Dumas by the Numbers

Every figure on this page is computed directly from the actual text of the 27 works on this site — not estimated, not pulled from a secondary source. Here's what nearly two centuries of Alexandre Dumas's fiction adds up to.

For scale: at 4.2 million words, the fiction on this site alone runs roughly five times the length of the entire Harry Potter series, or about forty times the length of The Great Gatsby. And this is only the portion of Dumas's output — historians estimate his complete lifetime body of work, including plays, travel writing, and memoirs, may run past 100,000 pages across some 250 separate titles.

Longest to Shortest: Every Work, Ranked

Word counts below are computed directly from each book's chapter text, not including annotations or navigation.

A Few Numbers Worth Sitting With

The Vicomte de Bragelonne Is Longer Than It Sounds

At 707,087 words across 258 chapters, this single novel — the conclusion of the d'Artagnan Romances — is longer than The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After combined, with room to spare. It's also close to three times the length of The Count of Monte Cristo, itself no short read. This site's own piece on the novel's structure explains why: it's really three parallel storylines running at once, not one continuous plot.

One Book Is Just One Chapter

The Countess de Saint-Geran is the only work on this site presented as a single continuous chapter rather than being broken into multiple sections — at 17,725 words, it's closer to a long novella than a novel, consistent with its place among the shorter Celebrated Crimes true-crime narratives rather than the sprawling serialized fiction that made Dumas famous.

Average Chapter Length Varies Enormously

Divide total words by total chapters and you get roughly 2,600 words per chapter site-wide — but that average hides real variation. The Vicomte de Bragelonne's chapters average under 2,750 words each, built for a feuilleton reader consuming a few pages at a time (see this site's piece on serialization), while Mary Stuart's ten chapters average over 7,300 words each — much closer to essay-length sections than the bite-sized, cliffhanger-driven chapters of his serialized fiction.

What Else Is On This Site

Curious how these numbers connect to when each book was actually written? See the publication order timeline, or start reading with the Reading Guides if you're not sure where to begin.