|
It’s “one for all and all for
one!” as D’Artagnan and his three pals follow
a course of swashbuckling intrigue and adventure in 17th-centry
France.
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 François-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 Château 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’Independant/L’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.’ |
