In 2024, the most popular French film was The Count of Monte Cristo—the latest of innumerable re-imaginings of the great novel written by Alexandre Dumas in 1846. It is a good thing to be reminded that not all that is popular is bad, and that “popular” can mean what appeals to the common sense of the common man.
Novels can be as important to getting to heaven as to creating blockbusters. Doubt it? Consider this line of reasoning: Getting to heaven requires practicing the virtues. (This takes for granted that they are practiced for the love of God. Otherwise, as St. Augustine says, they are just glittering vices.) Practicing the virtues means knowing what they are and knowing what the contrary vices are. Knowing these means remembering. One of the best ways to develop memory, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out, is to associate some striking mental image with whatever one wants to remember. And one of the best ways to fix striking images in the mind is by looking through the eyes of the great novelists.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a case in point: A dramatic masterpiece in its own right, it sears the mind with a damning description of the vices that oppose the four cardinal virtues, as seen in the four principal antagonists.
The Count of Monte Cristo tells of a young man, Edmond Dantès, on the cusp of natural happiness, who is destroyed by four very different men: one who is envious of his career, one who is jealous of his fiancée, a magistrate who sacrifices the duties of his office for the sake of personal interests, and a man who is too cowardly to risk harm. All of this happens in the first fifty pages. The next 1,100 follow Dantès’s imprisonment, escape, and attempt to punish his enemies.
“A story of revenge” is the summary our broad cultural awareness makes of the book, but the truth is that each villain ultimately destroys himself, and does so precisely by cultivating the exact opposite of one of the cardinal virtues. The villains are cardinals of vice, so to speak.
These villains can be analyzed one at a time, following the order of the cardinal virtues as Aquinas presents them, echoed by such interpreters as the great twentieth-century Thomist Josef Pieper: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance.
1. Danglars Against Prudence
Prudence is the form of all moral virtues, since all moral virtue requires knowledge of what is right. Fittingly, the villain who instigates the conspiracy against Edmond is the best example of “false prudence.”
Danglars proves throughout the story to be both the most formidable villain and at the same time the most stupid. The reason for this paradox is as deep as the difference between true and false prudence. True prudence is properly ordered toward all reality and the proportion that exists within reality. Ultimately, sin is the stupidest thing we can do. It is our collusion in snatching away our own happiness and sinking ourselves into everlasting misery.
Whereas prudence helps us do the good more effectively, false prudence is just a more effective way of sinning and therefore hurting ourselves. As Aquinas says, it is connected to the vice of covetousness, characterized pithily by Pieper as “an anxious senility, desperate self-preservation, overriding concern for confirmation and security.” It is a malicious ignorance that willfully sets lower goals over more excellent ones. Limiting our sight to ourselves, being as we are created for vision of God and for vision of all things in God, is exactly what hurts ourselves.
Danglars lives by lust, greed, and selfishness, unknowingly plotting his own downfall, which Dantès really only hastens. He finds himself in the end with the reward of his unchaste pursuit of self, looking at his graying reflection in a stream. Danglars sees, for the first time, what he has made himself: old and alone. He is a loveless parent in a loveless marriage, because he married and had a child solely to advance his career. He is a man with no friends because he only used relationships to further his interests. He is a man with no appreciation for beauty because he has purchased only tasteless, expensive artwork to advance his mindless acquiring of material goods. What is there for him but his poor, barren self?
2. Villefort Against Justice
The signal sinner here is the crown prosecutor, Monsieur de Villefort. He is the most pitiable character, for two reasons. In accord with the sentiment stretching from Socrates to Pieper, “the person who commits injustice should be pitied,” but the novel, moreover, presents us most intimately with the inward workings of Villefort’s mind and soul.
Villefort is an exemplar of the pathology of injustice and the way in which attempting to harm another always hurts the self. Villefort violates all three modes of being just, not giving what is due to his superiors, his equals, or his inferiors. The most crucial of his violations is his refusal to distribute justice to young Dantès.
Unlike Danglars, who in practicing false prudence distorts his understanding of reality itself, Villefort fails to recognize the value of other people in relation to himself—a failure that blinds him throughout the book. Fittingly for a man who believes that other people may have to be sacrificed to his own good, his story ends in the discovery that he is prosecuting long-lost son from a hushed-up affair. What better illustration of a man attacking his soul than a father prosecuting his son? Whereas the imprudent man cannot do anything truly good for himself, the man lacking justice can do himself only evil.
3. Caderousse Against Fortitude
Whereas Danglars cleverly though unwittingly plots his own downfall, and Villefort wounds his soul again and again, the next character to be considered, Caderousse, is the perfect example of cowardice, the opposite vice of the virtue of fortitude. He takes no active part in the arrest of Dantès, but he repeatedly fails to redress this injustice because he gives into his fear of the possible repercussions.
Caderousse’s sin—and his vice, which is the cultivation of sin—is a perfect illustration of Christ’s dictum that “he who saves his life will lose it in the world to come.” An excessive valuation of physical safety is the very thing that will endanger one most, sometimes even in the realm of physical safety. Caderousse’s death is a masterstroke of Dumas’s genius—the direct result of his previous cowardice, accomplished by the cowardly act of his murderer.
4. Fernand Against Temperance
Finally, we come to the sinner against temperance, Fernand, the man who wants Dantès’s beloved fiancée as his own wife. Fernand’s crime is not his desire for the chaste and lovely Mercédès, but instead his putting this desire ahead of all other goods, including honesty and integrity. Whereas temperance is the virtue whereby a person keeps his inner life in order, Fernand decides to create his own order.
This decision destroys him and his life. Introduced as an honest and brave man at the beginning of the book, his compromise for the sake of passion gradually eats away all of his virtues. Temperance in itself is only a means for doing and being good, but it is an indispensable one. An intemperate man is like a sieve: No matter what excellent virtues are poured into him, he has no power to contain or use them.
The author of the Book of Proverbs tells us that the “foolishness of a man perverteth his own way.” There are no more vivid, engrossing, and powerful illustrations of this saying than the careers of the villains in The Count of Monte Cristo.