Part 13

DUMAS, ALEXANDRE [ALEXANDRE DAVY DE LA PAILLETERIE] (1802-1870), French novelist and dramatist, was born at Villers-Cotterets (Aisne) on the 24th of July 1802. His father, the French general, Thomas Alexandre Dumas (1762-1806)--also known as Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie--was born in Saint Domingo, the natural son of Antoine Alexandre Davy, marquis de la Pailleterie, by a negress, Marie Cessette Dumas, who died in 1772. In 1780 he accompanied the marquis to France, and there the father made a mesalliance which drove the son into enlisting in a dragoon regiment. Thomas Alexandre Dumas was still a private at the outbreak of the revolution, but he rose rapidly and became general of division in 1793. He was general-in-chief of the army of the western Pyrenees, and was transferred later to commands in the Alps and in La Vendee. Among his many exploits was the defeat of the Austrians at the bridge of Clausen on the 22nd of April 1797, where he commanded Joubert's cavalry. He lost Napoleon's favour by plain speaking in the Egyptian campaign, and presently returned to France to spend the rest of his days in retirement at Villers Cotterets, where he had married in 1792 Marie Elisabeth Labouret.

The novelist, who was the offspring of this union, was not four years old when General Dumas died, leaving his family with no further resource than 30 acres of land. Mme Dumas tried to obtain help from Napoleon, but in vain, and lived with her parents in narrow circumstances. Alexandre received the rudiments of education from a priest, and entered 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. Madame Dumas presently joined her son in Paris, where she died in 1838.

Soon after his arrival in Paris Dumas had entered on a liaison with a dressmaker, Marie Catherine Labay, and their son, the famous Alexandre Dumas _fils_ (see below), was born in 1824. Dumas acknowledged his son in 1831, and obtained the custody of him after a lawsuit with the mother.

The first piece by Dumas and Leuven to see the footlights was _La Chasse et l'amour_ (Ambigu-Comique, 22nd of Sept. 1825), and in this they had help from other writers. Dumas had a share in another vaudeville, _La Noce et l'enterrement_ (Porte Saint-Martin, 21st of Nov. 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 on the 11th of February 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[1] 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 _Memoires_, 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 offence 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_ (Odeon, 10th of Jan 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 Mlle 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 and exclaims, "Elle me resistait, je l'ai assassinee." He produced more than twenty more plays alone or in collaboration before 1845, exclusive of dramatizations from his novels. _Richard Darlington_ (Porte Saint Martin, 10th of Dec 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_ (Porte Saint-Martin, 29th of May 1832), announced as by MM. X X X and Gaillardet, was the occasion of a duel and a law-suit with the original author, Frederic Gaillardet, whose MS. 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_ (Theatre Francais, 2nd of April 1839), still remains in the repertory.

In 1840 Dumas married Ida Ferrier, an actress whom he had imposed on the theatres that took his pieces. The amiable relations which had subsisted between them for eight years were disturbed by the marriage, which is said to have been undertaken in consequence of a strong hint from the duke of Orleans, and Mme Dumas lived in Italy separated from her husband.

As a novelist Dumas began by writing short stories, but his happy collaboration with Auguste Maquet,[2] 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, 1701-1702) 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 apres_ (10 vols., 1845) and _Dix ans plus tard, ou le vicomte de Bragelonne_ (26 pts., 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. The three musketeers are as famous in England as in France. Thackeray could read about Athos from sunrise to sunset with the utmost contentment of mind, and R.L. Stevenson and Andrew Lang have paid tribute to the band in _Memories and Portraits_ and _Letters to Dead Authors_. 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 _Police devoilee_, 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_ (10 vols., 1847-1848), in which Diane de Monsoreau avenges herself on the duke of Anjou for the death of her former lover, Bussy d'Amboise.

Much has been written about the exact share which Dumas had in the novels which bear his name. The Dumas-Maquet series is undoubtedly the best, but Maquet alone never accomplished anything to approach them in value. The MSS. of the novels still exist in Dumas's handwriting, and the best of them bear the unmistakable stamp of his unrivalled skill as a narrator. The chief key to his enormous output is to be found in his untiring industry and amazing fertility of invention, not in the system of wholesale collaboration which was exposed with much exaggeration by Querard in his _Supercheries litteraires_ and by "Eugene de Mirecourt" (C.B.J. Jacquot) in his misleading _Fabrique de romans, maison Alexandre Dumas et c^ie_ (1845). His assistants, in fact, supplied him with outlines of romances on plans drawn up by himself, and he then rewrote the whole thing. That this method was never abused it would be impossible to say; _Les Deux Diane_, for instance, a prelude to the Valois novels, is said to have been written entirely by Paul Meurice, although Dumas's name appears on the title-page.

