotting. What it establishes is a division of labour the rest of the novel keeps honouring.

• ✅Danglars writes it.The ship’s supercargo wants the captaincy Dantès is about to be given, and says so in the plainest terms available: what does anything matter, provided Dantès is not captain. He dictates the denunciation and writes it with his left hand so the writing cannot be recognised, then crumples it and throws it away as a joke.
• ✅Fernand sends it.Mercédès’s cousin, who has been refused, picks the discarded paper out of the arbour and puts it in his pocket. Danglars watches him do it and says nothing, and admits to himself a chapter later that Fernand may have sent the letter itself.
• ✅Villefort buries it.The deputy prosecutor reads the seized letter, sees that it is addressed to his own father, Noirtier, and burns it in front of the prisoner. He then commits Dantès to the Château d’If without trial to keep the connection out of the record.

Villefort’s motive is the one most retellings soften, and the text is unsentimental about it. Alone afterwards, he is not thinking about his father’s safety at all. He says that at Marseilles he himself would have been ruined and that the letter would have destroyed all his hopes. He does not bury a man to protect a parent; he buries a man to protect a career.

The Auteuil Dinner is a doorway in the playable Count of Monte Cristo: Danglars and Villefort are at your table, in a house you bought because of what is buried in its garden, and neither of them knows who is pouring the wine. You can open the ground, wait, or seat them differently. Role-play The Count of Monte Cristo →

🪞 Villefort, and the pattern turned inside out

The novel’s cleanest piece of structural irony belongs to Villefort. He destroys Dantès to stop his father’s politics from contaminating his own future, and in the end his future is destroyed from inside his own household. The count supplies the match rather than the fuel. He talks Villefort’s second wife through her toxicology in Chapter 52, and he digs Villefort’s buried son out of the garden at Auteuil and funds him into Paris society as a fake Italian nobleman, so that in Chapter 110 the boy can name his father from the dock. Everything that burns was already in the house.

His second wife poisons her way through the family to secure the inheritance for her son. When Villefort corners her, she takes the poison herself, and takes Edward with her. He finds his wife dead in her room, goes hunting through the house for the boy, and finds him too. The detail Dumas chooses for the moment of discovery is a folded paper that slips from the child’s clothing as the body is lifted. Villefort loses his reason in the same hour.

The symmetry is exact enough to be a design rather than an accident. A man ruins another man’s life to avoid being ruined by his father, and is then ruined by his son. Whether that counts as justice is argued properly in the hero-or-villain essay on this hub, which reads the same scene as the moment the count himself concedes he went too far.

🕯️ Abbé Faria, who builds the Count

Faria is a fellow prisoner who tunnels the wrong way and comes up in Dantès’s cell. He is the reason a nineteen-year-old sailor with no schooling walks out of the Château d’If fourteen years later able to pass as a nobleman in four languages. He describes himself as having been Cardinal Spada’s secretary for twenty years, which is also how he knows where the treasure is.

His account of how he became learned is the most quoted thing about him online, and it is usually quoted wrong. The version circulating is that he read every book on a subject and then memorised the single best one. What he actually says is larger and stranger.

“I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times, I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know.”

He then spent three years memorising those hundred and fifty, which is why prison costs him nothing intellectually: the library came with him. Everything Dantès later does with disguise, chemistry and languages runs on that inheritance, and the friendship is the only wholly uncomplicated one in the book.

👑 Haydée and Mercédès

Haydée is the novel’s most consequential character after Dantès himself, and she is almost always reduced to a footnote in summaries. She is the daughter of Ali Tepelini, the pasha of Yanina, and she brings down Fernand Mondego personally, in public, at his own trial before the House of Peers.

What she carries into that chamber is documentary. She identifies herself by her father’s name, produces the record of her own sale as a Christian slave of eleven years of age, states that Fernand sold her father to his enemies for four hundred thousand francs, and then looks at the accused and tells him she recognises him. Fernand’s ruin is not engineered by the count; it is testified into existence by a woman he sold.

Mercédès is the cast’s quietest tragedy and the one readers argue about most. She is Fernand’s first cousin, she refused him repeatedly before the arrest, she recognises Dantès years later by his voice alone and says nothing, and she ends with neither man. She also ends deliberately poor: she hands back the whole Morcerf fortune and tells Dantès she will live on the small sum he buried before his arrest, which she went and dug up where he told her it was. The ending essay on this hub follows her arc to the last page.

🎭 Caderousse and Noirtier

Caderousse is the third man at the table in the arbour, the drunk tailor who watches the conspiracy happen and does not stop it, and his function is to be the reader’s witness. He tells the whole backstory to a priest who is Dantès in disguise, including the correct attribution of the letter to Danglars, and he is the only conspirator who is never promoted, never rich for long and never dignified by a title.

Noirtier de Villefort is the most technically ambitious character in the novel and the one people remember longest. A former revolutionary and Bonapartist grandee, he suffers a stroke and loses everything except his eyes. He sits in a wheeled armchair placed in front of a large mirror so he can see the entire room without turning, closes his eyes once to mean yes, and communicates whole sentences by having someone read out the alphabet and a dictionary while he blinks.

Dumas then gives that man the hardest job in the plot. To break his granddaughter’s engagement to Franz d’Épinay, Noirtier first disinherits her, and when that fails he has a signed statement read aloud in front of the family: he killed Franz’s father himself, in a duel, years earlier. The engagement does not survive the reading. The full text of every scene named here is at Project Gutenberg.