Catalans

The Catalans is a small, isolated fishing village situated on a barren, weather-worn promontory about a hundred paces from the spot where Danglars and Caderousse sat drinking at La Reserve. Long ago, a mysterious colony quitted Spain and settled on this tongue of land. Whence it came no one knew, and it spoke an unknown tongue. One of its chiefs, who understood Provencal, begged the commune of Marseilles to give them this bare and barren promontory, where, like the sailors of old, they had run their boats ashore. The request was granted, and three months afterwards, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which had brought these gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up. This village, constructed in a singular and picturesque manner, half Moorish, half Spanish, still remains, and is inhabited by descendants of the first comers, who speak the language of their fathers. For three or four centuries they have remained upon this small promontory, on which they had settled like a flight of seabirds, without mixing with the Marseillaise population, intermarrying, and preserving their original customs and the costume of their mother-country as they have preserved its language.

Identity and Setting

The Catalans is defined by its enduring isolation and cultural distinctiveness. The village is built in a style that is half Moorish, half Spanish, and its inhabitants, descendants of the original colonists, have for three or four centuries preserved their own language, customs, and costume, intermarrying and refusing to mix with the surrounding Marseillaise population. The houses are sunburned to a beautiful dead-leaf color peculiar to the buildings of the country, and within are coated with whitewash, like a Spanish posada. The only street of this little village leads to the home of Mercedes, a young and beautiful girl with hair as black as jet and eyes as velvety as the gazelle's, who lives in a half-ruined hut with a few ragged nets, the miserable inheritance left by her father to her mother, and by her mother to her.

Events and Narrative Significance

The Catalans is the setting for the novel's first major romantic and jealous confrontations. It is here that Fernand, a tall, strapping Catalan with a red complexion and fierce air, pleads with Mercedes to marry him, invoking the sacred Catalan law of intermarriage. Mercedes, however, refuses him, declaring that she loves Edmond Dantes and will marry no other. It is into this tense scene that Edmond Dantes arrives, calling out joyfully for Mercedes, and the two lovers are clasped in each other's arms. The burning Marseilles sun, which shot into the room through the open door, covered them with a flood of light. Their intense happiness isolated them from all the rest of the world. The village is also the place where Mercedes, after Dantes' arrest, is left alone face to face with the vast plain that had never seemed so barren, and the sea that had never seemed so vast. Bathed in tears, she wandered about the Catalan village, sometimes standing mute and motionless as a statue, looking towards Marseilles, at other times gazing on the sea, and debating as to whether it were not better to cast herself into the abyss of the ocean. It is from this village that Fernand, after the marriage, is anxious to get his wife away, and eight days after the wedding they leave Marseilles, fearing Dantes' return.

Thematic Significance

The Catalans functions as a symbol of a lost, simpler world of origin and authentic identity. For Mercedes, it represents her prelapsarian past, the home of her youth and her true love, Edmond Dantes. For Fernand, it is a place of shame and fear, a constant reminder of his humble origins and the crime he committed to escape them. The village's unchanging, isolated character contrasts sharply with the dynamic, corrupting world of Parisian high society into which the characters later move. The promontory, like a flight of seabirds, is a fixed point of origin against which the vast, turbulent sea of the novel's plot is measured.