(A romantic romp of brave heroes, devious villains, desper...)
A romantic romp of brave heroes, devious villains, desperate battles, and true love, this epic tale of high adventure and derring-do is highly recommended for fans of Dumas’s work and would make for a fantastic addition to any bookshelf. Captain Paul is loosely based on the exploits of John Paul Jones, a captain in the American Navy during the revolutionary war.
(Darkly humorous, Captain Pamphile is a thrilling adventur...)
Darkly humorous, Captain Pamphile is a thrilling adventure story, full of sea battles, mutiny, and exotic animals all led by one of Dumas’ most intriguing creations. In the fashionable social circles of 1831, the vogue is to collect one’s own menagerie, and there is soon a demand for exotic animals from the four corners of the world.
(Georges is the story of a wealthy mulatto boy who is driv...)
Georges is the story of a wealthy mulatto boy who is driven from his island home by racist landowners. Returning to Mauritius as an accomplished young man, Georges pits his strength against a powerful plantation owner, leading a dramatic slave uprising and claiming the heart of a beautiful white woman.
(The Three Musketeers is a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Set i...)
The Three Musketeers is a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Set in the 17th century, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to travel to Paris, to join the Musketeers of the Guard.
(Alexandre Dumas weaves the compelling story of Siamese tw...)
Alexandre Dumas weaves the compelling story of Siamese twins who are separated physically but never in spirit. When one of the brothers is murdered, the other leaves Corsica for Paris to avenge the killing. Dumas brings this thrilling tale to life with his fascinating descriptions of Italy and France and his powerful portrayal of the undying love of a brother for brother.
(Based on the classic Christmas story by E. T. A. Hoffmann...)
Based on the classic Christmas story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Nutcracker of Nuremberg is the magical adventure of Marie Stahlbaum’s favorite toy, the Nutcracker, who battles the nefarious Mouse King in battle and takes the reader on a wonderful adventure, into a magical land of dolls.
(Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Al...)
Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time. In it, the dashing young hero, Edmond Dantès, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If, doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell.
(The Baron des Canolles is a man torn apart by the civil w...)
The Baron des Canolles is a man torn apart by the civil war that dominates mid-seventeenth-century France. For while the naïve Gascon soldier cares little for the politics behind the battles, he is torn apart by a deep passion for two powerful women on opposing sides of the war, Nanon de Lartigues, a keen supporter of the Queen Regent Anne of Austria, and the Victomtesse de Cambes, who supports the rebellious forces of the Princess de Condé.
(The Pale Lady is a gripping vampire tale about a Polish w...)
The Pale Lady is a gripping vampire tale about a Polish woman who is adored by two very different brothers. Full of adventure, tragedy, and romance, set in a land of creepy castles and misty monasteries.
(Set at the height of the tulipomania that gripped Holland...)
Set at the height of the tulipomania that gripped Holland in the 17th century, this is the story of Cornelius van Baerle, a humble grower whose sole desire is to grow the perfect specimen of the tulip Negra. When his godfather is murdered, Cornelius finds himself caught up in the deadly politics of the time, imprisoned and facing a death sentence. His jailor's daughter Rosa, holds both the key to his survival and his chance to produce the ultimate tulip.
(The story concerns Thibault, a shoe-maker, who is beaten ...)
The story concerns Thibault, a shoe-maker, who is beaten by the gamekeeper of the Lord of Vez for interfering with the lord's hunting. Afterward, he encounters a huge wolf, walking on its hind legs like a man, who offers him vengeance. Thibault may wish harm on any person in return for one of his own hairs for each wish.
(The Last Vendée deals with the Duchess de Berry's attempt...)
The Last Vendée deals with the Duchess de Berry's attempt to stir up an insurrection in that province in 1832 and has some romantic threads interwoven. The two girls who are nicknamed the She-Wolves are among Dumas's most attractive creations and the story of their love is touching. It is in this book that Dumas has lifted an entire episode from Scotts Rob Roy.
Alexandre Dumas père was one of the most prolific and most popular French authors of the 19th century. Without ever attaining indisputable literary merit, Dumas succeeded in gaining a great reputation first as a dramatist and then as a historical novelist, especially for such works as The Count of Monte Cristo, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, The Black Tulip and The Three Musketeers.