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. His son, Alexandre Dumas, was at that time living with his mother Mlle Labay, who was eventually reconciled with the elder Dumas. Father and son, though always on affectionate terms when they met, were too different in their ideas to see much of one another. 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.

Dumas was never an actual candidate for academic honours, but he had more than once taken steps to investigate his chances of success. A statue of him was erected on the Place Malesherbes, Paris, in 1883, and the figure of d'Artagnan finds a place on the pedestal.

Auguste Maquet was Dumas's chief collaborator. Others were Paul Lacroix (the bibliophile "P.L. Jacob"), Paul Bocage, J.P. Mallefille and P.A. Fiorentino. The novels of Dumas may be conveniently arranged in a historical sequence. The Valois novels and the musqueteers series brought French history down to 1672. Contributions to later history are:--_La Dame de volupte_ (2 vols., 1864), being the memoirs of Mme de Luynes, and its sequel _Les Deux Reines_ (2 vols., 1864); _La Tulipe noire_ (3 vols., 1850), giving the history of the brothers de Witt; _Le Chevalier d'Harmental_ (4 vols., 1853), and _Une Fille du regent_ (4 vols., 1845), the story of two plots against the regent, the duke of Orleans; two books on Mme du Deffand, _Memoires d'une aveugle_ (8 vols., 1856-1857) and _Les Confessions de la marquise_ (8 vols., 1857), both of doubtful authorship; _Olympe de Cleves_ (9 vols., 1852), the story of an actress and a young Jesuit novice in the reign of Louis XV., one of his most popular novels; five books on the beginning of the Revolution down to the execution of Marie Antoinette: the _Memoires d'un medecin_, including _Joseph Balsamo_ (19 pts., 1846-1848), in which J.J. Rousseau, Mme du Barry and the dauphiness Marie Antoinette figure, with its sequels; _Le Collier de la reine_ (9 vols., 1849-1850), in which Balsamo appears under the alias of Cagliostro; _Ange Pitou_ (8 vols., 1852), known in English as "The Taking of the Bastille"; _La Comtesse de Charny_ (19 vols., 1853-1855), describing the attempts to save the monarchy and the flight to Varennes; and _Le Chevalier de maison rouge_ (6 vols., 1846), which opens in 1793 with the hero's attempt to save the queen. Among the numerous novels dealing with the later revolutionary period are:--_Les Blancs et les bleus_ (3 vols., 1868) and _Les Compagnons de Jehu_ (7 vols., 1857). _Les Louves de Machecoul_ (10 vols., 1859) deals with the rising in 1832 in La Vendee. Other famous stories are:--_Les Freres corses_ (2 vols., 1845); _La Femme au collier de velours_ (2 vols., 1851); _Les Mohicans de Paris_ (19 vols., 1854-1855), detective stories with which may be classed the series of _Crimes celebres_ (8 vols., 1839-1841), which are, however, of doubtful authorship; _La San Felice_ (9 vols., 1864-1865), in which Lady Hamilton played a prominent part, with its sequels _Emma Lyonna_ and _Souvenirs d'une favorite_. Of his numerous historical works other than fiction the most important is his _Louis XIV et son siecle_ (4 vols., 1845). _Mes Memoires_ (20 vols., 1852-1854; Eng. trans. of selections by A.F. Davidson, 2 vols., 1891) is an account of his father and of his own life down to 1832. There are collective editions of his plays (6 vols., 1834-1836, and 15 vols., 1863-1874), but of the 91 pieces for which he was wholly or partially responsible, 24 do not appear in these collections.

