Dumas Alexandra

Dumas, Alexandre (1802-1870), French novelist and playwright of the romantic period, known as Dumas. Dumas, the most widely read of all French writers, is best remembered for his historical novels The Three Musketeers (1844; trans. 1846) and The Count of Monte-Cristo (1844; trans. 1846).

Dumas was born in  Aisne, July 24, 1802. He was the son of a general and the grandson of a nobleman who had settled in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and married a black woman there. He had little formal education but read voraciously and was especially attracted to 16th- and 17th-century adventure stories. While working as a clerk, he attended performances of an English Shakespearean company and was inspired to write drama.

Dumas was a prolific writer; about 1200 volumes were published under his name. Although many were the result of collaboration or the production of a Fiction factory in which hired writers executed his ideas, almost all the writing bears the unmistakable imprint of his personal genius and inventiveness.

Dumas's earnings were enormous but scarcely sufficient in his later years to sustain his extravagant style of living. He spent great sums of money in maintaining his estate outside Paris (Monte-Cristo), supporting numerous mistresses (one of whom was the mother of his son Alexandre), purchasing artworks, and making up the losses incurred by numerous business ventures. At his death, on December 5, 1870, he was virtually bankrupt.

Besides his historical novels, the works of Dumas include the plays Antony (1831), La tour de Nesle (The Tower of Nesle, 1832), Catherine Howard (1834), and L'Alchimiste (The Alchemist, 1839), as well as numerous dramatizations of his own fiction. He also wrote memoirs, which give a vivid picture of his times.

Louis XIII >>

Louis XIII (1601-43), king of France (1610-43), son of Henry IV, first of the Bourbon kings of France, born in Fontainebleau. During his minority from 1610 to 1617 his mother served as regent. She allied France with Spain and arranged the marriage in 1615 of Louis to Princess Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III, king of Spain. For most of his reign Louis was dominated by Cardinal Richelieu, who joined his council of ministers in 1624 and served eventually as prime minister until his death in 1642. Under Richelieu's anti-Habsburg foreign policy, France entered (1635) the Thirty Years' War as an ally of Sweden and the Protestant princes of Germany. Louis's reign was marked also by occasional religious strife between Roman Catholics and the French Protestants, or Huguenots, and by the many conspiracies against Richelieu. Louis was succeeded by his son Louis XIV.

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