Alexandre Dumas fils

Alexandre Dumas fils was a French novelist and dramatist, the illegitimate son of the author of The Three Musketeers, who spent his childhood taunted for it and his career writing about women the respectable world discarded. La Dame aux Camélias drew on his affair with the courtesan Marie Duplessis; Verdi turned it into La Traviata. He was elected to the Académie française in 1874.