Jacques Peuchet, Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon et les origines du Comte de Monte-Cristo d’Alexandre Dumas

As Alexandre Dumas himself admitted on several occasions, his novel The Count of Monte Cristo was inspired by “Le Diamant et la Vengeance”, a short story included in Mémoires tirés des archives de la police de Paris, pour servir à l’histoire de la morale et de la police, depuis Louis XIV jusqu’à nos jours (6 vol., Paris, Levavasseur, 1838), published under the name of Jacques Peuchet (1758–1830). It is also worth noting that yet another story from the same book, “Un crime de famille”, was used by Dumas in his novel. The aim of this article is to show the extent of the influence of Mémoires tirés des archives de la police de Paris on The Count of Monte Cristo as well as the reactions of the French press concerning this fact. Furthermore, the paper examines the theory according to which the memoirs in question, although attributed to Peuchet, were in fact partially, if not entirely, written by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1786–1864), novelist and author of countless apocryphal memoirs published under the names of various notable Frenchmen and women.