Well, Tonstant Weader is off wandering around France at the moment and, with this being the Children’s Issue, a review of Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Count of Monte Cristo seems appropriate.

While it’s not specifically a children’s book, everyone I know who has read it did so the first time in their early teens. I say the first time, because it is one of those books you come back to over and over again.

It’s a romance novel (in the true sense of the word, rather than the Mills & Boon, bodice ripper ilk) and a rollickingly good adventure story of love, vengeance, hope and betrayal, set during the period from just before the Hundred Days (after Napoleon’s escape from Elba) through to the reign of Louis-Phillipe (the last king of France).

Most people will know the main plot of the book - Edmund Dantes is wrongfully imprisoned in the Château d'If for 14 years, he escapes, acquires a fortune and comes back to Paris to take his revenge on those who betrayed him. Dumas created a story worthy of Shakespeare, exploring the quality of mercy and the justice of revenge. His characters are sometimes a little two dimensional, but the writing is so good that it rarely detracts from the story. Edmund’s transition from the uneducated carefree fisherman to the insane, despairing denizen of the Château d'If’s dungeon to the omnipresent Count is mesmerising. The myriad characters he touches along the way, tragic Mercédès and Valentine, ebullient Albert de Morcerf, nouveau riche Baron Danglars, aristocratic Gérard de Villefort, noble Maximilien Morrel, grasping Caderousse and sinister Fernand Mondego are beautifully drawn and well supported by the host of smaller but no less fascinating minor characters.

Like all Dumas’s books, every page is soaked in honour, love, passion and death; tied together in a compulsively readable study of fictional characters and historical events.

Alexandre Dumas (also known as Dumas père), one of the most prolific writers literature has ever known, was born in 1802 in a small village outside Paris. His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the illegitimate son of a French nobleman and a Creole slave girl. His mother was the daughter of a local innkeeper, and after his father’s death when Alexandre was 5, she did not have the resources to give him much of an education. Despite these disadvantages, Dumas managed to make (and spend) several fortunes throughout his highly successful career as a novelist, playwright and journalist. Befriended by Victor Hugo and de Musset, hated by Balzac, he was a generous and profligate philanderer, whose financial and amorous upheavals were a disruption to his writing throughout his whole life.

The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, his most well known books, were written simultaneously (in the midst of several tumultuous love affairs) in 1844, and have been translated into almost all modern languages and constantly reprinted ever since.

If you’ve only seen one of the many execrable films adaptations, or just never got around to reading it, I strongly recommend you give yourself a long winter’s afternoon on the couch with this wonderful book. If you can supplement your afternoon with a glass of wine and a roaring fire, well, so much the better.

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Ok, I’ve just been asked to put in an explanatory note. If you’ve no interest at all in French history (and fair enough too) please, turn the page and salivate over the pasta and red wine articles.

The Hundred Days refers to the time from Napoleon’s escape from Elba (where he was imprisoned after getting involved in a land war in Asia) until the restoration of Louis XVIII (younger brother of him wot married Marie Antoinette and got his head chopped off).

Louis XVIII had no children so his brother Charles X succeeded him. Over the next few years the French peasants threw a few more revolutions and the kings abdicated like dominos, Charles X, followed by his son Louis-Antoine, followed by his nephew Henri V.

Then the French parliament decided to bypass revolution (wowsers) and abdication and handed the crown to Louis-Phillip (the last king). He played about with it for a bit until another revolution frightened him into leaving it to his son and bolting for England. Unfortunately, his son, Phillipe, also buggered off to England before he could accept the crown.

And that was the end of kings in France.

Fascinating, eh?

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