Background
Alexandre Dumas was born on the 24th of July, 1802 in Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, France. He was the son of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie and Marie Louis Labouret. The Dumas family name was adopted from Alexandre's grandmother, an enslaved Haitian woman named Marie-Césette Dumas. His grandfather was the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de La Pailleterie. Thomas-Alexandre took the name Dumas when he enlisted in Napoleon's army. After Thomas's death, Marie Louise Labouret worked hard to provide an education for her son.
Education
His father died of cancer when Alexandre was only four years old, and his mother could not afford to send him to an elite school for education. However, the boy was a voracious reader who read whatever books were available to him.
He had a great sense of imagination which was further fuelled by the stories his mother told of his father’s bravery during the French Wars.
Career
Alexandre Dumas began his career in the office of a local solicitor. His chief friend was Adolphe de Leuven, the son of an exiled Swedish nobleman implicated in the assassination of Gustavus III. of Sweden, and the two collaborated in various vaudevilles and other pieces which never saw the footlights. Leuven returned to Paris, and Dumas was sent to the office of a solicitor at Crepy. When in 1823 Dumas contrived to visit his friend in Paris, he was received to his great delight by Talma. He returned home only to break with his employer, and to arrange to seek his fortune in Paris, where he sought help without success from his father's old friends. An introduction to the deputy of his department, General Foy, procured for him, however, a place as clerk in the service of the duke of Orleans at a salary of 1200 francs. He set to work to rectify his lack of education and to collaborate with Leuven in the production of vaudevilles and melodramas.
The first piece by Dumas and Leuven to see the footlights was La Chasse et l'amour (1825), and in this they had help from other writers. Dumas had a share in another vaudeville, La Noce et l'enterrement (1826). It was under the influence of the Shakespeare plays produced in Paris by Charles Kemble, Harriet 'Smithson (afterwards Mme Berlioz) and an English company that the romantic drama of Christine was written. The subject was suggested by a bas-relief of the murder of Monaldeschi exhibited at the Salon of 1827. The piece was accepted by Baron Taylor and the members of the Comedie Francaise with the stipulation that it should be subject to revision by another dramatist because of its innovating tendencies. But the production of the piece was deferred.
Meanwhile Dumas had met with the story of the ill-fated Saint-Megrin and the duchess of Guise in Anquetil's history, and had written, in prose, Henri III et sa cour, which was immediately accepted by the Comedie Francaise and produced in 1829. It was the first great triumph of the romantic drama. The brilliant stagecraft of the piece and its admirable historical setting delighted an audience accustomed to the decadent classical tragedy, and brought him the friendship of Hugo' and Vigny. His literary efforts had met with marked disapproval from his official superiors, and he had been compelled to resign his clerkship before the production of Henri III. The duke of Orleans had, however, been present at the performance, and appointed him assistant-librarian at the Palais Royal. Christine was now recast as a romantic trilogy in verse in five acts with a prologue and epilogue, with the sub-title of Stockholm, Fontainebleau, Rome, and was successfully produced by Harel at the Odeon in March 1830.
The revolution of 1830 temporarily diverted Dumas from letters. The account of his exploits should be read in his Mémoires, where, though the incidents are true in the main, they lose nothing in the telling. During the fighting in Paris he attracted the attention of La Fayette, who sent him to Soissons to secure powder. With the help of some inhabitants he compelled the governor to hand over the magazine, and on his return to Paris was sent by La Fayette on a mission to raise a national guard in La Vendee. The advice he gave to Louis-Philippe on this subject was ill-received, and after giving offense by further indiscretions he finally alienated himself from the Orleans government by being implicated in the disturbances which attended the funeral of General Lamarque in June 1832, and he received a hint that his absence from France was desirable. A tour in Switzerland undertaken on this account furnished material for the first of a long series of amusing books of travel. Dumas remained, however, on friendly and even affectionate terms with the young duke of Orleans until his death in 1842.
