February 27, 2019 • 37 mins
Alexandre Dumas wrote such classics as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and both those books’ sequels, eight Marie Antoinette romances, and a BUNCH of other novels and plays. And essays. And travel books. And memoirs. And a dictionary of cuisine. Hundreds and hundreds of works.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. Earlier we
talked about General Tomat Alexandre Dumat, who was the son
of an aristocrat and an enslaved woman from the French
(00:23):
colony of Sandoman, which is now Haiti. One of his
children was Alexandre Duma, known today as Alexandre Duma Pair
to distinguish 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 Pair,
of course, wrote such classics as the Three Musketeers in
(00:46):
the Count of Monte Cristo and both of those words
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 happened in his life that it's really impossible to
(01:06):
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 Duma to become the writer that he was,
along with some of the highlights and themes of his
(01:27):
later life at 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 all
of its high drama and fascinating twists and turns. So
Alexander Duma was born on July two in the town
of vie Coutrey in northern France. His father, as we
(01:49):
just said, was General Alex Duma. His mother was Marie
Louise Elizabeth le Bay, daughter of an innkeeper, and the
two of them meant when Alex was billeted at that
ending the French Revolution. Alexandla 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
(02:10):
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
(02:31):
was injured and ill, and he still couldn't collect a
pension or back pay, so the family fell into poverty.
Alexandra 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
(02:52):
Duma had also been fond of performing various feats of strength,
some of which he could still manage, and young Alexandla
was fascinated them. His father had been a war hero
and one of the most prominent men of color in
the French military, but Alexander was perception of him went
even beyond that, into someone who was larger than life
and almost mythic. Do I describe it this way quote
(03:15):
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
(03:35):
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 eighteen o 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
(03:57):
who lived nearby so that he would not be traumata
eis 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
(04:17):
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 Louise 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 meet again.
(04:41):
So Alexandra's mother spent her time working to try to
make ends meet and to pay for his older sister's education.
Alexandl 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,
Alexandla didn't have much formal education. He loved to read,
and he loved to talk about what he read, and
(05:02):
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 Alexandra was twelve, his mother finally got
(05:22):
access to a widow's pension and use it to open
a tobacco shop. A year later, he managed to catch
a glimpse of Napoleon Bonaparte in person. Dama 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
(05:42):
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, Alexandla meant two
(06:03):
other young men who would start him on the path
to becoming a writer. One was adult Ribbing Deluvin, the
son of a Swedish nobleman who moved into the area
around Ville, Cotterrey. The other was Amade de la Pance,
who was an officer and adults, wanted to be a
playwright and had connections to the theater scene in Paris, Amada,
(06:24):
New 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
(06:45):
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
(07:06):
of Hamlet by Jean franc 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
(07:27):
trying his hand at writing his own poems and plays.
He also pursued various young women along vehicle Tree. 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 mule fuy
tropical or my tropical tangle. He was also, by his
(07:49):
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
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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 St. Helena on May five. But apart from
that one sighting of Napoleon in eighteen fifteen, Duma felt
fairly removed from what was happening on the national stage. Eventually,
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Duma started 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,
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Alexander Duma 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
(09:20):
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
games keeper could follow the sound of 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
(09:42):
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 that just sound like
this could be a little scene from one of his books.
(10:03):
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 memboir, he tried to build
on the fifty francs that he had gotten for these engravings.
He took his money to the local coffee house and
started playing billiards against a family friend named Monsieur Cartier,
(10:25):
with the loser buying the winner two glasses of absinthe.
They weren't drinking 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 Juma, he
had won six hundred glasses of absinthe 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
(10:48):
could have done a split payment that was uh, 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 eighty three. He had few
resources when he got there, though. His biggest asset was
a collection of letters of introduction that his mother had
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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
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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
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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 hand writing. This
diploma of incapacity well became me a beautiful handwriting, so
someday I might become a copying clerk. This was my future.
(12:11):
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 door Leone,
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
(12:31):
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 francs. Of course, his ambition was
(12:53):
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
(13:14):
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. He was particularly
inspired by Scott's Waverley novels, which include Ivanhoe and Rob
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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 Doma 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
(13:57):
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 Charnaudier, who
was connected to numerous writers in the French Romantic movement,
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and Victor Hugo author of Les Miserab 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 four.
