The Count of Monte Cristo

Paris, 1830. A mysterious nobleman appears in the world of the salons. Styling himself the Count of Monte Cristo, he uses his vast wealth to try to secure a place for himself in society. No-one knows him, nor what his motivation is. The mysterious individual is actually Edmond Dantes, a widely-travelled sailor, and the victim of an evil conspiracy twenty years earlier, when he was falsely accused on his wedding day of loyalty to Napoleon, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He owed his years of suffering in the dungeon of the Chateau d'If to three scheming, so-called "friends" -- Fernand, Danglars and Caderousse -- one of whom wanted to deprive him of his wealth, another of his bride. His arrest was also very timely for Villefort, an ambitious magistrate whose career chances he was unwittingly obstructing. Inside the prison, Dantes is connected via a secret underground passage to the occupant of the neighbouring cell, Abbe Faria, who becomes his teacher and mentor. Before his death, the Abbe bequeaths to Dantes a valuable treasure buried on the island of Monte Cristo, and Dantes then succeeds in escaping from the prison by disguising himself as his late friend's "corpse". The wealth and knowledge imparted to him by the Abbe now enable Dantes, a man cheated out of half his life, to finally put his long-cherished and merciless plan of revenge into action ...