The Count of Monte Cristo: Chapter 25 Summary & Analysis

Dantes wakes up the next morning with a set of plans in mind. He knows he cannot stay on the island forever, simply “counting his money,” and must instead use that money to begin his longstanding plan for revenge. First, he fills his pockets with precious jewels—enough to make any man’s lifetime fortune, in themselves—and covers all traces of his work in the center of the island, even replanting grasses and flowers to make it seem that no one was walked up the high paths for many years. He goes back down to the shore and waits for the Jeune-Amelie, which arrives after several days, and though he tells them he is feeling better, he still pretends to be nursing a serious injury.

Dantes sails with the Jeune-Amelie to Leghorn, where he puts in, having now completed his three-month contract with Baldi and the ship. He sells four of the precious stones, without alerting the rest of the crew, to a banker in Leghorn, netting 20,000 francs. Then he turns to Jacopo and gives him money to buy and outfit his own vessel, to be sailed as part of Dantes’ command. Although Jacopo is surprised to learn that Dantes has come into money so quickly, he has long thought that Dantes was of “superior” social stock to the rest of the smugglers. Dantes explains to him, and later to the captain, that he has learned at Leghorn that he has come into a very large inheritance from a distant relative, and the sailors, all remarking on Dantes’ exceptional and noble nature, find this explanation completely plausible.

After he finds and outfits the boat and crew, Dantes dispatches Jacopo to sail to Marseille and report on the presence of his father and a woman named Mercedes, then to meet Dantes back on the island of Monte Cristo. Jacopo agrees to this and sets off. Dantes heads to Genoa, finds a boat being built for a rich Englishman, and buys it from the builders. As he sets sail out of Genoa, alone, those on the shore marvel at the wealthy man and where he might be setting sail for; no one guesses that it’s to Monte Cristo.

Dantes lands at Monte Cristo and, having anchored the vessel (in which the shipbuilders have constructed secret compartments), he loads, all alone, his treasure onto the ship over a period of many days. After about a week, Jacopo sails to him in his own ship, purchased with Dantes’ initial investment, and tells him the sorry news: Old Dantes is no longer alive, and Mercedes has “vanished.” Dantes conceals his response from Jacopo, going off into the center of the island alone for two hours. When he returns, he takes on some of the crew members, and the two ships make for Marseille.

As he approaches the port there, Dantes worries that he will be taken for the criminal Dantes and put back into the Chateau D’If. But he also knows that, having shaved his face and hair, he no longer resembles that criminal in the slightest, and the events of the past fourteen years have rendered him unrecognizable to anyone in Marseille who might have known him as a young man. When he alights at Marseille with his English passport (purchased at Leghorn), he breezes past the gendarmes and past a sailor he knew from his days on the Pharaon, Morrel’s vessel. He gives that sailor a large tip for no reason other than charity, and continues on his way to his father’s house.

Dantes mounts the stairs to his father’s old two-room apartment, and he finds a surprised, poor couple inside. He recognizes nothing of his father’s habitation of 15 years before, and when he leaves the apartment, he finds the landlord and buys the entire building, offering the couple from upstairs free lodgings anywhere else in the apartment complex except those top rooms, which Dantes (calling himself Lord Wilmore, the name on his English passport) reserves for himself.

Dantes then heads to Les Catalans and asks after Fernand and Mercedes. No one has heard anything of those two either for about 15 years. Dantes, to thank the Catalans for their efforts, buys them some new sailing vessels and nets. But before the inhabitants can thank him or ask where he has come from and what his business is in Marseille, Dantes is off again, on horseback, toward a town called Beaucaire. There, he has learned from the landlord of his father’s apartment, Caderousse has moved and become the manager of a small inn with his wife.