SYMHC Classics: Alexandre Dumas Pere

This 2019 episode covers Alexandre Dumas, who wrote hundreds and hundreds of works, including “The Three Musketeers,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,”  and even a dictionary of cuisine.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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,

(00:24):
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

(00:47):
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.

(01:09):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:17):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:58):
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

(03:21):
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

(03:45):
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

(04:05):
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

(04:26):
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,

(04:49):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:31):
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

(05:52):
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

(06:13):
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

(06:34):
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

(06:54):
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

(07:15):
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

(07:37):
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

(08:00):
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

(08:24):
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

(08:46):
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,

(09:07):
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

(09:28):
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

(09:51):
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.

(10:11):
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

(10:34):
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

(10:56):
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

(11:17):
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

(11:38):
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

(11:59):
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,

(12:20):
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

(12:41):
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

(13:02):
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

(13:23):
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

(13:44):
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

(14:05):
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.

(14:30):
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

(14:51):
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

(15:15):
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

(15:35):
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.

(15:59):
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

(16:20):
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.

(16:43):
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

(17:04):
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

(17:24):
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,

(17:46):
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

(18:07):
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

(18:30):
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

(18:51):
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,

(19:13):
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.

(19:34):
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

(19:54):
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

(20:14):
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

(20:35):
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

(20:57):
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

(21:18):
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

(21:39):
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

(21:59):
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

(22:21):
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

(22:43):
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

(23:03):
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

(23:24):
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

(23:45):
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.

(24:06):
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,

(24:27):
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

(24:49):
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.

(25:12):
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

(25:36):
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

(25:56):
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

(26:19):
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.

(26:42):
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,

(27:05):
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

(27:27):
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

(27:47):
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

(28:09):
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,

(28:29):
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

(28:53):
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,

(29:15):
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

(29:35):
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

(30:00):
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

(30:22):
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

(30:44):
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