The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [2]
By 1793, the simple soldier had become a general in the French republican army. A year earlier, he had married the daughter of an innkeeper in Villers-Cotterêts, Marie-Louise Labouret, whose father was something of a local personage because he had once been maître d’hôtel to the duc d’Orléans, the brother of Louis XVI. General Dumas acquired an extraordinary reputation for personal courage and daring while serving in the Army of the North. His most famous exploit was holding the bridge of Brixen alone against an entire squadron of Austrians, thus halting the enemy advance. The Austrians called him “the black Devil.” Bonaparte, who was then commander-in-chief of the republican armies, hailed him as the Horatius Coccles of the Tyrol. But Dumas and other generals of his revolutionary spirit had an inclination to independence that Bonaparte could not tolerate. Though he had personally called Dumas out of retirement in 1798 to join his Egyptian campaign, they had serious disagreements, and Dumas requested permission to return to France. In 1801, after various misadventures, including imprisonment in Naples and a nearly fatal poisoning, General Dumas finally reached Villers-Cotterêts, penniless and in broken health. A year later, Marie-Louise Dumas gave birth to a son, who was registered in the town hall as Alexandre Dumas. It was not until 1831 that Davy de La Pailleterie was officially added to his name.
General Dumas died in 1806, leaving his wife, his twelve-year-old daughter, Aimée, and little Alexandre to fend for themselves. Napoleon repeatedly refused to grant the widow a pension, and the family had to move back to the grandparents’ inn. Alexandre’s mother and sister taught him to read and write. At the age of twelve, he was sent to the local school, but he learned little there. His best gift was his excellent handwriting, which served him well when, in 1817, he went to work for the local notary as a copying clerk. His real school was the forest of Villers-Cotterêts, where he spent most of his time hunting, setting snares, and hobnobbing with the poachers.
When Dumas was eighteen, he went to nearby Soissons with some friends to see a production of Hamlet in a French adaptation by the mediocre poet Jean-François Ducis (1733–1816). He knew nothing of Shakespeare. “Imagine a blind man whose sight is restored,” he wrote in his Memoirs, “imagine Adam opening his eyes on creation.” He decided then and there to become a playwright. And since nothing could stop Dumas once his mind was made up, he went back to Villers-Cotterêts and organized an amateur theater group. A fellow clerk named Paillet left a memoir describing their work in the vast attic of a two-story house, which they converted into a theater. The artistic direction was left entirely to Dumas:
Performer, director, professor of deportment and diction, he was all of that…It was he who chose the plays, when he did not impose his own on us. It was he who gave the actors the proper intonation, arranged the entrances, determined the necessary movements. He indicated the words to be stressed, specified the direction of a glance, the breadth of a smile—in short, he gave everyone an understanding of the role he was to fulfill.
In 1822, Dumas and Paillet escaped to Paris for two days to visit a friend who had connections with the Comédie Française. At that time the dominant figure in the theater was the great Talma, who had brought new life to classical French tragedy by replacing stylized gestures and declamation with