Ringmaster of the Feuilleton
Grandson of an enslaved woman, son of a general: he rewrote Maquet’s drafts into Musketeers and Monte Cristo, then spent it all on lovers and Garibaldi.
Novelist, Dramatist & Master of the Feuilleton
Alexandre Dumas was the grandson of an enslaved woman from Saint-Domingue and the son of a revolutionary general who died broke. He got his first job because of his handwriting, conquered the Paris stage with Romantic melodrama, and then turned the newspaper serial into a workshop: Auguste Maquet researched and drafted, and Dumas rewrote every page in his own hand. A pamphleteer called it a fiction factory and mocked his skin; a court sent the pamphleteer to prison; in 1858 Maquet sued for his name on the books and lost. The money bought a theatre, a château and a schooner that carried Dumas into Garibaldi’s war. Then it was gone, and he died in his son’s house in 1870 — by his son’s account, afraid his work would not outlast him.
His father was born in Saint-Domingue in 1762, the son of a French nobleman, Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, and an enslaved woman, Marie-Cessette Dumas. As Tom Reiss tells it in The Black Count (2012), the marquis paid for his passage home by selling his Black family. The boy he sold only “conditionally, with the right of redemption”, then bought back once he had claimed the family estate. In 1786 the young man enlisted as a private under his mother’s surname, “Dumas, Alexandre”. The Revolution made Black men citizens, and at thirty-one he was a general.
He quarrelled with Bonaparte in Egypt. Sailing home, he put in at Taranto, which the Kingdom of Naples had retaken, and spent about two years in prison there; he came out, apparently poisoned, having lost the use of an eye and an ear. Meanwhile Bonaparte restored slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe, outlawed mixed marriages and barred people of colour from entering France. The general was refused another command and even his back pay. He died in 1806, when Alexandre, born at Villers-Cotterêts on 24 July 1802, was a small child, and left his widow and son “practically destitute”. Reiss argues that the cell at Taranto is the seed of the Château d’If.
The son grew up with little schooling and one marketable gift. In 1823, by his own account in his memoirs, he went to Paris with his father’s name and a few of his old letters, looking for a patron among the general’s old comrades. The minister of war would not see him. General Foy had him write out a petition on the spot, and found him a post as a supernumerary copying clerk in the secretariat of the Duc d’Orléans at twelve hundred francs a year. In 1824 Laure Labay bore him a son, also Alexandre, the future author of La Dame aux camélias. Dumas did not formally recognise the boy until 1831.
My Memoirs, Vol. II, 1822 to 1825Dumas’s own, often embroidered, account of arriving in Paris and winning a clerk’s desk with his handwriting.Read freeHe wrote at night, after office hours. In the memoirs of the sixteenth-century diarist Pierre de L’Estoile he found the affair of the Duchesse de Guise and her lover Saint-Mégrin, with Henri III, his favourites, Catherine de’ Medici and the jester Chicot all around them. Henri III et sa cour opened at the Comédie-Française on 11 February 1829. Dumas had boldly invited his employer, the Duc d’Orléans, who moved his dinner party earlier and brought his guests. Days before the première his mother had been struck down by apoplexy, and he divided his time between rehearsals and her bedside. The play was a triumph. Andrew Lang, introducing the English memoirs, thought Dumas “probably better known for the time and more spoken of than Victor Hugo”.
When Paris rose against Charles X in July 1830, Dumas went to the barricades. His memoirs tell how he drove to Soissons, where the garrison held a powder magazine. When the royal commandant, the Vicomte de Liniers, refused to give up the powder, Dumas drew a pair of double-barrelled pistols and swore to “blow out the brains of all four of you” within five seconds. When the memoirs ran in La Presse in 1853, Liniers’s son wrote in to say he had been in the room. In his version the powder had already been promised to the National Guard, Dumas waved one pistol, and he got the powder only when a deputation of guardsmen came to collect it. The son’s letter is reprinted in an appendix to the memoirs. Read the scene as Dumas’s legend of himself, told with a dramatist’s timing.
