The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [3]
A year later, Dumas moved to Paris, entered the service of the duc d’Orléans as a secretary, and began writing plays in earnest: rhymed vaudevilles and melodramas in collaboration with various friends; the verse tragedy Christine, which was accepted by the Comédie Française in 1828 but never performed there; and a series of historical and contemporary dramas in prose—Henri III and His Court (1829), Antony (1831), La Tour de Nesle (1832), and Kean (1836), among others—which made him the leading playwright of his time.
That time was one of great change in French, and European, culture. The major poets of the Romantic movement—Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny—had already made their appearance. The plays of Shakespeare and Schiller, and the historical novels of Walter Scott, had spread their influence widely. Hugo, who was the same age as Dumas, had already written his historical drama Cromwell, along with its famous preface, which was considered the opening shot in the war of the new literature against the old. But, though Hugo had given a public reading of the play, it had not been performed in the theater. Dumas’s Henri III and His Court was thus the first triumph of the young movement on the stage.
Dumas was bent on having his play performed at the Comédie Française. After two in-house readings, it was accepted by acclamation and went into rehearsal. The opening night was on February 11, 1829. The theater was packed. Hugo and Vigny were there, as were the duc d’Orléans, on Dumas’s insistent invitation, and other members of the high aristocracy. The play was a tremendous success. Many scenes were interrupted by applause; in the end there was a standing ovation. At the age of twenty-seven, Dumas, a provincial copying clerk with little education and no connections, had become a famous man and one of the major figures of the Romantic movement.
While he continued to write plays, Dumas, whose appetite for work was gargantuan, was also writing novelized historical chronicles. In 1832 he began to publish a series of “scenes from history” in the Revue des Deux Mondes. He also wrote separate works on a number of figures, including Isabel of Bavaria (1838) and the countess of Salisbury (1839). In 1839–40 he wrote biographical articles on Napoleon, a series of accounts of famous crimes, and historical chronicles of the lives of the Stuarts. In 1842, he published Jehanne la Pucelle, about Joan of Arc, and in 1843 a novel set in the eighteenth century, Le Chevalier d’Harmantal, written in collaboration with a history teacher eleven years his junior, Auguste Maquet, whom he had met in 1838 through the poet Gérard de Nerval. In 1844, when he began The Three Musketeers, he was already at work on his four-volume history of Louis XIV and His Century, which was published simultaneously with the novel.
Before Dumas took it up, the historical novel had already achieved literary distinction in works by Balzac, Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Prosper Mérimée. Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris had also reached a wider public. But what made for the enormous popularity of The Three Musketeers was a new development in journalism: the practice of serialization. The publishers of two newspapers, La Presse and Le Siècle, had hit upon the idea of expanding their readership by lowering their annual subscription rates. One means of attracting and keeping a larger audience was the publication of serialized novels, known as romans feuilletons. (According to André Maurois, in his biography The Three Dumas,* the formula “to be continued” was used for the first time by the Revue de Paris in 1829.) The roman feuilleton made certain technical demands on the writer: each installment