The Count of Monte Cristo

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Edmond Dantes is prisoner no. 34 at Chateau d'If and spends six years trying to understand how this happened to him and is at his wits end about to end his life when he encounters prisoner no. 27. Abbe Faria - the mad priest - has spent years digging a tunnel and recruits Dantes into his escape plan. The priest educates Dantes in the ways of the world and helps him understand how he (Dantes) was betrayed and by whom. Dantes gets a new lease on life but Abbe Faria loses his before they complete the tunnel. Dantes takes the corpse's place and is ceremoniously thrown off the prison walls and plunges into the sea.

Dantes swims his way to a nearby island and encounters smugglers, besting their chosen one in combat, but then charms them. He befriends his vanquished adversary and recovers the crucial tool of his vengeance - a magnificent treasure hidden in the bowels of the islet of Monte Cristo, with a map given to him Abbe Faria. Having commandeered the treasure Edmond Dantes fashions himself as a Count, but also as an agent of fate bent on avenging those responsible for his misery. The man that emerges from Chateau d'If is very different from the nineteen year old Edmond Dantes; the count is a shadowy, sinister and driven agent of fate. 

Edmond Dantes and the Count of Monte Cristo have become popular symbols of vengeance and justice. The book is regularly reprinted, movies are made and remade, and references and homages in popular culture keep appearing.

Huckleberry Finn refers to Chateau d'If as Castle Deef. Jeffrey Archer's A Prisoner of Birth was an homage to The Count of Monte Cristo. V for Vendetta makes a reference to it in the movie. Lew Wallace's Ben Hur was inspired by the book. Stephen Fry's The Stars' Tennis Balls and Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination are both retellings, in contemporary and scifi settings respectively. Even The Simpson tipped their hat to the count in E11 S18 titled 'Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times'.

Thomas Rethore was the son of a French nobleman and his Saint-Domingue slave and concubine, who was taken by his father from Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti) to France where he had a successful military career. To get to France Thomas' father had to sell his Haitian mother, two of their children and another daughter of hers from an earlier relationship. Thomas father also sold Thomas to pave a way for him to be taken to France. Later that same year Thomas' father bought him back and provided him with a first-class French education and lived a life of leisure at his father's willing expense. 

Despite his noble birth Thomas Rethore was denied entry into the military as a commissioned officer, so he enlisted as a private under a nom de guerre on his father's insistence that the family's noble name not be dragged into the lowest ranks of the army. This frosty relationship between father and son developed when Thomas' father married. Rethore became a part of the world's most formidable fighting force

Thomas Rethore would go on to become of the highest ranking military men of sub-Saharan African descent in the western world. Rethore was nicknamed as the black devil (diable noir in french) by his Austrian adversaries after his high altitude victories in the Alps; and as 'the Horatius Cocles of he Tyrol' by Napoleon for his military exploits (single-handedly defeating a squad of enemy troops over a bridge).

Towards the end of his military career Thomas Rethore was on a vessel that ran aground and he languished in a prison in the Kingdom of Naples for two years. After release he returned to his wife, with whom he had a son who would go on the become one of the most widely read authors of all time - Alexandre Dumas. Thomas Rethore's full name was General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie and Alexandre Dumas' most memorable characters we based on his father's exploits. Alexandre Dumas was also Thomas Rethore's nom de guerre when he joined the French army as a private.