In "The Count of Monte Cristo," Edmond Dantès is imprisoned in the Château d’If.
The Château d’If is a real fortress on the Île d’If, about 1.5 kilometers off Marseille in southeastern France. Built in the 16th century, it later served as a prison, making it a fitting setting for Alexandre Dumas’s tale of wrongful imprisonment and revenge.
In the novel, Dantès is arrested after a political conspiracy and confined there without a fair trial. He spends fourteen years in captivity and eventually meets the Abbé Faria, an older prisoner who becomes his teacher and reveals the secret of a vast treasure. After Faria dies, Dantès escapes by taking the dead man’s place in a burial sack and being thrown into the sea.
The fortress was a real prison, but Dantès and Faria are fictional characters. The Château d’If became internationally famous through Dumas’s 1844 novel and is now a major tourist site reached by boat from Marseille. Alcatraz and the Bastille are real prisons, but neither is the prison named in this story.