SYMHC Classics: Alexandre Dumas Pere

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic is our episode on Alexandre Duma Pere, who got a name drop in our episode on the loudon Possessions back in October. Tracy has been meaning to bring out this classic since then, but listen, time makes fools of us all. But it's here, it is now. This originally came out on February twenty seventh, twenty nineteen, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Frye. Earlier we talked about General Tomat Alexandre Duma, who was the son of an aristocrat and an enslaved woman from the French colony of Sandomang which is now Haiti. One of his children was Alexander Duma, known today as Alexander Duma Peer to distingue him from his own son, who also had the same name, because we wanted to be really confusing with this trio of men in this family. Alexander Dumat Peer, of course, wrote such classics as the Three Musketeers and the Count of Monte Cristo, and both of those works sequels and eight Marie Antoinette romances, and a bunch of other novels, in plays and essays and travel books and memoirs, and a dictionary of cuisine, hundreds and hundreds of works. The man was prolific. He did so much and so much happen in his life that it's really impossible to do justice to every single aspect of it in one episode of the show, and having multiple episodes seemed like it was getting super excessive in terms of the dumat family. So today we're going to talk about the upbringing that led Alexander Dumah to become the writer that he was, along with some of the highlights and themes of his later life and work. In my head, I'm now like, oh, you should we should start a podcast just called Duma and it's just their family and all of its yeah, all of its high drama and fascinating twists and turns. So Alexandre Duma was born on July twenty fourth, eighteen oh two, in the town of Ville Courtree in northern France. His father, as we just said, was General alex Duma. His mother was Marie Louise Elizabeth le Bouret, daughter of an innkeeper, and the two of them met when alex was billeted at that end during the French Revolution. Alexandre had one surviving older sister and another who died before he was born. According to his father, he weighed ten and a half pounds and was eighteen inches long at birth. Duma's childhood was quite difficult. Although his father had been in command of huge parts of the French military, which we talked about in that previous episode, he had fallen out of favor with Napoleon long before being captured and imprisoned in a dungeon in Naples for nearly two years. Once he was released, he was injured an ill, and he still couldn't collect a pension or back pay, so the family fell into poverty. Alexandle spent his early childhood in the company of his father, who regained some of his former health, but not enough to return to active duty. He heard all kinds of stories about his father's dramatic exploits in the army. Alex Duma had also been fond of performing various feats of strength, some of which he could still manage, and young Alexandla was fascinated by them. His father had been a war hero and one of the most prominent men of color in the French military, but Alexandra's perception of him went even beyond that, into someone who was larger than life and almost mythic dom. I described it this way, quote I adored my father. Perhaps at so early an age, the feeling which today I call love was only a naive astonishment at that herculean stature and that gigantic strength I'd seen him display on so many occasions. Perhaps it was nothing more than a childish pride and admiration. But in spite of all that, even today, the memory of my father, in every detail of his body, in every feature of his face, is as present to me as if I had lost him yesterday. Alex Duma died on February twenty sixth, eighteen oh six, probably from stomach cancer. Alexandla was approaching his fourth birthday, and as his father's condition worsened, his mother sent him to spend the night with cousins who lived nearby, so that he would not be traumatized if his father died during the night. On the night of his father's death, Alexandla woke his cousins and told them he was going to go open the door for his father, who had come to say goodbye. In the morning. When he was told that God had taken his father to heaven, Alexandra answered that he was going to go to heaven himself for revenge. With his mother, a widow without much to live on, Alexandra had very little structure to his childhood. Marie Luise tried to scare a widow's pension and was so persistent about it that Napoleon Bonaparte finally told the general who had been bringing it up with him on her their behalf quote, I forbid you to ever mention that fellow to me again. So Alexander's mother spent her time working to try to make ends meet and to pay for his older sister's education. Alexandra briefly spent some time enrolled at a private school, and his sister would teach him while she was home on school breaks, but beyond that, in his early years, Alexandra didn't have much formal education. He loved to read, and he loved to talk about what he read, and he took a few years of violin lessons that he said left him not even able to tune the instrument. Occasionally, his mother tried to enroll him in a school or seminary, but this never lasted very long, with Alexander running away or refusing to go back more often than not. In eighteen fourteen, when Alexander was twelve, his mother finally got access to a widow's pension and used it to open a tobacco shop. A year later, he managed to catch a glimpse of Napoleon Bonaparte in person. Dema described seeing him pass through town both before and after the Battle of Waterloo in eighteen fifteen, which was of course pivotal. He wrote, quote, I confess I had an intense desire to see this man, who, in making his heavy hand felt throughout France, had in a peculiarly hard fashion, ground down a poor adam like myself, lost among thirty two millions of human beings, whom he continued to crush while forgetting