Part 3

The Chateau de Monte-Cristo is the current home of the Dumas society. It is a Neo Renaissance building decorated in floral, angelic, and music motifs with a sculpture of a historical writer above each ground floor window.
A second building, a Neo Gothic pavilion commissioned as a writing studio by Dumas is comically named Chateau D’If.
The property includes multiple gardens. The Chateaux was designed by Hippolyte Durand and construction took place between 1844-47.
Though it cost him 500,000 Francs, in 1848 Dumas sold the entire property he’d just commissioned for only 31,000 after being brought to near financial ruin.
The property that Monte Cristo bought was so briefly lived in by the writer that other owners could claim more right to it than he could. It has been a private property, a school, after it fell into disrepair the owners attempted to reconvert it into 400 flats in the 1960s before the Chateaux were rescued by the Dumas society.
The Dumas society (Société des Amis d’Alexandre Dumas) was formed in 1971 to preserve the Chateau and Dumas’ legacy by collecting books, manuscripts, autographs, photographs and contributing to cultural activities within the Chateau. It’s currently operated by the society as a museum.