Sometimes the story feels like a slough because various parts seem to be superfluous. One beauty I enjoyed throughout the book was trying to think about how the part I was currently reading could possible matter for the Count’s inevitable revenge. Invariably, every detail of the story had a purpose and wasn’t just filler even though sometimes Dumas was clearly disguising those parts so that we might forget about them only to be blindsided by those details later when he would suddenly reveal how those details truly mattered.