my very existence. In eighteen sixteen, alexandle meant two other young men who would start him on the path to becoming a writer. One was Adolf ribingd Luvin, the son of a Swedish nobleman who moved into the area around Ville Courterree The other was Amedel de la Pence, who was an officer an Adulfe wanted to be a playwright and had connections to the theater scene in Paris. Amedee knew German and Italian and offered to teach Duma these languages in his spare time. Although Alexander didn't have a lot of schooling, he did have very neat and almost flowery handwriting, which let him get an apprenticeship with a notary in eighteen eighteen. He did a lot of errands. He copied documents by hand. It was a job that he described as intolerable if he had had to pay attention to what he was copying, But since he could copy without thinking about the words themselves, he was free to just let his mind wander. This job was what allowed Duma to take his first trip to a Paris theater. A client gave him and his fellow clerks a gratuity, and they decided to go in together and catch a very early stagecoach to Paris. There they saw an adaptation of Hamlet by Jean Francois Ducie. This was a formative experience in Duma's life. He came home in a state of amazement, and he wrote to the theater to send a copy of the play so he could study it over and over. For the next few years, Duma's life was very much the same. He did some studying, he hung out with his friends, he worked for the notary, and he started trying his hand at writing his own poems and plays. He also pursued various young young women along via Colechre. His father had always been described as exceptionally handsome, and the same was true of the young Alexandra, who had blue eyes, relatively fair skin, and hair that he called molefuey tropical or my tropical tangle. He was also, by his own admission, very vain, and by everyone else's admission, he was extremely popular with women. The biggest detriment to all of this in his youth was that the family had so little money that his clothing tended to be too small and in pretty poor repair, and that made him the target for mockery among the more mean spirited of them. During these years, Napoleon, who had been at the root of so many problems for the Duma family, was forced off the imperial throne of France, exiled, returned from exile and exiled again before dying in British custody on the island of Saint Helena on May fifth, eighteen twenty one. But apart from that one sighting of Napoleon in eighteen fifteen, Duma felt fairly removed from what was happening on the national stage. Eventually demonstrated trying to make his way to Paris on a more regular basis. He thought, if he could just get to the city, he might be able to earn enough money to support himself and his mother, and we will talk about how he got there. After a sponsor break. As I noted, before the break in the early eighteen twenties, Alexander Dumat made up his mind to start visiting Paris as often as he could, with the mind to eventually moving there, but he really had to scrounge for money to make these trips. On one occasion, he and a friend went together hunting rabbits and partridges along the way so that they could sell them once they got to Paris and pay for their food and lodging. This required the two of them to outsmart the gamekeepers who were in charge of the land that they were illegally hunting. On They only had one horse between them, so one had the gun and the other state on the horse to take the quarry and ride off with it before the gameskeeper could follow the sound or the shot and find them. They did make it to Parison back, but Duma got fired from a new notary job that he'd gotten just a few months before. He had taken this trip while his boss was away, planning to go and return without him knowing, but instead his boss got back a few hours before he did. I feel like that's a classic sitcom scenario yet playing out in the early eighteen hundreds in France. Yeah, this is one of the many things, Like, so many things come up that just sound like this could be a little scene from one of his books. After his mother sold some property to settle the family's debts, Duma convinced her to let him sell some engravings that his father had brought home while serving in the military, and then, according to his memoir, he tried to build on the fifty francs that he had gotten for these engravings. He took his money to the local coffeehouse and started playing billiards against a family friend named Monsieur Cartier, with the loser buying the winner to glasses of absence. They weren't ranking the absence, they were just using this to basically keep score. They kept doubling their bets over the course of five hours, until according to Duma, he had won six hundred glasses of absinth that was worth about ninety francs, which he took in lieu of all that alcohol. I don't know, there's something, you know, you could have done a split payment that was say, that was enough to pay for about a dozen round trip tickets to Paris, and Duma made frequent trips back and forth before moving there in eighteen twenty three. He had few resources when he got there, though. His biggest asset was a collection of letters of introduction that his mother had written to various old friends and military buddies of his late father, and one of these was General Maximilian Sebastian Foy. Foy wanted to help, but he very quickly figured out that Duma really did not know how to do anything. His haphazard schooling and his self study, which he wasn't all that dedicated with, had left him without a working knowledge of almost any subject, and his ample slacking off at the notary jobs he'd had had left him without any practical skills there either. His one strong point was that very attractive, ornate handwriting. This really brought it home for Duma that he had been wasting his youth. After seeing Foy's reaction to finally figuring out one thing he could do, that thing being right neatly, he said, quote, my head fell on my breast. My shame was