Edmond Dantès

Alexandre Dumas never wrote a continuation of The Count of Monte-Cristo, so an American, Edmund Flagg, supplied one. His novel takes Dantès past the vengeance into public life as Deputy from Marseilles, pulling him into the French Revolution of 1848 beside real leaders of the moment: Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc. Haydée returns, and Flagg invents two children for the Count: Espérance, his son, and Zuleika, his daughter, whose courtship by the young Roman Giovanni Massetti carries much of the book. A tempest wrecks Dantès and Haydée in the Mediterranean. Nobody would mistake the prose for Dumas. It survives as a period American view of 1848, and as a specimen of how freely the Count was borrowed: Peterson’s editions named no translator, and catalogues still file the book under Dumas.