Monte Cristo Tour

Meet in front of the Soap Museum

The meeting point has been carefully chosen: 25 Quai de Rive Neuve, right in front of theMarseille Soap Museum, just a few minutes’ walk from the Tourist Office and the Vieux-Port metro station.

It was here, on this very quay, that the three-masted ship Le Pharaon once docked, returning from Smyrna, Trieste and Naples, with a young first mate named Edmond Dantès on board.

A start to the tour that sets the tone: in Marseille, Dumas’s fiction and the real geography of the port are one and the same.

A guide unlike any other

Before we set off, a word about the man leading the tour.

Frédéric Presles is a writer, photographer and filmmaker, and a member of the Société des Explorateurs Français, an organisation founded in 1937 that brings together scientists, travel writers and adventurers.

His expeditions have taken him to Patagonia, the Sahara and the Far North, but it is in Marseille that he has chosen to conduct one of his most meticulous investigations: to rediscover, in the city as it is today, the real-life settings that inspired Dumas.

He has written an entire investigative book on the subject, and it is this very material that he weaves into the tour.

Between the harbour and the legend

The tour takes place entirely on foot, all the way round the Old Port.

Frédéric alternates between reading extracts from the novel, recounting historical anecdotes and posing the more unusual questions that are the spice of his narrative: what remains today of the novel’s settings? Why does the Château d’If attract visitors from China every year? How did a simple cigar come to bear the Count’s name?

As we wind our way through the narrow streets and past the building façades, we pass Fort Saint-Jean, catch a glimpse of the Bonne Mère – whosepredecessor (the chapel that stood there before it) was already watching over the arrival of the ‘Pharaon’ in 1815 – and gradually come to understand how a novel can reshape the way we view an entire city.

With the Château d’If as a backdrop

It is impossible to tell the story of The Count of Monte Cristo without mentioning the Château d’If, the prison where Dantès spent fourteen years before escaping.

Clearly visible from Fort Saint-Jean, the island serves as a reminder that the line between history and fiction is particularly blurred here: the castle really did serve as a state prison, and it is this reality that Dumas transformed into the dungeon of the most famous escapee in French literature.

A longer version of the experience also allows you to extend the adventure at sea, with a skipper, right up to the foot of the castle.