Meanwhile he had produced Napoleon Bonaparte (1831), his unwillingness to make a hero of the man who had slighted his father having been overcome by Harel, who put him under lock and key until the piece was finished. His next play, Antony, had a real importance in the history of the romantic theatre. It was put in rehearsal by Mademoiselle Mars, but so unsatisfactorily that Dumas transferred it to Bocage and Mme Dorval, who played it magnificently at the Porte Saint-Martin theatre on the 3rd of May 1831. The Byronic hero Antony was a portrait of himself in his relations with Mme Melanie Waldor, the wife of an officer, and daughter of the journalist M. G. T. de Villenave, except of course in the extravagantly melodramatic denouement, when Antony, to save his mistress's honour, kills her.
He produced more than twenty more plays alone or in collaboration before 1845, exclusive of dramatizations from his novels. Richard Darlington (1831), the first idea of which was drawn from Sir Walter Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate, owed part of its great success to the admirable acting of Frederick Lemaitre. La Tour de Nesle (1832) was the occasion of a duel and a law-suit with the original author, Frederic Gaillardet, whose manuscript had been revised, first by Jules Janin and then by Dumas. In rapidity of movement, and in the terror it inspired, the piece surpassed Henri III and Antony. A lighter drama, Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (1839), still remains in the repertory.
As a novelist, Dumas began by writing short stories, but his happy collaboration with Auguste Maquet, which began in 1839, led to the admirable series of historical novels in which he proposed to reconstruct the whole course of French history. In 1844 he produced, with Maquet's help, that most famous of "cloak and sword" romances, Les Trois Mousquetaires (8 vols.), the material for which was discovered in the Memoires de M. d'Artagnan (Cologne, 1705-1702) of Courtils de Sandras. The adventures of d'Artagnan and the three musketeers, the gigantic Porthos, the clever Aramis, and the melancholy Athos, who unite to defend the honour of Anne of Austria against Richelieu and the machinations of "Milady," are brought down to the murder of Buckingham in 1629. Their admirers were gratified by two sequels, Vingt Ans après (1845) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix ans plus tard (1848-1850), which opens in 1660, showing us a mature d'Artagnan, a respectable captain of musketeers, and contains the magnificent account of the heroic death of Porthos.
Before 1844 was out Dumas had completed a second great romance in 12 volumes, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, in which he had help from Fiorentino as well as from Maquet. The idea of the intrigue was suggested by Peuchet's La Police dévoilée, and the stress laid on the earlier incidents, Dantes, Danglars and the Chateau d'If, is said to have been an afterthought. Almost as famous as these two romances is the set of Valois novels of which Henri IV. is the central figure, beginning with La Reine Margot (6 vols., 1845), which contains the history of the struggle between Catherine of Medicis and Henry of Navarre; the history of the reign of Henry III is told in La Dame de Monsoreau (8 vols., 1846), generally known in English as Chicot the Jester, from its principal character; and in Les Quarante-cinq (1847-1848), in which Diane de Monsoreau avenges herself on the duke of Anjou for the death of her former lover, Bussy d'Amboise.
The latter part of Dumas's life is a record of excessive toil to meet prodigal expenditure and accumulated debts. His disasters began with the building of a house in the Renaissance style, with a Gothic pavilion and an "English" park, at Saint Germain-en-Laye. This place, called Monte-Cristo, was governed by a crowd of hangers-on of both sexes, who absorbed Dumas's large earnings and left him penniless. Dumas also founded the Theatre Historique chiefly for the performance of his own works. The enterprise was under the patronage of the duc de Montpensier, and was under the management of Hippolyte Hostein, who had been the secretary of the Comedie Francaise. The theatre was opened in February 1847 with a dramatic version of La Reine Margot. Meanwhile Dumas had been the guest of the duc de Montpensier at Madrid, and made a quasi-official tour to Algeria and Tunis in a government vessel, which caused much comment in the press.
Dumas had never changed his republican opinions. He greeted the revolution of 1848 with delight, and was even a candidate for electoral honours in the department of the Yonne. But the change was fatal to his theatrical enterprise, for the failure of which in 1850 he was made financially responsible. After the coup d'etat of 1851 Dumas crossed the frontier to Brussels, and two years of rapid production, and the economy of his secretary, Noel Parfait, restored something like order to his affairs. On his return to Paris in the end of 1853 he established a daily paper, Le Mousquetaire, for the criticism of art and letters. It was chiefly written by Dumas, whose Memoires first appeared in it, and survived until 1857, when it was succeeded by a weekly paper, the Monte-Cristo (1857-1860).
