The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [0]
Biographical note copyright © 1996 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2003 by Lorenzo Carcaterra
Translation copyright © 2003 by Random House, Inc.
Notes and glossary copyright © 2003 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dumas, Alexandre, 1802–1870.
[Chevalier de Maison-Rouge. English]
The knight of Maison-Rouge: a novel of Marie Antoinette /
Alexandre Dumas; a new translation by Julie Rose.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-335-0
1. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Fiction. 2. Girondists—
Fiction. 3. Marie Antoinette, Queen, consort of Louis XVI, King of
France, 1755–1793—Fiction. I. Rose, Julie. II. Title.
PQ2225.C713 2003
843′.7—dc21
2003044577
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Alexandre Dumas, who lived a life as dramatic as any depicted in his more than three hundred volumes of plays, novels, travel books, and memoirs, was born on July 24, 1802, in the town of Villers-Cotterêts, some fifty miles from Paris. He was the third child of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (who took the name of Dumas), a nobleman who distinguished himself as one of Napoleon’s most brilliant generals, and Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Labouret. Following General Dumas’s death in 1806 the family faced precarious financial circumstances, yet Mme. Dumas scrimped to pay for her son’s private schooling. Unfortunately he proved an indifferent student who excelled in but one subject: penmanship. In 1816, at the age of fourteen, Dumas found employment as a clerk with a local notary to help support the family. A growing interest in theater brought him to Paris in 1822, where he met François-Joseph Talma, the great French tragedian, and resolved to become a playwright. Meanwhile the passionate Dumas fell in love with Catherine Labay, a seamstress by whom he had a son. (Though he had numerous mistresses in his lifetime Dumas married only once, but the union did not last.) While working as a scribe for the duc d’Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe) Dumas collaborated on a one-act vaudeville, La Chasse et l’amour (The Chase and Love, 1825). But it was not until
1827, after attending a British performance of Hamlet, that Dumas discovered a direction for his dramas. “For the first time in the theater I was seeing true passions motivating men and women of flesh and blood,” he recalled. “From this time on, but only then, did I have an idea of what the theater could be.”
Dumas achieved instant fame on February 11, 1829, with the triumphant opening of Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court). An innovative and influential play generally regarded as the first French drama of the Romantic movement, it broke with the staid precepts of Neoclassicism that had been imposed on the Paris stage for more than a century. Briefly involved as a republican partisan in the July Revolution of 1830, Dumas soon resumed playwriting and over the next decade turned out a number of historical melodramas that electrified audiences. Two of these works—Antony (1831) and La Tour de Nesle (The Tower of Nesle, 1832)—stand out as milestones in the history of nineteenth-century French theater. In disfavor with the new monarch, Louis-Philippe, because of his republican sympathies, Dumas left France for a time. In 1832 he set out on a tour of Switzerland, chronicling his adventures in Impressions de voyage: En Suisse (Travels in Switzerland,1834–1837); over the years he produced many travelogues about subsequent journeys through France, Italy, Russia, and other countries.
Around 1840 Dumas embarked upon a series of historical romances inspired by both his love