Alexandre Dumas

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexandre Dumas once silenced a man who had insulted his ancestry with a single retort. "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey," he said. "You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends." The line has outlived nearly everything else about the quarrel that prompted it. It captures a writer who turned every slight, every debt, every scandal into material. Dumas published 100,000 pages in his lifetime. His novels have been adapted into nearly 200 films. Yet the man behind The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers fled France twice, kept a studio of ghostwriters, and ran through fortunes faster than he could earn them. Who was the grandson of an enslaved woman who became one of the most widely read French authors? Why did he die in obscurity and rise again, more than a century later, into a national shrine? And what did it take to settle his bones in the company of Victor Hugo and Emile Zola?

• 2. Blood And Bondage

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  Marie-Cessette Dumas was an enslaved woman of Afro-Caribbean ancestry, purchased in Saint-Domingue for what records call "an exorbitant amount." The marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie bought her along with a daughter from a previous relationship and made her his concubine. The two extant primary documents that name her race call her a "negresse," a black woman, rather than a "mulatresse." Whether she was born in Saint-Domingue or in Africa is unknown. The African people she descended from is unknown too.

  In 1775, after both his brothers died, Antoine left the colony to claim the family estates and the title of Marquis in France. Before sailing, he sold Marie-Cessette and their two daughters, along with her eldest daughter Marie-Rose, to a baron newly arrived from Nantes. He kept only Thomas-Alexandre, his single natural son, and brought the 14-year-old to France.

  Thomas-Alexandre received his freedom there and a sparse education at a military school. There was no question of the mixed-race boy being accepted as his father's heir. The surname "de la Pailleterie" was never given to him, so he took "Dumas" instead. "Dumas" means "of the farm," from du mas, perhaps signifying only that Marie-Cessette belonged to the farm property. He used it when applying for a marriage licence, attributing it to his mother. Some scholars suspect he devised the name himself and credited her when it suited him.

  Whatever its origin, the name traveled far. Thomas-Alexandre did well in the army and was promoted to general by the age of 31, the first soldier of Afro-Antilles origin to reach that rank in the French army.

• 3. From Stage To Page

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  Villers-Cotterets, in the department of Aisne in Picardy, was where Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802. His mother, Marie-Louise Elisabeth Labouret, was an innkeeper's daughter. He grew up with the legacy of a general for a father and a household of modest means. Work with Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, gave him his start.

  Henry III and His Court was the play that launched him. Produced in 1829, when Dumas was 27, it earned acclaim and ran 50 performances over the next year, extraordinary for the time. It was the first of the great Romantic historical dramas on the Paris stage, preceding Victor Hugo's more famous Hernani. Mounted at the Comedie-Francaise with the celebrated Mademoiselle Mars, it carried him into a career. His second play, Christine, proved equally popular the following year, giving him income enough to write full-time.

  Antony, staged in 1831, pushed further. A drama with a contemporary Byronic hero, it is considered the first non-historical Romantic drama, and it starred Marie Dorval, the great rival of Mademoiselle Mars. By then Dumas had also stepped out of the theatre and into the street, joining the 1830 Revolution that ousted Charles X and put his former employer on the throne as Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King.

  The end of press censorship and an improving economy made the times rewarding for his skills. After more successful plays, Dumas switched to novels. His first serial novel, La Comtesse de Salisbury, ran from July to September 1836, the beginning of the form that would make his name.

• 4. The Fiction Factory

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  Auguste Maquet was the best known of the assistants and collaborators Dumas leaned on. It was not until the late twentieth century that his role was fully understood. Maquet took Dumas to court to win authorial recognition and a higher rate. He got more money but never a by-line. Dumas had built something larger than himself: a production studio staffed with writers who turned out hundreds of stories, all subject to his personal direction, editing, and additions.

  Le Capitaine Paul, published in 1838, showed his method. He rewrote one of his own plays into a serial historical novel, drawing partly on the life of the Scottish-American naval officer John Paul Jones. From 1839 to 1841, with help from several friends, he compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection on famous criminals from European history. It featured Beatrice Cenci, Martin Guerre, and the Borgias, alongside more recent cases of executed murderers.

  Augustin Grisier, his fencing master, became both subject and source. Their 1840 novel The Fencing Master is written as Grisier's account of witnessing the Decembrist revolt in Russia. Czar Nicholas I banned the book and barred Dumas from the country until after the Czar's death. Dumas referred to Grisier with great respect in The Count of Monte Cristo, The Corsican Brothers, and his memoirs.

  The great series came in a rush in the 1840s. The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo both appeared in 1844, followed by Twenty Years After in 1845 and The Vicomte de Bragelonne in 1847, the last often split in English into three parts, of which The Man in the Iron Mask is best known. His novels were soon translated into English and other languages, and they sold.