In 1831 Antony, a modern-dress drama of adultery starring Marie Dorval, confirmed him as a leading Romantic playwright. The same year Belle Kreilssamner bore him a daughter, Marie-Alexandrine, and he formally recognised both of his children.
Auguste Maquet was a history teacher with literary ambitions and no name publishers would buy. Gérard de Nerval brought him to Dumas. Dumas reworked Maquet’s rejected play Bathilde, which opened at the Théâtre de la Renaissance on 14 January 1839 under Maquet’s name alone. Then Maquet brought sixty pages of a story the Revue de Paris had turned down, which he hoped to sell for 200 francs. In the account Dumas gave his lawyer years later, he told Maquet the pages were worth not 200 francs but 12,000. They became Le Chevalier d’Harmental, serialised in Le Siècle in 1841 under Dumas’s name, with Maquet paid 500 francs a volume. That set the pattern: Maquet’s material, Dumas’s name, and the publisher’s money.
The manuscripts show how it worked. Sarah Mombert, working from the papers in the Bibliothèque nationale, describes two stages. The partners agreed a plan; Maquet dug through chronicles and memoirs and wrote a preparatory draft, the “copie”; Dumas then wrote the “feuilleton” that went to the newspaper. He kept Maquet’s outline and some of his phrases, but expanded everything, added the narrator’s voice and dramatised the dialogue. Maquet’s 101-leaf draft of The Three Musketeers from chapter 41 to the end survives (BnF NAF 11944); most of his drafts were destroyed once used. Mombert credits the idea of the Musketeers to Dumas. Its raw material was the apocryphal Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan by Courtilz de Sandras, and Le Siècle began printing it on its front page on 14 March 1844.
The newspaper shaped the prose. “Serial novelists were paid by the line,” Graham Robb notes, and Dumas liked to reveal character through dialogue, “which had the added advantage of taking up more space in the newspaper.” A favourite story says he invented Athos’s near-silent servant Grimaud to fill lines with one-word answers, then killed him off when the paper stopped paying for short lines. No contemporary document for it has been traced, and Grimaud goes on appearing in the sequels. What the papers do show is the scale. On 26 March 1845 Dumas contracted with La Presse and Le Constitutionnel for nine volumes a year for five years at 3,500 francs a volume; by Mombert’s reading of the accounts, a page of Maquet’s was worth roughly a quarter of one of Dumas’s. Maquet reckoned that together they had written “un demi-million de lignes”.
Success brought the charge that he did not write his own books. In 1843 Louis de Loménie declared it “physiquement impossible” for Dumas to write or dictate everything signed with his name. In February 1845 the pamphleteer Eugène de Mirecourt (Jean-Baptiste Jacquot) published Fabrique de romans: Maison Alexandre Dumas et Cie, naming the “real authors” book by book: Maquet above all, but also Nerval, Gautier, Paul Meurice and others. According to the Dumas scholar Claude Schopp, Mirecourt had first asked, without success, to join the factory himself. The pamphlet was openly racist: “Grattez l’œuvre de M. Dumas, et vous trouverez le sauvage”. Scratch the work, it said, and you find the savage, who breakfasts on potatoes snatched burning from the ashes and eats them skin and all. Balzac wrote to Madame Hanska: “C’est ignoblement bête, mais c’est tristement vrai.”
Dumas fought back on every front. On 17 February he put a list of questions to the writers’ society. He and Maquet, he wrote, had produced forty-two volumes in two years, no newspaper or publisher had lost by it, and each had still found time for books of his own, because they were in the habit of working twelve to fourteen hours a day. Maquet sent him a letter he could keep as proof against any future heir, renouncing all rights in eight novels, from Le Chevalier d’Harmental to Monte Cristo and La Reine Margot, as fully compensated under their verbal agreement, and declaring himself honoured to be the collaborator “du plus brillant des romanciers français”. Dumas also sued, and on 15 March 1845 Mirecourt was sentenced to fifteen days in prison. Robb’s verdict is that many of Mirecourt’s accusations were true all the same.
