46 Fun Facts About Alexandre Dumas

What is Edmond Dantès's job before his arrest at the start of The Count of Monte Cristo?

Sailor Dantès is nineteen and about to be made captain of the merchant ship Pharaon when jealous rivals denounce him. The men who ruin him end up as a soldier, a banker and a royal prosecutor.

In which prison is the hero of Monte Cristo locked up?

Château d'If holds him for fourteen years, until he hides in a dead prisoner's burial sack and the guards fling it into the sea. The island fortress off Marseille is a real one.

Which fellow prisoner educates Edmond Dantès and tells him of a hidden treasure in The Count of Monte Cristo?

Abbé Faria digs an escape tunnel that comes out in the wrong cell, then spends years teaching his young neighbour languages and science. Abbé Busoni, the tempting pick, is a disguise the hero adopts after his escape.

What were the names of the three musketeers who befriend d'Artagnan?

Athos, Porthos and Aramis, known as 'the three inseparables', each challenge d'Artagnan to a duel on the same afternoon before becoming his closest friends.

Who is the villainous spy working for Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers?

Milady de Winter hides a fleur-de-lis branded on her shoulder, the mark of a criminal, and turns out to be the long-lost wife of one of the musketeers. She poisons Constance Bonacieux before the four friends have her executed.

In The Three Musketeers, what must d'Artagnan bring back from England to save the Queen's honour?

Her diamond studs were a gift from the King, and she had given them to an English admirer as a keepsake. When Richelieu has the King ask her to wear them at a ball, d'Artagnan races to London to fetch them back.

Which 1700 work by Courtilz de Sandras inspired The Three Musketeers?

Mémoires de Monsieur d'Artagnan was a half-invented life of a real musketeer, printed 27 years after the man's death. Dumas says in his preface that he stumbled on it in the Royal Library while researching Louis XIV.

Which siege do d'Artagnan and his friends fight at in The Three Musketeers?

At the siege of La Rochelle (1627–28) the four friends breakfast in the Saint-Gervais bastion under enemy fire to win a bet and talk in private.

Which English duke is assassinated in The Three Musketeers?

Buckingham is stabbed by John Felton, a Puritan officer talked into it by the prisoner he was set to guard. The real duke died the same way, killed by the real Felton at Portsmouth in 1628.

What is the final part of The Vicomte de Bragelonne usually called in English?

The Man in the Iron Mask is the last slice of a novel so long that English editions cut it into three or four books. Its plot swaps Louis XIV for his secret twin, who ends up locked behind an iron visor.

Which novel is the direct sequel to The Three Musketeers?

Twenty Years After finds the old friends on opposite sides of a French civil war, then united in a doomed bid to save England's Charles I. Ten Years Later, the tempting pick, is the subtitle of the third book.

Who was Dumas's best-known ghostwriting collaborator?

Auguste Maquet supplied the plots and the history for the musketeer novels and Monte Cristo, and Dumas worked them up in his own style under his name alone. Victor Hugo, the tempting pick, was a friend, not a helper.

What did Dumas's chief collaborator win when he took the novelist to court?

More money but no by-line was the outcome in 1858, when the court awarded him damages for unpaid work and left Dumas as sole author. A 2010 French film, The Other Dumas, retold their feud.

In which French colony was Dumas's father born?

Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, is where he was born in 1762 to a French marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman of African descent. He enlisted in France as a private and rose to general.

What nickname did Austrian troops give General Dumas in 1797?

The Black Devil, or Schwarzer Teufel, is what the Austrians called him as he fought through the Tyrol. The French preferred Horatius Cocles, after he held a bridge alone against a whole squadron.

General Dumas landed at Taranto in 1799 and spent two years imprisoned in which state?

The Kingdom of Naples was at war with France, so he was locked in a fortress until 1801. He came home with his health broken and died when his son, the future novelist, was three.

What does the surname Dumas probably mean?

Of the farm is the usual reading, from mas, a southern French word for a farmstead. The novelist's father took the name from his enslaved mother when he enlisted as a private in 1786.

In which town in northern France was Alexandre Dumas born?

Villers-Cotterêts, in the Aisne, is where he was born in 1802 and where his father the general lived out his retirement. Dumas died near Dieppe, and his body was brought home in 1872 to lie beside his parents.

Which French ruler employed the young Dumas as a clerk before taking the throne?

Louis-Philippe of Orléans was still a duke when Dumas joined his Paris office in 1823. Seven years later Dumas took part in the July Revolution that put his old employer on the throne.

Dumas's 1829 stage hit Henry III and His Court was the first big success for which movement in French theatre?

Romanticism reached the Paris stage with this play, a year before Victor Hugo's more famous Hernani. Its opening night at the Comédie-Française took Dumas from unknown clerk to celebrity in a few hours.

Edmund Kean, hero of an 1836 Dumas play, was a real Englishman famous as what?

An actor, and a hugely popular Shakespearean, he had died only three years before the play opened in Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre rewrote it in the 1950s.

In an 1850 Dumas novel, a jailed grower races to win a rich prize by breeding which flower in black?

Tulip growers chase a prize offered in Haarlem, and the hero's jealous neighbour has him denounced and jailed. He raises the bulb anyway, with help from his jailer's daughter.

Which naval hero, a Scot who fought for the American rebels, inspired a Dumas novel of 1838?

John Paul Jones had already starred in Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot, and Dumas, who loved Cooper, wanted to imagine the rest of his life. He wrote it as a play first, then reworked the play into the novel.

Dumas's 1840 novel about the Decembrist revolt was banned in which country?

