Alexandre Dumas, who lived a life as dramatic as any depicted in
his more than three hundred volumes of plays, novels, travel books,
and memoirs, was born on July 24, 1802, in the town of
Villers-Cotterêts, some fifty miles from Paris. He was the third
child of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie who took the name
of Dumas, a nobleman who distinguished himself as one of
Napoleon''s most brilliant generals, and Marie-Louise-Elisabeth
Labouret. Following General Dumas''s death in 1806 the family faced
precarious financial circumstances, yet Mme. Dumas scrimped to pay
for her son''s private schooling. Unfortunately he proved an
indifferent student who excelled in but one subject: penmanship. In
1816, at the age of fourteen, Dumas found employment as a clerk
with a local notary to help support the family. A growing interest
in theater brought him to Paris in 1822, where he met
Fran?ois-Joseph Talma, the great French tragedian, and resolved to
become a playwright. Meanwhile the passionate Dumas fell in love
with Catherine Labay, a seamstress by whom he had a son. Though he
had numerous mistresses in his lifetime Dumas married only once,
but the union did not last. While working as a scribe for the duc
d''Orléans later King Louis-Philippe Dumas collaborated on a
one-act vaudeville, La Chasse et l''amour The Chase and
Love, 1825. But it was not until 1827, after attending a British
performance of Hamlet, that Dumas discovered a direction for
his dramas. ''For the first time in the theater I was seeing true
passions motivating men and women of flesh and blood,'' he recalled.
''From this time on, but only then, did I have an idea of what the
theater could be.''
Dumas achieved instant fame on February 11, 1829, with the
triumphant opening of Henri III et sa cour Henry III and
His Court. An innovative and influential play generally regarded
as the first French drama of the Romantic movement, it broke with
the staid precepts of Neoclassicism that had been imposed on the
Paris stage for more than a century. Briefly involved as a
republican partisan in the July Revolution of 1830, Dumas soon
resumed playwriting and over the next decade turned out a number of
historical melodramas that electrified audiences. Two of these
works—Antony 1831 and La Tour de Nesle The Tower
of Nesle, 1832—stand out as milestones in the history of
nineteenth-century French theater. In disfavor with the new
monarch, Louis-Philippe, because of his republican sympathies,
Dumas left France for a time. In 1832 he set out on a tour of
Switzerland, chronicling his adventures in Impressions de
voyage: En Suisse Travels in Switzerland, 1834-1837; over
the years he produced many travelogues about subsequent journeys
through France, Italy, Russia, and other countries.
Around 1840 Dumas embarked upon a series of historical romances
inspired by both his love of French history and the novels of Sir
Walter Scott. In collaboration with Auguste Maquet, he serialized
Le Chevalier d''Harmental in the newspaper Le Siècle in 1842.
Part history, intrigue, adventure, and romance, it is widely
regarded as the first of Dumas''s great novels. The two subsequently
worked together on a steady stream of books, most of which were
published serially in Parisian tabloids and eagerly read by the
public. He is best known for the celebrated d''Artagnan
trilogy—Les trois mousquetaires The Three Musketeers,
1844, Vingt ans après Twenty Years After, 1845 and Dix
ans plus tarde ou le Vicomte de Bragelonne Ten Years Later;
or The Viscount of Bragelonne, 1848-1850—and the so-called Valois
romances—La Reine Margot Queen Margot, 1845, La Dame de
Monsoreau The Lady of Monsoreau, 1846, and Les
Quarante-cinc The Forty-Five Guardsmen, 1848. Yet perhaps
his greatest success was Le Comte de Monte Cristo The
Count of Monte Cristo, which appeared in installments in Le
Journal des debats from 1844 to 1845. A final tetralogy marked the
end of their partnership: Mmoires d''un medecin: Joseph
Balsamo Memoirs of a Physician, 1846-1848, Le Collier de
la reine The Queen''s Necklace, 1849-1850, Ange Pitou
Taking the Bastille, 1853, and La Comtesse de Charny
The Countess de Charny, 1852-1855.
In 1847, at the height of his fame, Dumas assumed the role of
impresario. Hoping to reap huge profits, he inaugurated the new
Theatre Historique as a vehicle for staging dramatizations of his
historical novels. The same year he completed construction of a
lavish residence in the quiet hamlet of Marly-le-Roi. Called Le
Ch?teau de Monte Cristo, it was home to a menagerie of exotic pets
and a parade of freeloaders until 1850, when Dumas''s theater failed
and he faced bankruptcy. Fleeing temporarily to Belgium in order to
avoid creditors, Dumas returned to Paris in 1853, shortly after the
appearance of the initial volumes of Mes Memoires My
Memoirs, 1852. Over the next years he founded the newspaper Le
Mousquetaire, for which he wrote much of the copy, as well as the
literary weekly Le Monte Cristo, but his finances never
recovered. In 1858 he traveled to Russia, eventually publishing two
new episodes of Impressions de voyage: Le Caucase
Adventures in the Caucasus, 1859 and En Russie Travels in
Russia, 1865.
The final decade of Dumas''s life began with customary high
adventure. In 1860 he met Garibaldi and was swept up into the cause
of Italian independence. After four years in Naples publishing the
bilingual paper L''IndependantL''Indipendente, Dumas returned to
Paris in 1864. In 1867 he began a flamboyant liaison with Ada
Menken, a young American actress who dubbed him ''the king of
romance.'' The same year marked the appearance of a last novel,
La Terreur Prussiene The Prussian Terror. Dumas''s final
play, Les Blancs et les Bleus The Whites and the Blues, opened in
Paris in 1869.
Alexandre Dumas died penniless but cheerful on December 5, 1870,
saying of death: ''I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to
me.'' One hundred years later his biographer Andre Maurois paid him
this tribute: ''Dumas was a hero out of Dumas. As strong as Porthos,
as adroit as d''Artagnan, as generous as Edmond Dantes, this superb
giant strode across the nineteenth century breaking down doors with
his shoulder, sweeping women away in his arms, and earning fortunes
only to squander them promptly in dissipation. For forty years he
filled the newspapers with his prose, the stage with his dramas,
the world with his clamor. Never did he know a moment of doubt or
an instant of despair. He turned his own existence into the finest
of his novels.''
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