Alexandre Dumas
The life
Alexandre Dumas was the most widely read French novelist of the nineteenth century and remains among the most widely read of any century in translation. He was the grandson of an enslaved woman from Saint-Domingue and the son of one of Napoleon's generals, a man of legendary strength who fell from favour and died poor, leaving his son a name and nothing else. Dumas built a fiction factory: collaborators, above all Auguste Maquet, researched and drafted; he supplied the dialogue, the pace and the swagger, and the swagger has never dated. The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo appeared as newspaper serials and made him rich twice over. He spent both fortunes. He wrote history as entertainment without ever quite lying about it, and his reputation, dismissed for a century as merely popular, has recovered entirely. His remains were moved to the Panthéon in 2002.
The Black Tulip
224 pages — the shortest way into Dumas, not the greatest.
On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively, so neat, and so trim that one might believe every day to be Sunday, with its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses, with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost Eastern cupolas are…