The two of them never married, but Doma paid for
their lodging and visited them often as after their romantic
(14:41):
relationship ended. Sama also started selling short comic sketches to
theaters to earn some extra money to try to keep
the mall 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,
(15:02):
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 eleven nine at the Comedy 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
(15:23):
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'artillon, 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,
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including Victor Hugo. Possibly helped by having so many people
who knew and liked in the 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
(16:05):
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 and 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
(16:28):
a play to be staged, and advocating that France not
allow such work to be performed at any of its
national theaters on Red. 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
and a career that was truly prolific, and did involve
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a staging of Christine not long after, but almost immediately,
Douma'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
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massive amount of work during his lifetime, Alexandre Duma was,
like his father, a revolutionary, although not on the exact
same scale as his father. So my Alexandre Duma had
been firmly on the liberty, equality, fraternity side of the
French Revolution and was a staunch defender of the French Republic.
Do I have many of these same leanings which came
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to the four 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
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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
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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 podcasts at
this point I can't even keep up after hearing him
say that they did not have enough ammunition. Duma also
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planned and helped carry out a successful powder raid at
the magazine at Soissant. The fighting went on from July
to the twenty ninth, after which Charles abdicated and his
successor was King Louis Philippe former Duke door Leon, 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
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to poetry, not politics, and Duma abutted 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
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of this uprising two and then afterward he tried unsuccessfully
to run for parliament to return to the eighteen thirties,
though on March five, eighteen thirty one, Duma and Belle
Samy 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
(19:42):
for pleasure, but often to escape criticism political disputes. The
ire of the monarch or debt deah. One of the
articles that I read. Leading after this was basically like
when the going got tough, Touma 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
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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
(20:25):
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
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writing drove a dramatic increase in newspaper sales, and that
increase lasted for decades. In eighteen forty, Duma married Ida 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
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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
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part of it as well. They would often sketch out
the book's outline while Duma filled in all the details
and 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 Dumas novels was
(21:49):
significant enough that he should be listed as the co author.
While the court did order Duma to pay Maket 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. Alexandra la Dumont's success led
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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 Dumont 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 leader folded.
(22:32):
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 Teakla 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 Cecily, and then
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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 Giuseppe Garibaldi's expedition of the one thousand and eighteen sixty.
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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 on 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
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in southern Italy. That is a lot to try to
sum up. There is 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
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had a daughter, michaela clearly Josepha Elizabeth in eight teen sixty.
So all this together, the spending lots of money, the
having a number of children with a variety of different women,
his general behavior. All of that made Duma a frequent
target of satire and derision, especially as he got older.
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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. Toos with is the
episode on his father. There's part of it. It's like,
what is wrong with you? Get your act together? Um,
(24:37):
But also he produced a lot of delightful things, so
it's not my place. Uh. Sometimes these criticisms were totally warranted.
After the expedition of the one thousand, Giuseppe Garibaldi named
Duma the director of excavations and museums. Duma took that
as an opportunity to try to insert himself as an
influencer in Naples, and he was so relentlessly mocked for
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it that Garbald they 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 honorary to Balzac, for example, called Dumont that
negro and these caricatures, as I mentioned earlier, often really
played up things like Duma's hair, which was very distinctive
(25:23):
and sometimes large. There's also a widely reported anecdote in
which somebody was disparagingly 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 Dumont really talked
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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 us slave uprising. Aljanue,
which is set in the French Revolution, calls for the
abolition of slavery. There's a lot more along the lines
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of general injustice than racism specifically. Earlier in his life,
Dumont 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
(26:29):
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
(26:49):
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
towards 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
(27:11):
son Alexandla, who found him awake at night. The elder
Alexandler 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, Duma
was broke and he moved in with his son, who
(27:33):
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 five of eighteen seventy and
was buried in his hometown of Via Colatree. By the
time of his death, Duma had not been forgotten, but
he wasn't exactly honored either. During his lifetime, he had
written at least three hundred works, including Legrand Dixon de Cuisine,
(27:56):
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 Francaise or French Academy,
while Alexandra dumas Pere never was. His work was considered
(28:17):
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 a hundred languages and adapted over
and over and over and over for the stage, TV, radio,
and film. In two thousand two, Duma's body was exhumed
and he was reinterred at the Pantheon in Paris, alongside
(28:40):
people like a Meal Zola and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire,
Victor Hugo, and other notable figures like Louis Braille 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
(29:01):
Charoque described it as quote repaying an injustice which mark
Duma 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
(29:23):
was just watching this funeral procession with Alexandre Duma's casket,
just bawling at my desk. I totally get that. Yeah,
it choked me up a lot. Uh. This also did
happen over the extremely strong objections of V. A. Caltree.