insupportable. The only thing I possessed was good handwriting. This diploma of incapacity well became me a beautiful handwriting. So someday I might become a copying clerk. This was my future. I would rather cut off my right arm. Fortunately, though, the General did know somebody in a very high position who needed a clerk. That was the Duke d'orleon, who would later become King Louis Philippe. But in a way this really added insult to injury, because not only was Duma's only job skill this good handwriting, but the people back home were astonished that he had managed to find a position with a Duke, of all people, after spending all those years not particularly applying himself to anything. So not only did he have a job, he didn't want. People were shocked that he had gotten it. He consoled himself with the fact that now at least he had a salary of twelve hundred francs. Of course, his ambition was not to be a copyist, even if it was the copyist for a duke. Fortunately, though, one of his supervisors was sympathetic to his ambitions of becoming a playwright and advised him on a course of self study and a focus for his creative work. His supervisor's advice, study the history of France, which in his opinion, wasn't getting nearly enough attention in the world of French literature and theater, and then write about that. Through this advice and this recommended course of self study, Duma came up with a goal for himself. He wanted to do for France what Sir Walter Scott had done for Scotland. Was particularly inspired by Scott's Waverley novels, which include Ivanhoe and Rob Roy along with twenty others. Those books were a major milestone in the development of historical fiction as a genre in European literature, and so that's what Duma set his mind on doing, writing historical fiction set in France and making that popular with the French public. At first, though his focus was really on writing this historical fiction through plays and not novels. Duma went to the theater as often as he could and embarked on a study of classic works of literature, including during downtime at work, he started making friends with notable people in the literary, theatrical and artistic circles of Paris, including people like Charles Naudier, who was connected to numerous writers in the French Romantic movement, and Victor Hugo, author of Les miss Robe and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And Duma started a relationship with a young woman named Marie Catherine la Bay, with whom he had a son, who was also named Alexandra, on July twenty seventh, eighteen twenty four. The two of them never married, but Duma paid for their lodging and visited them often as after their romantic relationship ended. Duma also started selling short comic sketches to theaters to earn some extra money to try to keep them all afloat. His first serious attempt at a play was called Christine and was about previous podcast subject Christina of Sweden. He submitted it to a theater company which accepted it, but even after a long series of revisions, they didn't ultimately perform it. Instead, Duma's first full length play to be staged was Henri the Third and His Court, which debuted on February eleventh, eighteen twenty nine, at the Committee Francaise, which was one of France's state theaters. Just a few days before the play's debut, Duma's mother had a stroke, so he had to divide his time between the theater and her bedside, including stepping out of the theater to go check on her during that first performance. Just before the play opened, he also invited the Duke d'urbillon, who politely declined, saying that he had another engagement. Duma convinced the Duke to come and to bring his whole retinue with him. A lot of Duma's friends were also there, including Victor Hugo, possibly helped by having so many people who he knew and liked an audience, The reception was overall extremely positive. There was a lot of loud applause in the theater and generally pretty favorable reviews afterward, and this performance has been cited as the start of a shift in French theater away from the classical and toward the romantic, with the play itself a drama rather than a classic tragedy. But of course the acclaim was not universal. A number of more classically minded established playwrights objected to its more romantic sensibilities in staging and the fact that it was melodramatic instead of tragic. Some of these playwrights circulated a petition denouncing the theater's management for allowing such a play to be staged and advocating that France not allows such work to be performed at any of its national theaters. Henri the Third was also criticized for being against the monarchy, and it spawned a huge debate about censorship. This was the first of many many plays in a career that was truly prolific, and did involve the staging of Christine. Not long after, but almost immediately, Duma's output slowed down just a little as he became a revolutionary. We will talk about that after a quick sponsor break. In addition to writing and co writing a massive amount of work during his lifetime, Alexander Duma was, like his father, a revolutionary, although not on the exact same scale as his father. So my Alexander Duma had been firmly on the liberty, equality fraternity side of the French Revolution and was a staunch defender of the French Republic. Had many of these same leanings which came to the fore in eighteen thirty. The July Revolution or the Revolution of eighteen thirty was one of a series of revolutions that swept through Europe between eighteen thirty and eighteen thirty two. In France, it was in response to a series of ordinances issued by King Charles the tenth. In these ordinances, the King dissolved the Chamber of Deputies and called for new elections to be held in September. But he also changed the laws so that most of the electorate lost their right to vote, and he suspended the freedom of the press. People were of course very upset by this. Duma had been on the verge of leaving for a trip to Algier, which France had