Titans of History

ALEXANDRE DUMAS PÈRE & FILS

1802–1870 & 1824–1895

His successes … resound like a fanfare. The name of Alexandre Dumas is more than French, it is European; it is more than European, it is universal … Alexandre Dumas is one of those men who can be called the sowers of civilization.

Victor Hugo

Alexandre Dumas’s soaring imagination holds us spellbound. As vividly drawn in life as one of his own characters, this master storyteller scorned literary pretension. Irrepressible to the end, he swaggered through a life that might have sprung straight from the pages of his books.

Dumas’s rip-roaring historical novels are crammed with romance, adventure, courage and daring. At one moment comical and poignant, the next mysterious and terrifying, they induce every emotion except boredom. In The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask, Dumas created some of the most thrilling stories ever written. He wove together history and fantasy, using scraps gleaned from old books to embroider timeless characters and gripping plots. His fecund imagination has rendered the names d’Artagnan and Dantès as familiar as Louis XIV and Richelieu.

He was the son of a swashbuckling Creole general (himself the illegitimate son of a marquis) and an innkeeper’s daughter. Given his ancestry, it is hardly surprising that Alexandre Dumas père specialized in tales of romance, derring-do, betrayal and intrigue. The fatherless boy who grew up in the small French town of Villers-Cotterêts was the son of the “Black Count,” a flamboyant and eccentric Napoleonic general whose integrity brought him only disgrace and provoked an early death.

Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was the Creole son of a black slave girl and a minor Norman marquis. Born in French Saint-Domingue in 1762 and raised by his mother’s family after she died when he was twelve, at eighteen Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France to be educated as befitted a nobleman. But when he joined the army as an ordinary soldier in 1786, he assumed his mother’s surname Dumas in order to avoid embarrassing his father’s family.

As the French Revolution overturned the strict hierarchy of France’s ancien régime, he rose up the army ranks. Dumas’s daring and skill in campaigns in the Vendée, in Italy and in Egypt had earned him the rank of general by the age of thirty-one. But in 1802 he was ordered to put down the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, and when he refused, Napoleon made his displeasure all too clear.

Politically disgraced, Dumas retired to the countryside, to the wife he had first met when he was billeted at her father’s inn in Villers-Cotterêts in 1789. Dogged by poverty and ill health, in 1806 the giant of a man died, leaving behind a widow and a small son and daughter.

The Black Count died in his forties, leaving his indigent widow to bring up two children on her own. When Dumas finally made his way to Paris, the mixed-race, rambunctious provincial was mocked for his frizzy blond curls and his antiquated dress. His father’s erstwhile friends evaded his pleas for patronage. Only a stroke of luck prevented an ignominious return to the countryside. Dumas’s beautiful penmanship secured him a position as a clerk in the office of the Duc d’Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe, 1830–48). It gave him enough money and plenty of time to pursue the writing that he believed would make his fortune. His faith was vindicated. In 1829 his play Henry III and his Court made him famous overnight.

The self-styled “king of the world of Romance” provided his audiences with a magical form of escapism. He was the champion of romanticism, seeing the theater as “above all a thing of the imagination” and rejecting the cold orations and philosophical monologues of traditional French drama. His characters fought, wept, made love and died on stage with passion, the triumphant climaxes of his plays rendering his audiences delirious. When Dumas started writing novels, his imagination enraptured Paris. As The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo appeared simultaneously, their daily installments of action and melodrama were instant talking points. Despite their tendency to melodrama, his characters were so exuberant that they still pulse with life today—the musketeers Aramis, Porthos, Athos and D’Artagnan (with their motto “One for all, and all for one”), the sinisterly beautiful Milady de Winter, and Edmond Dantès, the count of Monte Cristo himself.

