Titans of History полностью

The self-styled “king of the world of Romance” provided his audiences with a magical form of escapism. He was the champion of romanticism, seeing the theater as “above all a thing of the imagination” and rejecting the cold orations and philosophical monologues of traditional French drama. His characters fought, wept, made love and died on stage with passion, the triumphant climaxes of his plays rendering his audiences delirious. When Dumas started writing novels, his imagination enraptured Paris. As The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo appeared simultaneously, their daily installments of action and melodrama were instant talking points. Despite their tendency to melodrama, his characters were so exuberant that they still pulse with life today—the musketeers Aramis, Porthos, Athos and D’Artagnan (with their motto “One for all, and all for one”), the sinisterly beautiful Milady de Winter, and Edmond Dantès, the count of Monte Cristo himself.

In The Three Musketeers, D’Artagnan, the cocky but charming provincial Gascon swordsman, joins the experienced king’s men to fight the sinister intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu and others. In The Count of Monte Cristo, an innocent man, Dantès, is imprisoned forever in the Château d’If island prison, where an old prisoner helps him escape—“Death is the escape from the Château d’If”—to claim a buried fortune and mysterious title. Dantès—now Monte Cristo—returns to seek justice in the classic tale of revenge.

At the height of his success Dumas was Paris’ literary star. His image was on medallions and etchings. His workrooms were strewn with flowers and bursting with visitors. Extravagant, exuberantly dressed in capes and sporting flashy canes, with a menagerie of outlandish pets and an endless stream of still more glamorous mistresses, Dumas was the perfect subject for caricature. It was not always kind and it was often racist. But his generosity, his child-like sensitivities and his bombastic naivety earned him as much love as ridicule.

The critics sneered at Dumas’s popularity, at his readability, at his prodigious and varied output. He was never elected to the bastion of France’s artistic establishment, the Académie française. He was attacked in print for being no more than the foreman of a “novel factory” because he used collaborators. Assistants did indeed research and draft his work, but it was he who brought about the literary alchemy. Furiously scribbling away in his shirtsleeves, he injected the romance, suspense and humor that gave his work its magic. Dumas had no time for academic introspection. The self-styled popularizer wrote to entertain, to enchant and consume, to dispel the mundaneness of life. He succeeded. “It fertilizes the soul, the mind, the intelligence,” wrote Victor Hugo, one of France’s other titanic men of letters. Dumas “creates a thirst for reading.”

Dumas was always blithely unconcerned by the sniping of others less successful than himself. He abandoned his tenuous claim to the title of marquis; his name was title enough. He had his motto—“I love those who love me”—carved in huge letters on Monte Cristo, the opulent château he built to celebrate his success.

His lifestyle was precarious. Debts forced him to sell Monte Cristo. On his deathbed he remarked wryly: “I came to Paris with twenty-four francs. That is exactly the sum with which I die.” His action-packed cape-and-sword romances became less fashionable as literary styles changed. But he was undaunted by his oscillating fortunes. Irrepressible and indefatigable, he continued to write. He founded magazines and he lectured. He even participated in Garibaldi’s campaign to unify Italy.

When Dumas died, at the home of his devoted son at Puys near Dieppe, it was, in the words of one young journalist, “as though we had all lost a friend.” The “affectionate and much-loved soul” was also the “splendid magician” who created works that gave “passage into unknown worlds.”

Dumas had a son who would also make his name in literature. In 1822, when he was twenty, Alexandre Dumas had moved to Paris to make his fortune and quickly took up with the first of many mistresses, Marie-Catherine Labay, a dressmaker who lived in the rooms opposite him. Young Alexandre, the child of this affair, was six years old before his father formally recognized him and won custody of him in a vicious legal battle. (Father and son, both Alexandre and both writers, are distinguished as père and fils.) His father cherished him and gave him the most expensive education possible (although he could not prevent his son’s classmates from taunting him for his mixed-race heritage). But his mother’s distress at losing her son was an experience that the adult Dumas fils would revisit in his work.