just annexed when these four ordinances were issued, so instead of going on his trip, he sent his servant to retrieve his gun from the gunsmiths and to buy him some ammunition, and then, as the revolution grew more violent. He joined the demonstrators at the barricades after hearing the Marquis de Lafayette, who has been name dropped in so many podcast at this point I can't even keep up after hearing him say that they did not have enough ammunition. Duma also planned and helped carry out a successful powder raid at the magazine at Suisson. The fighting went on from July twenty seventh to the twenty ninth, after which Charles abdicated and his successor was King Louis Philippe, former Duke d'Orleans, described as the King of the French rather than the King of France, but Duma's prior relationship with the king did not serve him well. The King told him to stick to poetry, not politics, and Duma rebutted that a poet's point of view could be prophetic. Louis Philippe abruptly dismissed him, and Duma resigned his position at the library of the Palais Royal, where Louis Philippe had appointed him while still a duke. A similar series of revolutions took place in eighteen forty eight, which overthrew Louis Philippe Duma was part of this uprising too, and then afterward he tried unsuccessfully to run for parliament to return to the eighteen thirties. Though on March fifth, eighteen thirty one, Duma and belcreuse I had a daughter together, who they named Marie Alexandrine. The next year he took a trip to Switzerland, and he published a travelog from his time there in eighteen thirty three. This was the first of many travels, sometimes for pleasure, but often to escape criticism, political disputes, the ire of the monarch or debt. Yeah, one of the articles that I read leading after this was basically like when the going got tough. Tuma left in the eighteen thirties, he started experimenting with writing stories and novels rather than just plays, and in eighteen thirty six a new development in the world of publishing really shifted what he was doing. Until that point, newspapers in France had sold annual subscriptions, but that year a paper called La Press started selling individual issues, and with individual issue sales came the opportunity for serialized novels that were published one bit at a time from one issue to the next. Something we're familiar with today that at the time was truly groundbreaking. This was hugely successful both for Duma and for the newspaper. He started writing novels that would be published serially, with installments ending with cliffhangers to encourage people to buy the next issue. Other publications and writers started following the same model. Serialized writing drove a dramatic increase in newspaper sales, and that increase lasted for decades. In eighteen forty Duma married Aida Ferrier. They would be together for about the next four years, and they spent most of that time living in Florence because it was cheaper than Paris. Many of Duma's most famous works were written between eighteen forty four and eighteen fifty four, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. This was his most prolific decade as a writer, with most of the work featuring exciting stories full of heroic characters that play out against a backdrop of French history. His massive output during this time was not solely his own work, though he had researchers and collaborators who were part of it as well. They would often sketch out the book's outline while Duma filled in all the details in the dialogue, or they would provide background research. The most well known of these was Auguste Maquette, who took Duma to court in eighteen fifty six and eighteen fifty eight, claiming that his contributions to eighteen of Duma's novels was significant enough that he should be listed as the co author. While the court did order Duma to pay Maquette some of the money that he was owed, they left the attribution of the books as it was. There is still a lack of consensus of like how much actual work these various assistants were doing. Alexandle Duma's success led to ongoing problems with money. He was making an enormous income for the time. The average workers pay when he was living was about three francs a day, but some years Duma was making more than eighty thousand francs. But he spent lavishly and often without any kind of workable plan. He launched two different newspapers, both of which later folded. He started construction on Chateau de Monte Cristo in eighteen forty six, and when he ran out of money, that was sold at auction. In eighteen forty seven, he opened the Teatra Historique in Paris, which was bankrupt within three years, leading him to be prosecuted for his debts. He fled to Belgium and then Russia and then Sicily, and then back to Paris to finally settle his bankruptcy. His travels and his spending habits did not stop there though. In the late eighteen fifties he went to England, Germany, Russia and Italy, and then in eighteen sixty he bought a yacht called the Emma, and he used that yacht to follow Giuseppa Garibaldi's expedition of the one thousand in eighteen sixty. It wasn't just that he was following this expedition in a yacht, the yacht itself was full of champagne and fine food as well, and this made it a huge and kind of weird disparity between Duma and the yacht and the expedition, which had almost no money, almost no training, and rusty rifles, but still at the same time managed to take down the Bourbon kingdom of the two Sicilies in southern Italy. That is a lot to try to sum up there was an episode on that in the archive. I thought about replaying it as a Saturday Classic, but it is pretty short and I haven't found anything to pair it with. So you can go find that on our website if you're interested in learning more about that sort of information dump I just had. Also aboard the Emma was a woman named Emily Cordier, with whom Duma had a daughter, Mikaela Kleayly Josepha Elizabeth in eighteen sixty. So all this together, the spending lots of money, the having