• 5. Lavish And Insolvent

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  Forty mistresses is the count scholars have settled on for Dumas. He spent lavishly on women and sumptuous living, and despite earning a great deal he was frequently insolvent. In 1846 he built a country house outside Paris at Le Port-Marly, the large Chateau de Monte-Cristo, with a separate building for his writing studio. Strangers and acquaintances filled it for lengthy visits, taking advantage of his generosity. Two years later, facing financial difficulties, he sold the entire property.

  Ida Ferrier, an actress born Marguerite-Josephine Ferrand, was the woman he married, on the 1st of February 1840. They had no children together. His liaisons produced at least four children he is known to have fathered. Alexandre Dumas, fils, born in 1824 to the dressmaker Marie-Laure-Catherine Labay, became a successful novelist and playwright in his own right.

  Around 1866 Dumas had an affair with Adah Isaacs Menken, an American actress twenty-six years younger and at the height of her career. She had performed her sensational role in Mazeppa in London and had a sold-out run of Les Pirates de la Savanne in Paris.

  The English playwright Watts Phillips, who knew him in later life, described "the most generous, large-hearted being in the world," and also "the most delightfully amusing and egotistical creature on the face of the earth." His tongue, Phillips said, was like a windmill: once set in motion you never knew when it would stop, especially if the theme was himself. That self-regard had company. With Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval, Eugene Delacroix and Honore de Balzac, Dumas belonged to the Club des Hashischins, which met monthly to take hashish at a Paris hotel. References to the drug appear in The Count of Monte Cristo.

• 6. Exile And Revolution

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  Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's election turned Dumas into a fugitive. Bonaparte disapproved of the author, and in 1851 Dumas fled to Brussels, in part to escape his creditors. The man who had marched in the 1830 Revolution now found the new order closed to him.

  Russia took him in around 1859, where French was the second language of the elite and his writings were enormously popular. He spent two years there, visiting St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Astrakhan, Baku, and Tbilisi, and published travel books about the country. It was a striking return for the author whose Fencing Master had once been forbidden within its borders.

  Italy drew him next. In March 1861 the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed under Victor Emmanuel II, and for the next three years Dumas threw himself into the movement for Italian unification. He founded and led a newspaper, Indipendente. There he befriended Giuseppe Garibaldi, a man he had long admired, sharing both liberal republican principles and membership in Freemasonry.

  Dumas remained a Freemason until the day he died, a member of the Lodge "La Cauderet" and the Lodge "L'Olympique." He often wrote brotherhood and Masonic references into his fiction. He returned to Paris in 1864 and published travel books about Italy.

• 7. Death And Resurrection

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  On the 5th of December 1870, Dumas died at the age of 68 of natural causes, possibly a heart attack. He was buried at his birthplace of Villers-Cotterets. His death was overshadowed by the Franco-Prussian War, and changing literary fashions decreased his popularity for decades.

  Reginald Hamel and Claude Schopp were among the scholars whose late-twentieth-century work revived him, prompting a critical reappraisal and turning up lost manuscripts. In 1970, on the centenary of his death, the Paris Metro named a station in his honour. His country home, the Chateau de Monte-Cristo, was restored and opened to the public as a museum.

  The Knight of Sainte-Hermine showed how much remained buried. Dumas had written and serialized the novel in 1869, the third part of the Sainte-Hermine trilogy, nearly finishing it before his death. In 1990 Schopp noticed a letter in an archive that led him to the unfinished work. He spent years researching it, editing the completed portions, and writing the final two-and-a-half chapters from the author's notes. Published in 2005, it sold 60,000 copies and became a best seller, appearing in English in 2006 as The Last Cavalier.

  In 2002, for the bicentenary of his birth, French President Jacques Chirac had Dumas's ashes re-interred at the Pantheon. Villagers in his hometown first objected, noting that Dumas had written in his memoirs that he wished to be buried there. The village eventually yielded. His new coffin, draped in blue velvet, was carried on a caisson flanked by four mounted Republican Guards costumed as the four Musketeers and transported through Paris.

  "With you, we were D'Artagnan, Monte Cristo, or Balsamo," Chirac said, "riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles, with you, we dream." Chirac acknowledged the racism that had existed in France and called the transfer a way of correcting that wrong, enshrining Dumas alongside Victor Hugo and Emile Zola. None of France's great writers, he noted, has been so widely read. Researchers keep finding more: the five-act play The Gold Thieves surfaced in 2002, and Frank Wild Reed, a New Zealand pharmacist who never visited France, left behind the greatest collection of Dumas material outside the country, some 3,350 volumes now held by Auckland Libraries.