They were not happy about exhuming him. They called it
an insult to his memory. The mayor was kind of like, well,
(29:46):
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 La Chevalier
de Saint Armine, which is the last Cavalier, was unearthed
(30:09):
at the Bibliothech Nacionale in Paris, and that was published
in two thousand five. Maybe when we are in Paris
this June, we can go and visit the grave of
Alexandre Duma. I don't know if it will be possible
to go to the museum because that's a little farther
afield from where we will be staying. Yeah, I have
(30:29):
such a long list already that I'm almost reluctant to
add another thing to it. We have a little bit
of free time in the in the trip outside of
the preset tour schedule um, and I'm scared to keep
adding to it because I think I might be maxed
out already on the places that I wanted to run
and go. Um. But maybe we'll go to the I
(30:53):
on the other hand, have had a lot going on,
nothing bad, just a lot going on, um, and so
I have just been like, we're going to Paris in June,
and that is the end of my thought process. I'm
gonna have to look at it in more detail or
before we, you know, get on a plane. Yeah, I'm
I got I got plans at one one of our
days off. I think some of my friends from London
(31:14):
are going to come over and meet us and hang out.
So nice. Yeah, we have like two days that are
fairly free, so one of those will work out whichever
works best for them. But there will be much running
around and there's some fabric stores. I got a hit.
And you know, if you're hearing this and you're thinking
trip to Paris, what we are taking a trip to Paris?
(31:35):
Listeners can come with us if you go to our website,
which is missed in history dot Com. Up at the
top menu, there is a link that says Paris trip
exclamation point that's under the little menu icon if you're
on a mobile device, and that will take you to
the page where you can find out all the information
about it and where you can sign up. We are
both incredibly excited. My lack of planning does not reflect
(31:57):
my excitement. That has just increasingly become how I travel
is by going, I'll figure it out, have the basic outline,
I'll figure it out. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah. Part
of it is because, um, some of the people that
have decided to go on this trip with us, our
friends of mine, so that we've all been yanking a
lot about it and where we're going to run off
(32:18):
to at various points in time, and my husband and
I are going to try to get away and do
a date or two while we're there. You know, it's
a lot to pack in, but you don't want to
waste your time. Yeah. When uh, when my husband and
I went on our honeymoon to Iceland a couple of
years ago, we had a list of things that we
(32:40):
wanted to see or do while we were there, and
then we had our lodging worked out in advance for
every night of the trip. But then otherwise we just
sort of left ourselves open to things, which in some
ways is how this trip has already planned out, because
we have days that are pretty structured in terms of
walking tours and going to Versailles and stuff like that,
and days that are more like explore the city time. Um,
(33:01):
but that we enjoyed that trip so much that it's
become sort of the template of how we travel now.
Perfect Perfect. Do you have a listener mail, I sure do.
This goes back to our episode on the Regulator War.
It is from Lisa. Lisa says, I just listened to
the podcast on the Regulator War and I wanted to
share a little historical tidbit related to it. I went
(33:21):
to college at Elon University, which is in Alamance County
and just down the road from Alamance Battleground Historical Site.
Today there's a small historical exhibit about the event on
the property, which I went to visit when I was
living in the area. And the podcast you mentioned that
some people argue that this event influenced the American Revolution
due to the similarities between their causes, and this is
very much the opinion of the staff at the historical site.
(33:44):
When I told him I was from out of state.
