by Alexandre Dumas
From the version for broadcasting in twelve parts by Patrick Riddell
Final episode
' The Fifth of September ' and members of the BBC Drama Repertory Company
Produced by Peter Watts
For more than twenty years, Edmond Dantes has been planning his revenge on the three men who had him falsely imprisoned in the Chateau d'lf, and it is now almost complete.
He has driven the sinister
Fernand Mondego to disgrace and suicide. For the sake of their old love, however, he has arranged that Mercedes, whom Fernand stole from him years ago, shall live out her days in peace in Marseilles.
The Judge, de Villefort, has also been publicly shamed, when Monte Cristo exposed his crime of burying alive an illegitimate child. Monte Cristo has also thwarted Madame de Villefort's plot to poison her step-daughter Valentine: hastily sending the girl's fiance Maximilian out of Paris, he has substituted for the poison a drug that simulates death, and has spirited her away to his island in the care of the Greek girl Haydee. Both de Villefort and his scheming wife believe the girl dead and buried, and de Villefort has accused her of the murder.
There remains Baron Danglars, whose motive was the most ignoble of all-namely greed. Monte Cristo's financial schemes have now so shaken the banker's credit that he, too, is on the verge of ruin.