Edmond Dantes, the young and successful merchant sailor recently granted his own command by his dying captain Leclere, returns to Marseille to marry his fiancee Mercedes. Leclere, a supporter of the exiled Napoleon I, has charged Dantes to deliver two objects: a package to Marechal Bertrand (exiled with Napoleon Bonaparte on Elba), and a letter from Elba to an unknown man in Paris. On the eve of his wedding to Mercedes, Fernand (Mercedes' cousin and a rival for her affections) and Danglars (who is jealous of Dantes' rapid rise to captain) send an anonymous note accusing Dantes of being a Bonapartist traitor. Villefort, the deputy crown prosecutor in Marseille, while initially sympathetic to Dantes, destroys the letter from Elba when he discovers that it is addressed to his father who is a Bonapartist. In order to silence Dantes, he condemns him without trial to life imprisonment...