They asked if I was from Massachusetts. I said no,
and then they proceeded to explain that they view this
battle as the first battle of the American Revolution, not
Lexington or Concord. Unsurprisingly, visitors from Massachusetts did not like
this particular interpretation. Thanks for the interesting podcasts, Lisa. Thank
you Lisa for writing us this email. One of the
(34:07):
things that I uncovered when I was working on that
episode that didn't make it into the final episode was
sort of the historiography of that event and how it
has changed over time, because there was a period sort
of in the late nineteen early twenty century where people
(34:28):
were sort of like, yeah, this was definitely where we
should start the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Lisa did
not specify how long ago this trip to the UH
to the battle ground was. And I did find as
I was looking through stuff a picture that was of
a historical marker that did seem to suggest like this
was the first battle of the American Revolution. That does
(34:51):
not appear to be the stance of the park or
like the North Carolina the whichever department it is that
is governing those parks, that does not appear to be
the case anymore. Um. The Friends of the Aliman's Battleground
website has a thing that says, although the Battle of
Alamance was not the first official battle of the American Revolution,
(35:13):
it did provide some valuable insight for revolutionaries as discontent
with British rule continued to increase. So that, to me
is a really interesting example of how writing about history
has changed over time. Because history is not like a
dry set of facts that existed and have no interpretation
(35:34):
to them at all, the way that historians interpret things shifts, um.
And I found a super interesting paper that UH that
went into all that in detail that initially I had
a bunch of stuff about in the outline that I
finally decided was a little bit off the actual topics,
so I took it out, UM, but I'm glad I
(35:55):
had to taught an opportunity to talk about it today.
It also cracks me up that there is a little
North Carolina, Massachusetts arguing. They are arguing, so not exactly
a little conflict of Yeah, yeah, it's totally valid to
say that a lot of times, UM education and UH
(36:18):
instruction about the Revolutionary War focuses a whole lot on
the Northeast and does not talk as much about things
that happened elsewhere. Even growing up in North Carolina, I
feel like most of the Revolutionary War stuff that we
heard about was happening in places like Massachusetts. Um. So
like that's a totally valid point to make about history education. Anyway,
(36:39):
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, where History podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and we're all over social media at
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our Pinterest, and our Instagram. If you come to our website,
which is missing history dot com, you will find that
link for the trip to Paris, as well as a
searchable archive of every episode we have ever done, and
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(37:01):
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else do you
get your podcasts. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. Earlier we
talked about General Tomat Alexandre Dumat, who was the son
of an aristocrat and an enslaved woman from the French
(00:23):
colony of Sandoman, which is now Haiti. One of his
children was Alexandre Duma, known today as Alexandre Duma Pair
to distinguish 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 Pair,
of course, wrote such classics as the Three Musketeers in
(00:46):
the Count of Monte Cristo and both of those words
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 happened in his life that it's really impossible to
(01:06):
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 Duma to become the writer that he was,
along with some of the highlights and themes of his
(01:27):
later life at 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 all
of its high drama and fascinating twists and turns. So
Alexander Duma was born on July two in the town
of vie Coutrey in northern France. His father, as we
(01:49):
just said, was General Alex Duma. His mother was Marie
Louise Elizabeth le Bay, daughter of an innkeeper, and the
two of them meant when Alex was billeted at that
ending the French Revolution. Alexandla 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
(02:10):
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
(02:31):
was injured and ill, and he still couldn't collect a
pension or back pay, so the family fell into poverty.
Alexandra 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
(02:52):
Duma had also been fond of performing various feats of strength,
some of which he could still manage, and young Alexandla
was fascinated them. His father had been a war hero
and one of the most prominent men of color in
the French military, but Alexander was perception of him went
even beyond that, into someone who was larger than life
and almost mythic. Do I describe it this way quote
(03:15):
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
(03:35):
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 eighteen o 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
(03:57):
who lived nearby so that he would not be traumata
eis 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
(04:17):
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 Louise 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 meet again.
(04:41):
So Alexandra's mother spent her time working to try to
make ends meet and to pay for his older sister's education.
Alexandl 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,
Alexandla didn't have much formal education. He loved to read,
and he loved to talk about what he read, and
(05:02):
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 Alexandra was twelve, his mother finally got
(05:22):
access to a widow's pension and use it to open
a tobacco shop. A year later, he managed to catch
a glimpse of Napoleon Bonaparte in person. Dama 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
(05:42):
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, Alexandla meant two
(06:03):
other young men who would start him on the path
to becoming a writer. One was adult Ribbing Deluvin, the
son of a Swedish nobleman who moved into the area
around Ville, Cotterrey. The other was Amade de la Pance,
who was an officer and adults, wanted to be a
playwright and had connections to the theater scene in Paris, Amada,
(06:24):
New 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
(06:45):
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
(07:06):
of Hamlet by Jean franc 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
(07:27):
trying his hand at writing his own poems and plays.