a number of children with a variety of different women, is general behavior. All of that made Duma a frequent target of satire and derision, especially as he got older. Newspaper cartoonists depicted him as this rotund inept and very vain person with an increasingly astonishing tangle of hair. Like his father, he was fond of dueling, and his critics made fun of him for that too, as with is the episode on his father. There's part of me, it's like, what is wrong with you? Get your act together? But also he produced a lot of delightful things, so it's not my place. Sometimes these criticisms were totally warranted. After the expedition of the one thousand, Giuseppe Garibaldi named Duma the director of excavations and museums. Dumad took that as an opportunity to try to insert himself as an influencer in Naples, and he was so relentlessly mocked for it that Garibaldi rescinded his appointment after merely a few days. Historians diverge on the role that racism may have played in all of this, and in Duma's life. Obviously, racism existed. Honore de Balzac, for example, called Dumat that negro, and these caricatures, as I mentioned earlier, often really played up things like Duma's hair, which was very distinctive and sometimes large. There's also a widely reported anecdote in which somebody was despaired, uragingly talking about Duma's race, and he walked over to them and said, quote, my father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great grandfather a monkey. You see, sir, my family starts where yours ends. But it wasn't something that Duma really talked about in his own memoirs, and comparatively few of his works focus on black characters. Most notable is George, which we talked about in our prior episode, in which the titular character is described as mulatto and leads a slave uprising. Aljenoux, which is set in the French Revolution, calls for the abolition of slavery. There's a lot more along the lines of general injustice than racism specifically. Earlier in his life, Duma had described himself and his process this way quote. My dramatic work and my efforts at historical writing had developed two principal qualities, those of dialogue and of narrative. And these are qualities which, speaking with my usual frankness about myself, I may say that I possess in a superior degree. But at this time I had not yet discovered the existence of two other qualities, no less important, lightheartedness and a lively amusing style. As a rule, people are cheerful and lighthearted because their digestion is in good order and they have nothing to bother them. But in my case this condition is a persistent one, not indeed making me insensible to sorrow, which, whether affecting my friends or myself, moves me deeply, but rendering me proof against all the worries, cares, and conflicts of daily life. But toward the end of his life duma was no longer free from cares and worries. He became increasingly wistful and anxious. In eighteen fifty seven, he had a conversation with his son Alexandra, who found him awake at night. The elder Alexandla said that his stomach hurt, and that when that happened, he walked. He said, when it got worse, he read. The younger Alexandla asked, and what about when it gets too painful to read? And his father answered, I work. In eighteen seventy, at the age of sixty eight, Dumas was broke and he moved in with his son, who was now a respected writer in his own right, and told him quote, I have come to die in your home. He did die on December fifth of eighteen seventy and was buried in his hometown of Ville Coltre. By the time of his death, Dumas had not been forgotten, but he wasn't exactly honored either. During his lifetime, he had written at least three hundred works, including Lugram Dixiew Dee Guisine, which was published three years after he died, and his novels and plays were often adored by the public. They were popular and commercially successful, but in the eyes of the academic establishment, they weren't all that worthwhile. His son, for example, was admitted to the Academy Francese or French Academy, while Alexandle duma Perier never was. His work was considered too low brow. Today, though, several of Duma's works are considered among the classics of French literature, and they've been translated into more than one hundred languages and adapted over and over and over and over for the stage, TV, radio, and film. In two thousand and two, Duma's body was exhumed and he was reinterred at the Pantheon in Paris, alongside people like Emile Zola and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and other notable figures like Louis Braile and Marie Curie. At the reburial, there was a parade of people in costume and the casket was carried by four musketeers and covered in a drape that said in French all for one and one for all. French President Jacques Scharac described it as quote repaying an injustice which marked Dumas from childhood, just as it marked the skin of his slave ancestors. I watched some footage of this on the internet yesterday. I was surprisingly affected by it. I don't, like, I don't feel the most gigantic emotional attachment to the Three Musketeers or anything like that. But I was just watching this funeral procession with Alexander Duma's casket, just bawling at my desk. I totally get that. Yeah, it choked me up a lot. This also did happen over the extremely strong objections of Via Coltree. They were not happy about exhuming him. They called it an insult to his memory. The mayor was kind of like, well, after I approved this, I realized that I really regret it. It was very upsetting for the place that he had grown up and was originally buried. And the Chateau de Monte Cristo that we talked about him working on and not quite finishing, was eventually restored. It is now a museum. In the late nineteen eighties, a copy of Le Chevalier de Saint Armine, which is the last cavalier was unearthed at the BiblioTech Nacionale in Paris, and that was published in two thousand and five. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.