Calvino ends these tales [t zero] with his own " The Count of Monte Cristo." The problem he sets himself is how to get out of Chateau d'If. Faria keeps making plans and tunneling his way through an endless, exitless fortress. Dantes, on the other hand, broods on the nature of the fortress as well as on the various drafts of the novel that Dumas is writing. In some drafts, Dantes will escape and find a treasure and get revenge on his enemies. In other drafts, he suffers a different fate. The narrator contemplates the possibilities of escape by considering the way a fortress (or a work of art) is made. "To plan a book -- or an escape -- the first thing to know is what to exclude." This particular story is Borges at his very best and, taking into account the essential unity of the multiplicity of all things, one cannot rule out that Calvino's version of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is indeed the finest achievement of Jorge Luis Borges as imagined by Italo Calvino.
Dumas is primary?