He also pursued various young women along vehicle Tree. 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 mule fuy
tropical or my tropical tangle. He was also, by his
(07:49):
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
(08:11):
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 St. Helena on May five. But apart from
that one sighting of Napoleon in eighteen fifteen, Duma felt
fairly removed from what was happening on the national stage. Eventually,
(08:35):
Duma started 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,
(08:57):
Alexander Duma 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
(09:20):
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
games keeper could follow the sound of 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
(09:42):
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 that just sound like
this could be a little scene from one of his books.
(10:03):
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 memboir, he tried to build
on the fifty francs that he had gotten for these engravings.
He took his money to the local coffee house and
started playing billiards against a family friend named Monsieur Cartier,
(10:25):
with the loser buying the winner two glasses of absinthe.
They weren't drinking 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 Juma, he
had won six hundred glasses of absinthe 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
(10:48):
could have done a split payment that was uh, 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 eighty three. He had few
resources when he got there, though. His biggest asset was
a collection of letters of introduction that his mother had
(11:08):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:49):
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 hand writing. This
diploma of incapacity well became me a beautiful handwriting, so
someday I might become a copying clerk. This was my future.
(12:11):
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 door Leone,
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
(12:31):
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 francs. Of course, his ambition was
(12:53):
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
(13:14):
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. He was particularly
inspired by Scott's Waverley novels, which include Ivanhoe and Rob
(13:35):
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 Doma 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
(13:57):
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 Charnaudier, who
was connected to numerous writers in the French Romantic movement,
(14:20):
and Victor Hugo author of Les Miserab 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 four.
The two of them never married, but Doma paid for
their lodging and visited them often as after their romantic
(14:41):
relationship ended. Sama also started selling short comic sketches to
theaters to earn some extra money to try to keep
the mall 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,
(15:02):
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 eleven nine at the Comedy 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
(15:23):
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'artillon, 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,
(15:43):
including Victor Hugo. Possibly helped by having so many people
who knew and liked in the 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
(16:05):
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 and 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
(16:28):
a play to be staged, and advocating that France not
allow such work to be performed at any of its
national theaters on Red. 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
and a career that was truly prolific, and did involve
(16:48):
a staging of Christine not long after, but almost immediately,
Douma'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
(17:10):
massive amount of work during his lifetime, Alexandre Duma was,
like his father, a revolutionary, although not on the exact
same scale as his father. So my Alexandre Duma had
been firmly on the liberty, equality, fraternity side of the
French Revolution and was a staunch defender of the French Republic.
Do I have many of these same leanings which came
(17:31):
to the four 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
(17:52):
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
(18:13):
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 podcasts at
this point I can't even keep up after hearing him
say that they did not have enough ammunition. Duma also
(18:34):
planned and helped carry out a successful powder raid at
the magazine at Soissant. The fighting went on from July
to the twenty ninth, after which Charles abdicated and his
successor was King Louis Philippe former Duke door Leon, 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
(18:57):
to poetry, not politics, and Duma abutted 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
(19:18):
of this uprising two and then afterward he tried unsuccessfully
to run for parliament to return to the eighteen thirties,
though on March five, eighteen thirty one, Duma and Belle
Samy 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
(19:42):
for pleasure, but often to escape criticism political disputes. The
ire of the monarch or debt deah. One of the
articles that I read. Leading after this was basically like
when the going got tough, Touma 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
(20:03):
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
(20:25):
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
(20:46):
writing drove a dramatic increase in newspaper sales, and that
increase lasted for decades. In eighteen forty, Duma married Ida 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
(21:07):
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
(21:28):
part of it as well. They would often sketch out
the book's outline while Duma filled in all the details
and 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 Dumas novels was
(21:49):
significant enough that he should be listed as the co author.
While the court did order Duma to pay Maket 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. Alexandra la Dumont's success led
(22:11):
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 Dumont 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 leader folded.
