I am currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo (can’t recommend enough) and I came along a passage in Chapter 78 “Yanina” where the following conversation between Albert de Morcef and Beauchamp alludes to 3 weeks (24 days) while discussing a potential duel between the two:
“M. Albert de Morcerf,” said Beauchamp, rising in his turn, “I cannot throw you out of window for three weeks—that is to say, for twenty–four days to come—nor have you any right to split my skull open till that time has elapsed.”
I did some brief research into this concept of 8 days per week. Could someone expand on it? Is it common practice (then, being ~1830s, and now)? Do other cultures do the same? What is the overall reasoning/justification for it? Thank you
OP, I just checked the original in French :
« Monsieur Albert de Morcerf, dit Beauchamp en se levant à son tour, je ne puis vous jeter par les fenêtres que dans trois semaines, c’est-à-dire dans vingt-quatre jours, et vous, vous n’avez le droit de me pourfendre qu’à cette époque. Nous sommes le 29 du mois d’août, donc au 21 du mois de septembre.» (emphasis mine)
My take here is that is an issue with translation. « Que dans » here means that Beauchamp cannot act for a period of at least three weeks. He can then act during any day of this fourth week, hence his precision added for a date that suits him.
Source : « Le Comte de Monte-Cristo », Dumas, Édition de Gilbert Sigaux.
I can concur with the explanation by /u/Syharhalna as a possibility to understand the text. That being said, if I can add something from a literary studies perspective:
Even in the original French, the way it's written is a bit... clumsy. Most readers will just pass over this without overthinking it, but if they notice the oddity like you did, then there's a whole reasoning to reconstruct in order to make sense of it, that isn't necessarily evident, --- not so much, I think, because of the "que dans trois semaines / for [or before] three weks", than due to the "c'est-à-dire / that is to say" which, at first glance at the very least, sounds like it introduces an exact equivalence that just doesn't add up.
But. One think to keep in mind is that Dumas' novels were initially meant for serialized publications in newspapers. It means that Dumas had to produce a lot of content in a short span of time. Consider this. The first and second parts of The Count of Monte Cristo were published this way between August and November 1844, and the third part from June 1845 to January 1846. At any point, Dumas never had more than a few chapters ready ahead of the publication, and sometimes none at all. In July 1844, he had just finished writing and publishing both The Three Musketeers and the novella Gabriel Lambert -- which reads, in a way, as a prototype for Monte Cristo (in the sense that, while the plot is completely different, it also takes place during the reign of Louis Philippe and deals with similar themes of false identity, social mobility, and imprisonment). And that pause during the second and third parts of Monte Cristo, he mostly used it to write and publish Queen Margot (December 1844 to April 1845) and Twenty Years After (January to August 1845). Plus, you know, a few other minor things on the side.
Such a pace didn't allow for a lot of polishing of the text. For the most part, it works well with Dumas' style, his energy and alacrity. But it is plain to see that the conditions in which texts like this were produced impacted them in a number of ways, not all positive. It's also worth noting that in order to keep that rythm, Dumas worked with "collaborators"; the extent of those collaborations was and remains a hot topic; but it surely happened on occasions, at least, that Dumas did only minimal touch-ups on some first drafts produced by some of them, before sending the chapter to the press.
At the end of the day, occasional clumsiness, like this one or worse, may be a collateral damage in this context of production. It may be that Dumas wanted to express what Syharhalna rationalized and explained, and that he deemed the expression cleared enough when maybe it wasn't; or it just may be that in the rush of writing, he made a silly calculation mistake, and there's no need to seek futher explanation.
One of Dumas' otherwise succesful rivals in the same field in the 1850s and 60s, Ponson du Terrail, became notorious for this kind of blunders (real... or attributed by a mocking posterity, like: "his hand was cold as the one of a snake"), to the point that he's now mostly remembered for those. Luckily for Dumas and for us, the qualities of The Count of Monte Cristo and some other masterpieces outweight by far a few flaws here and there...