In The Three Musketeers, D’Artagnan, the cocky but charming provincial Gascon swordsman, joins the experienced king’s men to fight the sinister intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu and others. In The Count of Monte Cristo, an innocent man, Dantès, is imprisoned forever in the Château d’If island prison, where an old prisoner helps him escape—“Death is the escape from the Château d’If”—to claim a buried fortune and mysterious title. Dantès—now Monte Cristo—returns to seek justice in the classic tale of revenge.

At the height of his success Dumas was Paris’ literary star. His image was on medallions and etchings. His workrooms were strewn with flowers and bursting with visitors. Extravagant, exuberantly dressed in capes and sporting flashy canes, with a menagerie of outlandish pets and an endless stream of still more glamorous mistresses, Dumas was the perfect subject for caricature. It was not always kind and it was often racist. But his generosity, his child-like sensitivities and his bombastic naivety earned him as much love as ridicule.

The critics sneered at Dumas’s popularity, at his readability, at his prodigious and varied output. He was never elected to the bastion of France’s artistic establishment, the Académie française. He was attacked in print for being no more than the foreman of a “novel factory” because he used collaborators. Assistants did indeed research and draft his work, but it was he who brought about the literary alchemy. Furiously scribbling away in his shirtsleeves, he injected the romance, suspense and humor that gave his work its magic. Dumas had no time for academic introspection. The self-styled popularizer wrote to entertain, to enchant and consume, to dispel the mundaneness of life. He succeeded. “It fertilizes the soul, the mind, the intelligence,” wrote Victor Hugo, one of France’s other titanic men of letters. Dumas “creates a thirst for reading.”

Dumas was always blithely unconcerned by the sniping of others less successful than himself. He abandoned his tenuous claim to the title of marquis; his name was title enough. He had his motto—“I love those who love me”—carved in huge letters on Monte Cristo, the opulent château he built to celebrate his success.

His lifestyle was precarious. Debts forced him to sell Monte Cristo. On his deathbed he remarked wryly: “I came to Paris with twenty-four francs. That is exactly the sum with which I die.” His action-packed cape-and-sword romances became less fashionable as literary styles changed. But he was undaunted by his oscillating fortunes. Irrepressible and indefatigable, he continued to write. He founded magazines and he lectured. He even participated in Garibaldi’s campaign to unify Italy.

When Dumas died, at the home of his devoted son at Puys near Dieppe, it was, in the words of one young journalist, “as though we had all lost a friend.” The “affectionate and much-loved soul” was also the “splendid magician” who created works that gave “passage into unknown worlds.”

Dumas had a son who would also make his name in literature. In 1822, when he was twenty, Alexandre Dumas had moved to Paris to make his fortune and quickly took up with the first of many mistresses, Marie-Catherine Labay, a dressmaker who lived in the rooms opposite him. Young Alexandre, the child of this affair, was six years old before his father formally recognized him and won custody of him in a vicious legal battle. (Father and son, both Alexandre and both writers, are distinguished as père and fils.) His father cherished him and gave him the most expensive education possible (although he could not prevent his son’s classmates from taunting him for his mixed-race heritage). But his mother’s distress at losing her son was an experience that the adult Dumas fils would revisit in his work.

The son adored his father but was different from him in almost every way. Dumas fils, a member of the Académie française, wrote moralizing novels and plays that made him the darling of the French literary establishment. His love affair as a youth with the young courtesan Marie Duplessis, one of the celebrated beauties of her time, inspired his best-known work, La Dame aux camélias (1848), in which a young man falls in love with a beautiful girl of pleasure. His father ends it and she dies of tuberculosis. Verdi made it into the opera La Traviata (1853), and there have been eight film versions starring actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to Greta Garbo and Isabelle Huppert.

Father and son both produced great works, but The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the father’s masterpieces—remain not just timeless but universal, still bestsellers and the subjects of innumerable movies. In 2002, President Jacques Chirac of France presided as Republican Guards dressed as the Musketeers moved Dumas’s body to rest in the Panthéon. “With you,” said the president, “we were D’Artagnan and Monte Cristo!”