In 1858 Dumas travelled through Russia to the Caucasus, and in 1860 he joined Garibaldi in Sicily. After an expedition to Marseilles in search of arms for the insurgents, he returned to Naples, where Garibaldi nominated him keeper of the museums. After four years' residence in Naples he returned to Paris, and after the war of '66 he visited the battlefields and produced his story of La Terreur prussienne. But his powers were beginning to fail, and in spite of the 1200 volumes which he told Napoleon he had written, he was at the mercy of his creditors, and of the succession of theatrical ladies who tyrannized over him and feared nothing except the occasional visits of Dumas fils. He was finally rescued from these by his daughter, Mme Petel, who came to live with him in 1868; and two years later, on the 5th of December 1870, he died in his son's house at Puys, near Dieppe.
Alexandre Dumas is one of the most known French writers. His works have been translated into nearly 100 languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century for nearly 200 films.
His most famous work is The Count of Monte Cristo, an adventure novel that unfolds in the 19th century and covers the historical events that happened in France, Italy and Mediterranean Islands. The book is considered a literary classic. The Three Musketeers is another one of his very popular works which revolves around the adventures of a young man named d’Artagnan and his three friends. The story has been adapted into several plays, films, television series, and videogames.
A French historian Alain Decaux founded the Société des Amis d'Alexandre Dumas (The Society of Friends of Alexandre Dumas) in 1971.
Alexandre Dumas called himself a republican but later, he declared his opposition to the regime and his devotion to the republican cause.
Dumas was a strong supporter of the Marquis de Lafayette. His political activities were viewed unfavorably by the new king, his former boss, and he was forced to leave France for a time. Dumas was pleased by the Revolution of 1848 and even ran as a candidate for the Assembly.
Views
Quotations:
"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope."
"In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas, no feelings, but interests, in politics, we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all."
"I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride."
"All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope."
"Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures."
"Woman is sacred; the woman one loves is holy."
Personality
Alexandre Dumas was too easy-going and good-natured to hate. Balzac himself, his inveterate enemy, confessed that Dumas had no pettiness of soul, no base jealousy and that he was only capable of generous actions.
Interests
writing, traveling, reading
Connections
Alexandre Dumas was married to Ida Ferrier. He had four children, two sons Alexandre Dumas and Henry Bauer, and two daughters, Marie-Alexandrine Dumas, and Micaëlla-Clélie-Josepha-Élisabeth Cordier, from numerous liaisons with other women.
Father:
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie
Dumas was a corporal in 1792 when France went to war with Austria and Prussia. He had gained a reputation in the army for his strength, swordsmanship, and a volatile temper. He enthusiastically supported the First Republic established during the Revolution. When the Black Legion was formed in 1792, Dumas was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became second in command of the legion. The Black Legion was fighting with the Army of the North when Dumas was promoted to general of brigade in 1793. In 1793 Dumas was given command of the Army of the Alps, and in 1794 he captured two important mountain passes, the Little Saint Bernard Pass and the Col du Mont Cenis. Denounced that year by the local Jacobin Club, he was recalled to Paris to defend himself, but the coup d’état of 9 Thermidor (July 27) put an end to the Reign of Terror and the charges brought against him. He then briefly served with the Army of the West. Fit for service in 1796, Dumas was ordered back to the Army of the Alps, not as its commander but as second in command under Gen. François-Christophe Kellermann. In October 1796, he was sent to Italy to serve under Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte, he fought under Bonaparte until the Treaty of Campo Formio, the peace settlement signed in October 1797 that followed France’s victory over Austria.
When Bonaparte led an expedition to Egypt in 1798, Dumas was given command of the cavalry. But again he pleaded poor health and was permitted to leave Egypt in February 1799. When his ship proved to be unseaworthy and put into the Italian city of Taranto, Dumas became a prisoner of war. Freed in April 1801, he returned to Villers-Cotterêts to regain his health. He was retired from the army in 1802.
The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas
Dumas's memoirs and surviving correspondence form the core of this comprehensive biography of the French Romantic writer whose adventures and exploits matched those of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.
