The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [2]
The final decade of Dumas’s life began with customary high adventure. In 1860 he met Garibaldi and was swept up into the cause of Italian independence. After four years in Naples publishing the bilingual paper L’Indépendant/L’Indipendente, Dumas returned to Paris in 1864. In 1867 he began a flamboyant liaison with Ada Menken, a young American actress who dubbed him “the king of romance.” The same year marked the appearance of a last novel, La Terreur Prussiene (The Prussian Terror). Dumas’s final play, Les Blancs et les Bleus (The Whites and the Blues), opened in Paris in 1869.
Alexandre Dumas died penniless but cheerful on December 5, 1870, saying of death: “I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to me.” One hundred years later his biographer André Maurois paid him this tribute: “Dumas was a hero out of Dumas. As strong as Porthos, as adroit as d’Artagnan, as generous as Edmond Dantès, this superb giant strode across the nineteenth century breaking down doors with his shoulder, sweeping women away in his arms, and earning fortunes only to squander them promptly in dissipation. For forty years he filled the newspapers with his prose, the stage with his dramas, the world with his clamor. Never did he know a moment of doubt or an instant of despair. He turned his own existence into the finest of his novels.”
Introduction
The long, picturesque and eventful life of Alexandre Dumas does not warrant discussion here. Fortunately two excellent biographies, one in French by J. Lucas-Dubreton, the other in English by Herbert Gorman, both published in the nineteen-twenties, are readily accessible. There are also his own less reliable but as fascinating Memoirs. Any consideration of Dumas as author or of Dumas as the particular author of The Three Musketeers must lean heavily on biographical material. Nor should we forget that Negro blood ran through his veins. It contributed richly to his personality, it explains much of his talent, and through him it lent a new note to European letters.
Uncouth and untutored, Dumas began as a “literary” dramatist. He was no mean rival to Victor Hugo; indeed he anticipated the master. Several of his plays are safely ensconced in the annals of dramatic art and one, Antony, appears to many critics to be perhaps the most representative drama of the French Romantic school. But Dumas had his ear close to the ground, he understood himself thoroughly, he wooed and won large rather than selective audiences. His literary drama be-came mere melodrama and in the course of time he once actually wrote a play, Caligula, for a horse. He was not interested in Rome of the decadence but he did find out that the Emperor Caligula in his cups had appointed a horse Consul of Rome. There happened in the Paris of Dumas to be a very accomplished circus-trained horse. What more natural than that Dumas should dramatize the animal with the help of history?
But of course it was in the field of the novel that Dumas was to win unprecedented and unparalleled popularity. In his life his infinite gusto allowed him to be all things to all men and even to a great many women; in his writings, with the turn of a wrist, he could serve up vast civilizations wholesale; but in the last analysis, it is as an incomparable storyteller that he triumphs and the best story he ever told was The Three Musketeers.
Everything was grist for his mill. French history from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century provided him with the raciest material for his swift-paced tales; yet he levied tribute from Greece and Provence, from the British Isles, from Italy and Spain, from Germany, from Russia, from Africa and from America. Even his minor works, tossed off at random, reminiscences