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In early 2021, Snopes became aware of social media posts claiming a line in Britney Spear's 1998 hit song ... Baby One More Time was an English translation of an excerpt in a popular French novel written by Alexandre Dumas more than 150 years earlier, The Count of Monte-Cristo. One tweet read: In other words, internet sleuths believed they had discovered the origin of the lyric my loneliness is killing me, I must confess I still believe, which Swedish songwriter Max Martin included in the song on Spears' debut album. He told journalists the tune popped into his head as he was attempting to fall asleep one night. The posts claimed Dumas, not Martin, however, originally wrote the line about loneliness in the 1844 Romantic novel, Le Comte de Monte- Cristo — which was about a man who was unjustly incarcerated during France's Bourbon Restoration era — and included an English-to-French translation of the quote that supposedly appeared in the book. However, the book does not include the verbatim phrase ma solitude me tue, j’avoue que je continue de croire, according to Snopes' review of the unexpurgated edition of the classic French text. Using a keyword search for solitude, we learned the text mentioned the word 12 times — none of which under the circumstances alleged in the claim. The phrase j'avoue (or I admit in English) did not appear once in the French text, according to our search. In sum, considering the fact that the original French text of Le Comte de Monte- Cristo did not include the alleged line (ma solitude me tue, j’avoue que je continue de croire), we rate this claim False.
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