(22:32):
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 Teakla 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 Cecily, and then
(22:53):
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 Giuseppe Garibaldi's expedition of the one thousand and eighteen sixty.
(23:14):
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 on 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
(23:34):
in southern Italy. That is a lot to try to
sum up. There is 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
(23:55):
had a daughter, michaela clearly Josepha Elizabeth in eight teen sixty.
So all this together, the spending lots of money, the
having a number of children with a variety of different women,
his general behavior. All of that made Duma a frequent
target of satire and derision, especially as he got older.
(24:16):
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. Toos with is the
episode on his father. There's part of it. It's like,
what is wrong with you? Get your act together? Um,
(24:37):
But also he produced a lot of delightful things, so
it's not my place. Uh. Sometimes these criticisms were totally warranted.
After the expedition of the one thousand, Giuseppe Garibaldi named
Duma the director of excavations and museums. Duma took that
as an opportunity to try to insert himself as an
influencer in Naples, and he was so relentlessly mocked for
(24:59):
it that Garbald they 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 honorary to Balzac, for example, called Dumont that
negro and these caricatures, as I mentioned earlier, often really
played up things like Duma's hair, which was very distinctive
(25:23):
and sometimes large. There's also a widely reported anecdote in
which somebody was disparagingly 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 Dumont really talked
(25:46):
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 us slave uprising. Aljanue,
which is set in the French Revolution, calls for the
abolition of slavery. There's a lot more along the lines
(26:08):
of general injustice than racism specifically. Earlier in his life,
Dumont 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
(26:29):
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
(26:49):
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
towards 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
(27:11):
son Alexandla, who found him awake at night. The elder
Alexandler 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, Duma
was broke and he moved in with his son, who
(27:33):
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 five of eighteen seventy and
was buried in his hometown of Via Colatree. By the
time of his death, Duma had not been forgotten, but
he wasn't exactly honored either. During his lifetime, he had
written at least three hundred works, including Legrand Dixon de Cuisine,
(27:56):
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 Francaise or French Academy,
while Alexandra dumas Pere never was. His work was considered
(28:17):
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 a hundred languages and adapted over
and over and over and over for the stage, TV, radio,
and film. In two thousand two, Duma's body was exhumed
and he was reinterred at the Pantheon in Paris, alongside
(28:40):
people like a Meal Zola and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire,
Victor Hugo, and other notable figures like Louis Braille 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
(29:01):
Charoque described it as quote repaying an injustice which mark
Duma 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
(29:23):
was just watching this funeral procession with Alexandre Duma's casket,
just bawling at my desk. I totally get that. Yeah,
it choked me up a lot. Uh. This also did
happen over the extremely strong objections of V. A. Caltree.
They were not happy about exhuming him. They called it
an insult to his memory. The mayor was kind of like, well,
(29:46):
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 La Chevalier
de Saint Armine, which is the last Cavalier, was unearthed
(30:09):
at the Bibliothech Nacionale in Paris, and that was published
in two thousand five. Maybe when we are in Paris
this June, we can go and visit the grave of
Alexandre Duma. I don't know if it will be possible
to go to the museum because that's a little farther
afield from where we will be staying. Yeah, I have
(30:29):
such a long list already that I'm almost reluctant to
add another thing to it. We have a little bit
of free time in the in the trip outside of
the preset tour schedule um, and I'm scared to keep
adding to it because I think I might be maxed
out already on the places that I wanted to run
and go. Um. But maybe we'll go to the I
(30:53):
on the other hand, have had a lot going on,
nothing bad, just a lot going on, um, and so
I have just been like, we're going to Paris in June,
and that is the end of my thought process. I'm
gonna have to look at it in more detail or
before we, you know, get on a plane. Yeah, I'm
I got I got plans at one one of our
days off. I think some of my friends from London
(31:14):
are going to come over and meet us and hang out.
So nice. Yeah, we have like two days that are
fairly free, so one of those will work out whichever
works best for them. But there will be much running
around and there's some fabric stores. I got a hit.
And you know, if you're hearing this and you're thinking
trip to Paris, what we are taking a trip to Paris?
