Pierre Picaud: The Real Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas’s literary classic The Count of Monte Cristo is one of Dumas’s most famous and beloved novels, but this satisfying tale of injustice and vengeance was not entirely drawn from the imagination of Dumas. The story was based on a real-life person named Pierre Picaud, who, like Edmond Dantes, was wrongfully imprisoned based on false accusations. Later, Picaud got of prison and after recovering a buried treasure, returned to Paris to exact revenge upon his three jealous friends who implicated him in the conspiracy. François “Pierre” Picaud was a shoemaker in Nîmes, France. In 1807, Picaud was engaged to marry a rich and beautiful woman named Marguerite Vigoroux. But one of his friends, Mathieu Loupian, who wanted to marry Vigoroux himself, became jealous of his good fortune. Together with two other men, Solari and Chaubart, Loupian falsely accuse Picaud of being a spy and a royalist agent in the pay of England. A fourth friend, Antoine Allut, knew of the conspiracy but did not alert it. On his wedding day, Picaud was arrested and taken to prison under great secrecy. He spent seven years at the Alpine fortress of Fenestrelle (now in Piedmont, Italy), not even learning why he was arrested until his second year. During his imprisonment, Picaud dug a small passage to a neighboring cell and befriended an Italian priest named Father Torri, who was detained there. A year later, a dying Torri bequeathed to Picaud a treasure he had hidden in Milan. When Picaud was released after the fall of the French Imperial government in 1814, he took possession of the treasure, and returned to Paris under another name. He spent the next ten years plotting revenge against his former friends. First, he found Allut in Nimes, who in exchange for a large diamond, told him the story of his denunciation.