Dark star of the Dumas dynasty

BIOGRAPHY:The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, By Tom Reiss, Harvill Secker, 414pp. £20

POSSIBLY ONE of the most enduring rites of passage for young readers is reading the works of two very different and equally exciting 19th-century writers: the Frenchman Alexandre Dumas – or Dumas père – and the Scot Robert Louis Stevenson.

Between them they wrote many classic adventure stories, compelling tales that set the imagination alight. They shape readers for life. In 1844 Dumas published The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. They are fast-moving page-turners; vivid, bombastic and irresistible, with their unforgettable characters and flamboyant splatter of French history.

The introverted, physically delicate Stevenson wrote in a more restrained, allusive style. Treasure Island (1883) is a remarkably moral study of human nature confronted by temptation, while Kidnapped (1886) presents a historical narrative as an intense coming-of-age experience. A few months earlier in 1886 came The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a fascinating late-Gothic variation on the Faust theme.

There is no denying that Stevenson takes the darker, more psychological approach. Dumas père exudes the same passion and righteousness, the sheer love of telling a story that Dickens would manifest throughout a frenetic career.

Dumas also wrote plays and is regarded as one of the major figures of French Romantic theatre. His son, also Alexandre, known as Dumas fils, was a playwright. His first stage work was La Dame aux Camélias (1852), based on a novel he had published five years earlier about a beautiful and doomed Parisian courtesan. The story soon inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata. And the background includes an intriguing further footnote: the young Dumas had had an affair with Marie Duplessis, one of the most celebrated courtesans of her day.

That the son would draw so candidly on his life might seem in marked contrast to his father’s sprawling accounts of the king’s musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis, dashing about in the company of d’Artagnan. The Three Musketeers seems as though it was made for Hollywood long before the movie industry was invented. But the attractive outsider d’Artagnan was not born in a writer’s study. He actually lived and was, as Reiss explains in his heartfelt, overblown but highly readable book, largely inspired by Dumas père’s soldier father. Thomas Alex Dumas was the first black man to rise to the rank of general in the French army and a one-time friend of the dangerously jealous Napoleon, who resented his proven courage and personal glamour.

Indeed, much of the exciting fiction, and most specifically the characters of d’Artagnan and Edmond Dantès (the latter falsely accused in The Count of Monte Cristo as a Bonapartist conspirator and imprisoned in wretched conditions for many years), is based on the life and times of Alex Dumas, born in 1762, the son of a French aristocrat and a black slave woman.

Just as Dantès was forgotten by the world, so too, to some extent, has the soldier father and grandfather of the more famous Dumas père and fils been sidelined, without a fitting public monument in Paris to mark his contribution to French military history. Reiss makes racism an underlying theme of the book and considers the immense national wealth France gained from the inhumanely run sugar plantations in the French Caribbean colonies when France opposed slavery.

Alex Dumas’s father, Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, was a wayward marquis and the eldest of three brothers. He joined the army and, lazy by nature, in time fetched up on Saint Domingue, now Haiti, at a sugar plantation being operated by his slightly more industrious younger brother.

Davy de la Pailleterie had four children, including Alex Dumas, by a freed slave, Marie-Cessette Dumas. Her last name, meaning “of the field”, was later taken by the black count who would be betrayed twice by his aristocrat father. The first instance was when Davy de la Pailleterie decided to return to France, and sold Alex, with whom he had lived throughout the boy’s early childhood, to pay the fare.

The two would later be reconciled, and old Davy de la Pailleterie ensured that the boy, strikingly handsome with a towering, impressive physique, was educated in the classics and taught the valuable arts of horsemanship and fencing. He discovered fine clothes. Father and son appeared to enjoy good relations until the old man decided to wed his much younger housekeeper and the mixed-race son was disinherited. Alex then renounced his father’s name and instead took his mother’s, which he would make famous in his lifetime and his son would immortalise through his books.

Having never worked, Alex joined the army, “the only one profession suited to a man of his style, skills and temperament”. As evidence of his dignity and his rejection of the father who had again dismissed him, Alex entered not as an officer but as an ordinary soldier. People admired Alex; he was quiet-spoken, honourable, brave and a real-life hero.

Reiss writes as a fan, his prose is quasi-novelistic and the narrative is a lively, opinionated investigation, grounded in 18th-century French social, political and military history, and reveals a specific grasp of both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. The style tends towards the conversational: “The summer of 1790 was the second – and sunniest – of the Revolution, metaphorically anyway; in fact it rained a lot.” The author knows he has a great story, and he carries the reader along with an enthusiasm that offsets the gush and adoration.

In the prologue, Reiss makes a valid point: “To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget.” Reiss denounces France for the way one of its heroes has been edited out of the national consciousness. Ironically, France in the 18th century was far less racist than now. The French had embraced the American War of Independence as later generations would the Bolshevik Revolution. Alex’s “non European features”, Reiss argues, were taken not as signs of primitive inferiority “but rather as echoes of antiquity, when the great civilisations had been the melting pots of the ancient world”.

The black general was appointed leader of the French Army of the Alps and opened the high alpine passes for the French army, enabling its second Italian campaign against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He participated in Napoleon’s failed expedition to Egypt. On his return, Alex Dumas was imprisoned by the Italians and Napoleon did nothing to help him. His health was undermined and he eventually died of stomach cancer – as did Napoleon. Dumas was only 43.

Reiss bases his book, an act of retrieval, on Dumas père’s undying love for his tragic soldier father. The child’s memory inspires the book, as does Reiss’s own memory of reading Dumas père’s memoir when he was a boy. It was approaching midnight on February 26th, 1806, “and Alexandre Dumas, the future author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, was asleep in his uncle’s house. He was not yet four years old.” When the child heard that his father had gone to heaven he wanted to kill God for the theft.

Whatever about the stylistic shortcomings and the repetition, The Black Count is good popular history; relentlessly, lovingly researched, indexed, cross-referenced and anecdotal. It is sustained by the author’s admiration for a singular individual, the brilliant father of a novelist whose subject was heroism and justice, the concepts by which his beloved sire had lived.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent