 Paris, 1830. A mysterious nobleman appears in the world of the salons. Styling himself the Count of Monte Cristo, he uses his vast wealth to try to secure a place for himself in society. No-one knows him, nor what his motivation is. The mysterious individual is actually Edmond Dantès, a widely-travelled sailor, and the victim of an evil conspiracy twenty years earlier, when he was falsely accused on his wedding day of loyalty to Napoleon, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He owed his years of suffering in the dungeon of the Château d If to three scheming, so-called "friends" -- Fernand, Danglars and Caderousse -- one of whom wanted to deprive him of his wealth, another of his bride. His arrest was also very timely for Villefort, an ambitious magistrate whose career chances he was unwittingly obstructing. Inside the prison, Dantès is connected via a secret underground passage to the occupant of the neighbouring cell, Abbé Faria, who becomes his teacher and mentor. Before his death, the Abbé bequeaths to Dantès a valuable treasure buried on the island of Monte Cristo, and Dantès then succeeds in escaping from the prison by disguising himself as his late friend s "corpse". The wealth and knowledge imparted to him by the Abbé now enable Dantès, a man cheated out of half his life, to finally put his long-cherished and merciless plan of revenge into action ...