(31:35):
Listeners can come with us if you go to our website,
which is missed in history dot Com. Up at the
top menu, there is a link that says Paris trip
exclamation point that's under the little menu icon if you're
on a mobile device, and that will take you to
the page where you can find out all the information
about it and where you can sign up. We are
both incredibly excited. My lack of planning does not reflect
(31:57):
my excitement. That has just increasingly become how I travel
is by going, I'll figure it out, have the basic outline,
I'll figure it out. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah. Part
of it is because, um, some of the people that
have decided to go on this trip with us, our
friends of mine, so that we've all been yanking a
lot about it and where we're going to run off
(32:18):
to at various points in time, and my husband and
I are going to try to get away and do
a date or two while we're there. You know, it's
a lot to pack in, but you don't want to
waste your time. Yeah. When uh, when my husband and
I went on our honeymoon to Iceland a couple of
years ago, we had a list of things that we
(32:40):
wanted to see or do while we were there, and
then we had our lodging worked out in advance for
every night of the trip. But then otherwise we just
sort of left ourselves open to things, which in some
ways is how this trip has already planned out, because
we have days that are pretty structured in terms of
walking tours and going to Versailles and stuff like that,
and days that are more like explore the city time. Um,
(33:01):
but that we enjoyed that trip so much that it's
become sort of the template of how we travel now.
Perfect Perfect. Do you have a listener mail, I sure do.
This goes back to our episode on the Regulator War.
It is from Lisa. Lisa says, I just listened to
the podcast on the Regulator War and I wanted to
share a little historical tidbit related to it. I went
(33:21):
to college at Elon University, which is in Alamance County
and just down the road from Alamance Battleground Historical Site.
Today there's a small historical exhibit about the event on
the property, which I went to visit when I was
living in the area. And the podcast you mentioned that
some people argue that this event influenced the American Revolution
due to the similarities between their causes, and this is
very much the opinion of the staff at the historical site.
(33:44):
When I told him I was from out of state.
They asked if I was from Massachusetts. I said no,
and then they proceeded to explain that they view this
battle as the first battle of the American Revolution, not
Lexington or Concord. Unsurprisingly, visitors from Massachusetts did not like
this particular interpretation. Thanks for the interesting podcasts, Lisa. Thank
you Lisa for writing us this email. One of the
(34:07):
things that I uncovered when I was working on that
episode that didn't make it into the final episode was
sort of the historiography of that event and how it
has changed over time, because there was a period sort
of in the late nineteen early twenty century where people
(34:28):
were sort of like, yeah, this was definitely where we
should start the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Lisa did
not specify how long ago this trip to the UH
to the battle ground was. And I did find as
I was looking through stuff a picture that was of
a historical marker that did seem to suggest like this
was the first battle of the American Revolution. That does
(34:51):
not appear to be the stance of the park or
like the North Carolina the whichever department it is that
is governing those parks, that does not appear to be
the case anymore. Um. The Friends of the Aliman's Battleground
website has a thing that says, although the Battle of
Alamance was not the first official battle of the American Revolution,
(35:13):
it did provide some valuable insight for revolutionaries as discontent
with British rule continued to increase. So that, to me
is a really interesting example of how writing about history
has changed over time. Because history is not like a
dry set of facts that existed and have no interpretation
(35:34):
to them at all, the way that historians interpret things shifts, um.
And I found a super interesting paper that UH that
went into all that in detail that initially I had
a bunch of stuff about in the outline that I
finally decided was a little bit off the actual topics,
so I took it out, UM, but I'm glad I
(35:55):
had to taught an opportunity to talk about it today.
It also cracks me up that there is a little
North Carolina, Massachusetts arguing. They are arguing, so not exactly
a little conflict of Yeah, yeah, it's totally valid to
say that a lot of times, UM education and UH
(36:18):
instruction about the Revolutionary War focuses a whole lot on
the Northeast and does not talk as much about things
that happened elsewhere. Even growing up in North Carolina, I
feel like most of the Revolutionary War stuff that we
heard about was happening in places like Massachusetts. Um. So
like that's a totally valid point to make about history education. Anyway,
(36:39):
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, where History podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and we're all over social media at
missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook or Twitter,
our Pinterest, and our Instagram. If you come to our website,
which is missing history dot com, you will find that
link for the trip to Paris, as well as a
searchable archive of every episode we have ever done, and
show notes for the episodes Holly and I have done together.
(37:01):
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else do you
get your podcasts. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com. M
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