Alexandre Dumas
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46 free Alexandre Dumas trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Alexandre Dumas wrote 100,000 pages, kept 40 mistresses, built a château named after his own novel and died broke as the Franco-Prussian War drowned out the news. His father, the son of a French marquis and an enslaved African woman, was a general at 31 and Napoleon's Black Devil; his son was a playwright too, so the world calls him Dumas père. These 46 questions cover the life and the books: The Three Musketeers and its real-life inspirations, The Count of Monte Cristo and the shoemaker Pierre Picaud, the ghostwriter Auguste Maquet and his lawsuit, the Fencing Master banned by the Tsar, the hashish club he shared with Hugo and Baudelaire, exile in Brussels, Garibaldi and L'Indépendant, the cookbook published after his death and the 2002 procession that carried him to the Panthéon behind four mounted musketeers. Easy questions stick to the famous titles and characters; the expert tier asks about Adah Isaacs Menken, Frank Wild Reed and Claude Schopp. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is Edmond Dantès's job before his arrest at the start of The Count of Monte Cristo?
Sailor
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.
Q 02In which prison is the hero of Monte Cristo locked up?
Château d'If
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.
Q 03Which fellow prisoner educates Edmond Dantès and tells him of a hidden treasure in The Count of Monte Cristo?
Abbé Faria
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.
Q 04What were the names of the three musketeers who befriend d'Artagnan?
Athos, Porthos and Aramis
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.
Q 05Who is the villainous spy working for Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers?
Milady de Winter
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.
Q 06In The Three Musketeers, what must d'Artagnan bring back from England to save the Queen's honour?
Her diamond studs
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.
Q 07Which 1700 work by Courtilz de Sandras inspired The Three Musketeers?
Mémoires de Monsieur d'Artagnan
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.
Q 08Which siege do d'Artagnan and his friends fight at in The Three Musketeers?
La Rochelle
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.
Q 09Which English duke is assassinated in The Three Musketeers?
Buckingham
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.
Q 10What is the final part of The Vicomte de Bragelonne usually called in English?
The Man in the Iron Mask
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.
Q 11Which novel is the direct sequel to The Three Musketeers?
Twenty Years After
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.
Q 12Who was Dumas's best-known ghostwriting collaborator?
Auguste Maquet
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.
Q 13What did Dumas's chief collaborator win when he took the novelist to court?
More money but no by-line
Q 21Edmund Kean, hero of an 1836 Dumas play, was a real Englishman famous as what?
An actor
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.
Q 22In an 1850 Dumas novel, a jailed grower races to win a rich prize by breeding which flower in black?
Tulip
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.
Q 23Which naval hero, a Scot who fought for the American rebels, inspired a Dumas novel of 1838?
John Paul Jones
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.
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.
Q 14In which French colony was Dumas's father born?
Saint-Domingue
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.
Q 15What nickname did Austrian troops give General Dumas in 1797?
The Black Devil
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.
Q 16General Dumas landed at Taranto in 1799 and spent two years imprisoned in which state?
The Kingdom of Naples
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.
Q 17What does the surname Dumas probably mean?
Of the farm
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.
Q 18In which town in northern France was Alexandre Dumas born?
Villers-Cotterêts
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.
Q 19Which French ruler employed the young Dumas as a clerk before taking the throne?
Louis-Philippe of Orléans
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.
Q 20Dumas's 1829 stage hit Henry III and His Court was the first big success for which movement in French theatre?
Romanticism
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.
Q 24Dumas's 1840 novel about the Decembrist revolt was banned in which country?
Russia
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.
Q 25Augustin Grisier, who co-wrote an 1840 novel with Dumas, was Dumas's what?
Fencing master
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.
Q 26Which scheming queen mother is the villain of Dumas's Queen Margot, set around the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572?
Catherine de' Medici
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.
Q 27What was the name of the country house Dumas built outside Paris in the 1840s?
Château de Monte-Cristo
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.
Q 28Dumas's son and namesake wrote which novel, the story behind Verdi's opera La Traviata?
The Lady of the Camellias
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.
Q 29After Louis-Napoléon's 1851 coup, Dumas slipped over France's northern border into which country?
Belgium
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.
Q 30Which Italian hero did Dumas befriend while supporting unification?
Giuseppe Garibaldi
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.