The complete works of Dumas were issued by Michel Levy _freres_ in 277 volumes (1860-1884). The more important novels have been frequently translated into English. There is a long list of writings on his life and his works both in English and French. The more important French authorities are: his own memoirs, already cited; C. Glinel, _Alexandre Dumas et son oeuvre_ (Reims, 1884); H. Parigot, _Dumas pere_ (Grands ecrivains francais series, 1902), and _Le Drame d'Alexandre Dumas_ (1899); H. Blaze de Bury, _Alexandre Dumas_ (1885); Philibert Andebrand, _Alexandre Dumas a la maison d'or_ (1888); G. Ferry, _Dernieres Annees d'Alexandre Dumas_ (1883); and L.H. Lecomte, _Alexandre Dumas_ (1904). Of the English lives of Dumas perhaps the best is that by Arthur F. Davidson, _Alexandre Dumas Pere, his Life and Works_ (1902), which contains an extensive bibliography. See also lives by P. Fitzgerald (2 vols., 1873) and H.A. Spurr (1902), and essays by Andrew Lang (_Letters to Dead Authors_), Brander Matthews (_French Dramatists_), R.L. Stevenson (_Memories and Portraits_). (M. Br.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] His friendship with Victor Hugo was interrupted in 1833-1834 by the articles contributed to the _Journal des debats_ by a friend and protege of the poet, Granier de Cassagnac, who brought against Dumas charges of wholesale plagiarism from other dramatists.

[2] The details of this collaboration were brought to light in a suit brought against Dumas by Maquet with regard to his share in the profits. See the _Gazette des tribunaux_ (January 21, 22, 28, and February 4, 1858).

DUMAS, ALEXANDRE ["DUMAS _FILS_"] (1824-1895), French dramatist and novelist, was born in Paris on the 27th of July 1824, the natural son of Alexandre Dumas (see above) and the dressmaker Marie Labay. His father at that date was still a humble clerk and not much more than a boy. "Happily," writes the son, "my mother was a good woman, and worked hard to bring me up"; while of his father he says, "by a most lucky chance he happened to be well-natured," and "as soon as his first successes as a dramatist" enabled him to do so, "recognized me and gave me his name." Nevertheless, the lad's earlier school-life was made bitter by his illegitimacy. The cruel taunts and malevolence of his companions rankled through life (see preface to _La Femme de Claude_ and _L'Affaire Clemenceau_), and left indelible marks on his character and thoughts. Nor was his paternity, however distinguished, without peril. Alexandre the younger and elder saw life together very thoroughly, and Paris can have had few mysteries for them. Suddenly the son, who had been led to regard his prodigal father's resources as inexhaustible, was rudely undeceived. Coffers were empty, and he had accumulated debts to the amount of two thousand pounds.

Thereupon he pulled himself together. To a son of Dumas the use of the pen came naturally. Like most clever young writers--and report speaks of him as specially brilliant at that time--he opened with a book of verse, _Peches de jeunesse_ (1847). It was succeeded in 1848 by a novel, _La Dame aux camelias_, a sort of reflection of the world in which he had been living. The book had considerable success, and was followed, in fairly quick succession, by _Le Roman d'une femme_ (1848) and _Diane de Lys_ (1851). All this, however, did not deliver him from the load of debt, which, as he tells us, remained odious. In 1849 he dramatized _La Dame aux camelias_, but for various reasons, the rigour of the censorship being the most important, it was not till the 2nd of February 1852, and then only by the intervention of Napoleon's all-powerful minister, Morny, that the play could be produced at the Vaudeville. It succeeded then, and has held the stage ever since, less perhaps from inherent superiority to other plays which have foundered than to the great opportunities it affords to any actress of genius.

Thenceforward Dumas's career was that of a brilliant and prosperous dramatist. _Diane de Lys_ (1853), _Le Demi-Monde_ (1855), _La Question d'argent_ (1857), _Le Fils naturel_ (1858), _Le Pere prodigue_ (1859) followed rapidly. Debts became a thing of the past, and Dumas a wealthy man. The didactic habit was always strong upon him. "Alexandre loves preaching overmuch," wrote his father; and in most of his plays he assumes the attitude of a rigid and uncompromising moralist commissioned to impart to a heedless world lessons of deep import. The lessons themselves are mostly concerned with the "eternal feminine," by which Dumas was haunted, and differ in ethical value. Thus in _Les Idees de Madame Aubray_ (1867) he inculcates the duty of the seducer to marry the woman he has seduced; but in _La Femme de Claude_ (1873) he argues the right of the husband to take the law into his own hand and kill the wife who is unfaithful and worthless--a thesis again defended in his novel, _L'Affaire Clemenceau_, and in his pamphlet, _L'Homme-femme_; while in _Diane de Lys_ he had taught that the betrayed husband was entitled to kill--not in a duel, but summarily--the man who had taken his honour; and in _L'Etrangere_ (1876) the bad husband is the victim. Nor did he preach only in his plays. He preached in voluminous introductions, and pamphlets not a few. And when, in 1870 and 1872, France was going through bitter hours of humiliation, he called her to repentance and amendment in a _Nouvelle Lettre de Junius_ and two _Lettres sur les choses du jour_.