Race was never far from the attacks. Caricaturists made his hair and features their subject, and the President of France recalled in 2002 a society that held against him “son teint bistre, ses cheveux crépus”. A much-repeated anecdote, which Harry Spurr’s 1902 biography takes from Blackwood’s Magazine, has a stranger quizzing him about his ancestry, one generation at a time, until Dumas snaps that his great-grandfather was an ape: “My pedigree commences where yours terminates!” The retort may have been polished in the retelling. The insult it answers was real.
The Count of Monte Cristo, serialised from 1844 to 1846, turns that machinery into a vast design about imprisonment, knowledge and revenge. A young sailor is betrayed on his wedding day. He spends fourteen years in the Château d’If, gets an education from the prisoner in the next cell, escapes with a treasure, and spends a decade taking patient, disguised revenge. Its pleasure lies in delayed connections, and its ending asks whether perfect retribution can avoid becoming another captivity. At the 1859 appeal, Maquet’s advocate told the court he held Maquet’s written plans for it.
The money went into stone. The Théâtre-Historique was built on the Boulevard du Temple to stage Dumas’s own dramas, and it opened on 21 February 1847 with an adaptation of La Reine Margot; Monte Cristo was later played there across two consecutive nights. At Le Port-Marly the architect Hippolyte Durand built him a château with carving copied from Jean Goujon’s sculpture at the Louvre, and a neo-Gothic writing pavilion that Dumas called the “château d’If”. He gave the housewarming on 25 July 1847. Spurr, following Percy Fitzgerald, describes monkeys, parrots and a pack of strange dogs in the grounds. Andrew Lang said the gates were open “to everybody but bailiffs”.
It could not last. After the February Revolution of 1848 the newspapers were full of politics and wanted no feuilletons, and the theatre’s audiences thinned until it failed. On 22 March 1849 Dumas sold the château, which had cost several hundred thousand francs, for 31,000 to a buyer who was fronting for him, so he could stay on for a while.
Maquet walked out in 1851. Dumas had fallen into arrears with him while other creditors had legal claims first. Charles Reade, quoted by Spurr, put what Maquet left behind at 130,000 francs. In December 1851, after Louis-Napoléon’s coup and with creditors closing in, Dumas went to Brussels, where Victor Hugo was already in exile. He lived at 73 rue de Waterloo until January 1853 and, he boasted, wrote fifty volumes there with no collaborator his enemies could name.
Back in Paris he founded a daily newspaper, Le Mousquetaire (1853–1857), and filled much of it himself. Visitors found the office as noisy as a factory. Henri Blaze de Bury remembered Dumas writing through the din: “Without pausing in his writing, he held out his left hand to you with a smile.” The paper was never run on business lines. When it died in 1857 he started another, Monte-Cristo, straight away.
In January 1858 Maquet went to court. He asked to be declared co-author of eighteen novels, the Musketeers cycle, Monte Cristo and La Reine Margot among them, with half the royalties, his name beside Dumas’s and 50,000 francs on account. On 3 February the court rejected every claim and ordered him to pay the costs. At the appeal in November 1859 the two advocates gave rival histories, which Claude Schopp has recently re-read. For Maquet, Me Marie said the first draft was always Maquet’s and that Dumas recopied it “non pas servilement”, taking over its ideas, scenes and dialogue and adding his own witticisms. For Dumas, Me Duverdy said Dumas planned each book aloud through whole days or nights; Maquet then researched and wrote a provisional version, which Dumas rewrote from the first word to the last.
Duverdy’s best exhibit was Maquet’s manuscript of a scene from The Black Tulip, set beside the printed text. In Maquet’s draft the guards burst in at once. In Dumas’s version the tulip-lover, entrusted with the de Witts’ dangerous papers, wastes precious minutes chasing his bulb and forgets the warning lying on his table. Then the guards arrive. Both briefs were partisan, and Schopp warns as much. Secondary accounts disagree about any later money settlement; none says Maquet ever got his name on the books.
Dumas met Giuseppe Garibaldi in Turin on 4 January 1860. On 9 May he sailed from Marseille in his new schooner, the Emma, with about twenty companions, among them his young mistress Émilie Cordier, dressed as a sailor. He had meant to cruise the eastern Mediterranean, but Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily changed the plan. Dumas reached him at Palermo on 11 June and helped gather money and arms for the campaign. Spurr says he spent the 50,000 francs meant for his holiday on rifles.