Russia kept the novel off its presses into the twentieth century. When Dumas toured the country in 1858, a provincial governor surprised him by producing the real exiled couple behind his lovers.

Augustin Grisier, who co-wrote an 1840 novel with Dumas, was Dumas's what?

Fencing master to Dumas, he handed over notes on his years teaching swordplay abroad, and the 1840 novel is told in his voice. Dumas repaid him with a mention in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Which scheming queen mother is the villain of Dumas's Queen Margot, set around the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572?

Catherine de' Medici marries her daughter Margot to the Protestant Henri of Navarre, and the slaughter of his fellow Huguenots begins days after the wedding. Isabelle Adjani played Margot in the 1994 film.

What was the name of the country house Dumas built outside Paris in the 1840s?

Château de Monte-Cristo rose on a hill above the Seine at Port-Marly, with a little Gothic pavilion in the grounds for writing. He threw a housewarming for 600 guests and had to sell within two years.

Dumas's son and namesake wrote which novel, the story behind Verdi's opera La Traviata?

The Lady of the Camellias came out in 1848, inspired by his own affair with a young Paris courtesan. He turned it into a hit play, known in English as Camille, and Verdi's opera followed in 1853.

After Louis-Napoléon's 1851 coup, Dumas slipped over France's northern border into which country?

Belgium took in many French exiles after the coup, and in Brussels he found Victor Hugo among them. Two years of fast writing there put his finances back in something like order.

Which Italian hero did Dumas befriend while supporting unification?

Giuseppe Garibaldi had just taken Palermo in 1860 when Dumas sailed in on his own schooner, then went off to Marseille to find him guns. Once Naples fell, the general made the novelist keeper of its museums and excavations.

In which Quentin Tarantino film does a German bounty hunter tell his host that Alexandre Dumas was Black?

Django Unchained has the bounty hunter King Schultz deliver the news to Calvin Candie, who named one of his slaves after the hero of The Three Musketeers. Candie had just sneered at the author as a soft-hearted Frenchy.

Dumas's famous retort to a racist insult ended with what line?

My family starts where yours ends capped the family tree he had just recited for the man, which ran from his mixed-race father back to a monkey. The sneer that set him off was that he must know all about Black people.

Dumas joined a Paris club of writers who met to try which drug?

Hashish gave the Club des Hashischins its name, and its members gathered on the Île Saint-Louis in the 1840s to eat it. In Monte Cristo the Count tempts a young guest with a spoonful, calling it the ambrosia of the gods.

Dumas's novel The Queen's Necklace retells a real jewel swindle that blackened the name of which French queen?

Marie Antoinette is cleared in the end, yet the trial over the missing necklace drags her name further through the mud. Dumas makes the occultist Cagliostro the hidden hand pulling every string.

Which war overshadowed Dumas's death in December 1870?

Franco-Prussian War fighting was still going on when the ailing Dumas died at his son's seaside house near Dieppe. He was buried close by, and his body was taken home after the peace, in 1872.

Where were Dumas's remains moved in 2002?

The Panthéon is reserved for France's national heroes, and President Chirac sent Dumas there over the objections of his home town, which wanted to keep the grave. His friend Victor Hugo had lain there for over a century.

What words were written on the blue cloth covering Dumas's coffin at his state reburial in 2002?

All for one, one for all is the motto of his musketeers, and it lay over him while writers and actors kept an evening vigil at his old country house. Next day four men dressed as his heroes escorted the coffin through Paris.

In Dumas's last, unfinished novel, the hero fires the shot that kills Admiral Nelson at which battle?

Trafalgar is where his hero, fighting for the French, shoots the British admiral dead. The book then waited more than 130 years for its first edition, which a Dumas scholar pieced together and published in 2005.

The Count of Monte Cristo ends with a letter from the Count that sums up all human wisdom in which words?

Wait and hope is his parting advice to the young lovers he has brought back together, read out as his ship shrinks to a white sail on the horizon. It is a gentle sign-off from a man who spent the whole book on revenge.

What was the subject of the huge dictionary Dumas finished months before he died?

Cooking was his other great passion, and the book is half encyclopaedia, half recipe collection, spiced with stories from his travels. It came out in 1873, three years after his death.

Which Paris theatre did Dumas found in the 1840s, mainly to stage plays made from his own novels?

Théâtre Historique opened in February 1847 with a stage version of his novel Queen Margot, under the patronage of one of the king's sons. It closed in 1850, and a court held Dumas liable for its debts.

Dumas's 1844 tale of a vendetta and twins who feel each other's pain takes its title from which island?

Corsica is home to the de Franchi twins, who were joined at birth and cut apart with a scalpel. One stays on the island to settle an old blood feud while the other practises law in Paris, and the story has been filmed many times.

Dumas found Monte Cristo's plot in a case from whose published files?

The Paris police archivist Jacques Peuchet told of a Nîmes shoemaker jailed on a false charge of spying, who came out rich and hunted down the friends who had framed him. Dumas blew the anecdote up into a vast novel.

How did readers first get The Count of Monte Cristo?

In newspaper instalments, it ran in the Paris daily Journal des Débats from August 1844 to January 1846. The first bound volumes were already on sale long before the paper had printed the ending.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, what becomes of Dantès's fiancée Mercédès while he is locked away?

She marries his rival, her cousin Fernand, who had helped to frame Dantès, and rises with him to become a countess in Paris. Years later she alone knows the Count for who he is the moment they meet.

In which prison film do inmates decide The Count of Monte Cristo belongs on the library's Educational shelf?

The Shawshank Redemption has an inmate stumble over the author's name while unpacking books, and the hero tells him he'll like it because it's about a prison break. His friend Red suggests filing it under Educational.