The Real Count of Monte Cristo
We were talking about The Count of Monte Cristo in my car.
Not casually. Properly. The way you only can when someone has actually read the book and not just followed the plot. My 12 year old daughter knows it inside out. Not the summary. The structure.
She asked me who I identify with.
I’ve never really thought about it. I’m not the cold revenge type, so not Edmond Dantès.
If anything, Abbé Faria. The old priest in the Château d’If. The man who turns a prison into a school.The one who understands that even when everything is taken from you, you still have your mind. That’s a philosophy I understand. Not heroic. Not dramatic. Just quiet, stubborn work.
Then I asked my daughter the same question.
I expected something obvious. Dantès. Maybe a prominent female character. Something emotional, something visible.
But she said:
Villefort’s father.
Noirtier.
I paused for a moment. Maybe I don’t know my own daughter as well as I thought. That’s not a typical answer for a twelve-year-old.
I asked her why.
She said he’s a real badass.
Because he doesn’t care what people think of him. Because he helps Napoleon when it’s dangerous to do so. Because he chooses a side and sticks with it, even when it costs him everything. And because even later, when he’s paralyzed, when he can’t move or speak, he still acts. He still decides things. He still protects people. He’s not finished.
That’s what she saw.
Not the man who moves through the world.
The man who cannot move, and still does.
Most people read that character as tragic. A body that has failed. A voice that is gone.
She read him as power.
A will that doesn’t bend.
A man who doesn’t adjust himself to the room.
There’s something in that. Because Noirtier is not impressive in the usual way. He doesn’t perform strength. He doesn’t explain himself. He doesn’t try to be liked. He simply remains what he is, even when the world closes in on him.
And in a story full of revenge, plots, disguises, and dramatic gestures, the most immobile character becomes, in a strange way, one of the most decisive.
That’s not an obvious reading.
That’s not even the reading the book invites you to have on the surface.
You have to look past movement, past noise, past appearances.
You have to ask a different question:
Who actually has agency here?
She answered it.
And what surprises me is not just that she chose him.
It’s that she chose him over everyone else.
Over the hero.
Over the victims.
Over all the female characters the story offers.
She went straight for the old man in the chair.
And that makes me think.