Alexandre Dumas wrote France’s greatest historical novels

This edited article about Alexandre Dumas originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 117 published on 11 April 1964.

A scene from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

When Alexandre Dumas gave his first play in for criticism, he was asked, “Have you any other means of existence?” When he replied that he was a clerk, he was told, “Go back to your desk, young man, go back to your desk.”

Luckily for us, he ignored that advice, and became the most celebrated playwright and author of his day. He even had a street named after him in a Paris suburb.

Life was not easy for his mother; her husband died when their son was only four, and she was left with little more than the land they lived on. As a result, young Alexander received very little education, and as soon as possible, he was sent to work as a lawyer’s messenger, and later, a clerk.

He had always been interested in drama, and during his working hours he thought out plots for his plays. As the idea grew in his mind, he recited the lines to himself, until he had the whole play in his head: then he wrote it down.

In 1828, the Theatre Francais acted a play of his, Henri III. It was an immediate success. Dumas later wrote: “My success, if the best deserved, was at any rate, one of the most sensational of the time.”

In 1839, Dumas became friends with a lecturer and writer of history called August Maquet, who soon started supplying Dumas with the historical backgrounds for his novels.

They collaborated on many books, and with Dumas’s boundless imagination and Maquet’s wide historical knowledge, such masterpieces as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo were written.

Dumas became tremendously rich through his writings, but he lived like a character from his own books, spending his money as soon as he got it, and he was soon in debt.

His downfall began when he built a huge house which he named Monte Cristo. The day the house was finished, he “warmed” it with a party of over six hundred guests. The trouble was that the guests just stayed on, spending all Dumas’s money as fast as he earned it.

Sometimes, one of them would offer to work for his keep, and then Dumas would invent a pointless duty, as he did for one man, like reporting to him on the temperature of the weather. For finding out this simple fact, the man would be paid a weekly wage by Dumas.

During all this time Dumas continued to write and make money, for his books were tremendously popular. The historical background provided by Maquet, and the convincing way Dumas recounted the exciting adventures of his characters, produced wonderful novels which have been popular all over Europe ever since they were published. Such books as The Man in the Iron Mask, The Black Tulip and Twenty Years After have helped to immortalize both their author and their characters, such as D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers.

High living and wild spending wore Dumas out however, and he was near poverty when he died at the age of sixty-eight.