On 14 September 1860 Garibaldi, now master of Naples, appointed him director of the excavations and museums of Pompeii and Naples and gave him the Chiatamone palace to live in. On 11 October Dumas launched a newspaper, L’Indipendente. He also published a French version of Garibaldi’s memoirs, which, the historian Gilles Pécout notes, is full of his own additions and variations. Pécout adds that Dumas sometimes exaggerated his role as go-between with the Neapolitan revolutionaries, and Spurr says Neapolitans jeered at a foreigner holding the post. At the end of 1860 Émilie Cordier gave birth to their daughter, Micaëlla. Dumas stayed in Naples, on and off, until 1864.
He came home to falling sales and the usual creditors, and went on lecturing, staging and serialising to pay them. In 1866–67 he took up with the American actress Adah Isaacs Menken, then performing in Paris. In 1867, as Peter Duffy writes, Paris was “awash with a set of pictures of her snuggling Alexandre Dumas, then sixty-four”. Dumas sued to stop the photographs being sold, which only made them more notorious. That they were lovers is likely but not proven.
His last novel, Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine (1869), was left unfinished and lay forgotten in the archives for more than a century before it was rediscovered in the late 1980s. Robb, who finds it faltering, quotes the old man: “I am completely ruined.” Then, a moment later: “But I have no debts.”
He also wrote a cookbook, an alphabet of recipes, ingredients and table talk. He handed the manuscript of the Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine to the publisher Alphonse Lemerre, and it appeared only in 1873, edited by Denis-Joseph Vuillemot, at more than 1,100 pages. Spurr tells of a Sunday when the servants walked out after a row with Dumas’s mistress, and he fed a crowd of guests on what was left in the larder: rice and tomatoes.
As his health failed, his daughter raised the alarm, and Dumas fils took him to his house at Puys, near Dieppe. He died there on 5 December 1870, while the Prussian army was advancing across France. By his son’s account, the dying man said he felt he was standing on a monument built on sand. The son told him the pillar was well built.
Grand Dictionnaire de cuisineThe posthumous cookbook in a scanned first edition: recipes, ingredients and anecdotes in alphabetical order.Browse the scanHis own fiction takes up race most directly in Georges (1843). The novel is set on Mauritius, then the Île de France. A mixed-race planter’s son, educated in France, comes home to avenge the white colonists’ humiliation of his father, and he ends up leading a slave revolt. It does not make Dumas’s life into the plot, and it is no simple sermon: Robb finds its slaves and Malays drawn with condescension, “hardly a manifesto for racial tolerance”.
On 30 November 2002 his remains were taken from Villers-Cotterêts to the Panthéon, his coffin escorted by Republican Guards dressed as musketeers. President Jacques Chirac called the ceremony a reparation: “Elle répare une injustice”. It was, he said, an injustice that had marked Dumas from childhood “comme elle marquait déjà au fer la peau de ses ancêtres esclaves”. Read the adventures beside the systems that made them: the colony, the newspaper, the archive, the lawyer’s brief, and a collaborator whose name never reached the cover.
GeorgesA colonial revenge story in which race and belonging become the subject, not the background.Read freePublic-domain ebooks · multiple languages
Free editions of the Musketeer cycle, Monte Cristo and other works.Browse free ebooksAlexandre Dumas · trans. E. M. Waller, introduction by Andrew Lang
The father, the childhood at Villers-Cotterêts, and Dumas’s self-mythology in full voice; volumes II–IV continue to the Soissons powder raid.Read freeAlexandre Dumas · trans. E. M. Waller
The July Revolution and the Soissons episode, with the Liniers family’s 1853 rebuttal printed in an appendix.Read free1873 · Alexandre Dumas, ed. D.-J. Vuillemot · French
The posthumous cookbook in a scanned first edition.Browse the scan
J. R. R. TolkienTwo very different arts of building a world readers can inhabit
Ayn RandLong-form popular fiction organised around fiercely drawn ideals
