Literary Lives 12

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Gardening

no men – but ideas – no feeling, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.”

- Alexandre Dumas

“Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit.”

- Alexandre Dumas

Dumas was a very organised and ambitious young man. After writing several successful plays, he switched to writing novels. Although involving himself in an extravagant lifestyle and spending a lot more than he earned, he had taught himself to be an astute marketer. Newspapers then were publishing serial novels, so he wrote one of his plays Le Capitaine Paul in 1838 as his first serial novel. He founded a production studio, staffed with writers who turned out hundreds of stories, all under his direction, editing, and choosing various editions. He was 36 years old and made more money that he had ever dreamed of making.

From 1839 to 1841, Dumas, with the assistance of several friends and accomplices, compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection of essays on famous criminals and crimes from European history that featured Beatrice Cenci, Martin Guerre, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, as well as more recent events and criminals, including the alleged murderers Karl Ludwig Sand and Antoine François Desrues, who were executed. Dumas also collaborated with Augustin Grisier, his fencing teacher, in his 1840 novel The Fencing Master. The story is in fact Grisier’s accurate account of how he came to witness the events of the Decembrist revolt in Russia – when Russian army officers on December 26, 1828, led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest again Nicholas I’s assumption of the throne after his brother Constantine removed himself from the line of succession. The novel was banned in Russia by Czar Nicholas I, and Dumas was prohibited from visiting the country until after the Czar’s death. Dumas refers to Grisier with great respect in his memoirs, as well as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Corsican Brothers.

Dumas used many assistants and collaborators in churning out his increasingly popular novels, of whom Auguste Maquet was the best known. Maquet took Dumas to court for using his written material in order to get recognition and more money for his unrecognised work. Dumas subsequently agreed to the increased payment – but not to authorial recognition. THE IRON Mask mounted on a jail off the coast of France near Cannes. Dumas’s ‘The Man in the Iron Maks’ was the last adventure of his Musket-eers

CHÂTEAU de Monte-Cristo

“What I’ve loved most after you, is myself; that is, my dignity and that strength which made me superior to other men. That strength was my life.”

- Alexandre Dumas

Dumas married actress Ida Ferrier in 1840, but continued to have many affairs with other women and is known to have fathered at least four children out of wedlock. This was in addition to the three natural children he had with his longsuffering wife. Many years later, in 1866, he had an affair with the well-known American actress Adah Isaacs Menken, who was at the peak of her success in Les Pirates de La Savanne in Paris. Dumas’ novels, including The Count of Monte

Cristo and The Three Musketeers, were incredibly popular and were translated into English and other languages. His writing and his book productions earned him untold riches, but he was frequently insolvent. He was a profligate and spent lavishly on women and good living. It is said that he had no less than 40 mistresses and had the stamina to handle them. In 1846, he built a grand country house outside Paris at Le Port-Marly – the enormous Château de Monte-Cristo (named after his successful serialised novel The Count of Monte-Cristo) - with an additional structure for his writing and literary productions. The château was usually filled with friends and strangers who sponged off his generosity. Only two years after he built his magnificent building, faced with financial ruin, he was forced to sell the property.

Dumas was a productive writer and travelled widely creating travel books about his journeys – to Spain,

Italy, Germany, the British Isles and French Algeria.

When King Louis-Philippe was ousted in a revolt in 1851, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected president. He disapproved of Dumas, causing the author to flee to Brussels, Belgium as much to avoid political unpopularity as to escape his creditors. Two years later, in 1859, he moved to Russia where French was the second language, and where he was popular. He left in 1861 to go to Italy where Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king. There, for three years, he befriended Garibaldi in the movement for Italian unification before returning to Paris in 1864, six years before he died. He was buried at his birthplace of Villers-Cotter ts in the department of Aisne.

“There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body’s sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.”

- Alexandre Dumas

Dumas’ death was overshadowed by the Franco-

Prussian war. Changing literary fashions also decreased his popularity. However, in the late 20th century scholars have caused a critical and new appreciation of his works.

His former country home, the Château de Monte-Cristo, has been restored and opened to the public as a museum. Researchers have discovered Dumas works in obscure archives, and in 2002, the bicentenary of Dumas’ birth, French President Jacques Chirac held a ceremony honouring the author by having his ashes re-interred at the Mausoleum of the Panthéon of Paris, where many of the greatest French luminaries are buried. Dumas is enshrined alongside two other great French authors, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola.