Alexandre Dumas: author of The Three Musketeers

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Hello, Greg here.

Just a reminder before we get going that episodes of Your Dead to Me are released on Fridays wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else.

First on BBC Sounds.

Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today we are packing our book bags and traveling back to 19th-century France to learn all about the acclaimed novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas.

And to help complete our trio of musketeers, we have two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London.

You may have read her wonderful book, African Europeans: An Untold untold history, and you will remember her from our episode on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

It's Professor Olivette Otelais.

Welcome back, Olivette.

Oh, hello, Greg.

Lovely to be back.

We're delighted to have you back.

And in Comedy Corner, she's an award-winning rising star who won the Chortel Best Newcomer Award in 2022.

Maybe you've seen one of her sold-out live runs at the Edinburgh Fringe or Soho Theatre.

I certainly have.

Or watched her on TV on Live at the Apollo, or heard her on all kinds of podcasts.

including Off Menu and The Guilty Feminist.

It's Celia A.B.

Welcome to the show, Celia.

Hello, thank you for having me.

Oh, it's lovely to have you in.

Your first time on the show, which feels like a booking era.

We should have had you on ages ago.

I've been trying to get you on for ages.

I will say, like, the difference between your intro and my intro is so funny.

Because it's like, you clear like a genius.

And then it's like, I'm Celia's a clown.

But a very respected clown.

Respected clown.

Yes, it is I.

It is I.

So, Celia, you are

French-Algerian, and you grew up in Paris.

How do you feel about history, French history?

Did you do it at school?

I didn't really like history at school.

Oh.

I like it a bit more now.

I would say the bit of history I know the most about is the Algerian War.

Not the funniest.

No, but it's but I like it.

I like history also when it's like more specific.

So like they have the life of someone who lived in a period.

Social history.

Yeah, that's what I meant to.

Good stuff.

And Alexandre Dumas, did you do him at school?

Is he kind of like the French Dickens?

Do you have to read him?

So the only thing I remember about Alexandre Dumas is that the first boy I was in love with lived on Dreamer Street.

That's a good anecdote.

We'll take it.

I'm going to sound like...

Yeah, just for the listeners, I just got back from Australia.

I'm a bit of a dum-dum today.

I just found out he's a playwright just now.

Just now?

I thought he was a street.

Yes, we didn't really do an episode on a street, but...

But it's nice to know know that there's a romantic uh link there for you because he was a romantic writer.

I'm excited to find out about this guy.

He's a great I want to know what makes him tick.

I mean he loved the ladies.

Did he?

He did.

So we will get into a bit of romance, but also he wrote some serious books.

So

a lot to get through.

Okay.

So what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

And I imagine some of you will know Dumas' work.

Maybe Maybe you've read The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo or watched many of the film or TV adaptations of them.

Perhaps you enjoyed a babyface Leo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask or you've seen the romantic and bloody Larraen Margot, a French cinema classic.

And if you've been to Paris, you may have gone to the street named after him or used the metro station named after Dumas.

But who was the real man behind the stories?

Was he as swashbuckling as his literary heroes?

What life events inspired his epic novels?

And just how many mistresses can one man have?

Let's find out.

Right, we shall begin at the beginning.

Celia, give us a guess on where you think the story starts.

March 2020.

No, I'm going to say.

The COVID pandemic, you think?

The COVID pandemic.

I think, okay, so I'm going to say it's the beginning of the 1800s.

Does that sound good?

That sounds great.

It sounds lovely.

Olivette, more specificity, please.

Yes, of course.

She wasn't far off.

Oh, there we go.

I mean, he was born Alexandre Dumas David de la Paietry

on the 24th of July, 1802, in Villère-Coutre.

Okay.

And he was the second son of General Tomas-Alexandre Dumas-David de la Pailletri and Marie-Louise-Elisabette La Bouret, an innkeeper's daughter.

Okay, so the father has a fantastic name.

Yes, he did.

And mum is an innkeeper's daughter, perhaps slightly less fancy.

Less fancy.

Still, they made a baby.

They managed, yeah.

So Thomas Alexandre, the dad, was of dual heritage or mixed race, and he was born in Haiti to a minor nobleman and an enslaved woman.

But the Dumas decided to go by his mother's name, Dumas.

Thomas Alexandre's father brought him to France,

freed him because he was born an enslaved person, gave him a French education,

including swordsmanship lessons with Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

Ah!

We're harking back to a previous episode.

So Celia, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a.

You don't need to tell me.

Please, please, I need to tell you.

Please, please do tell me.

He was an incredible swordsman in France, but also an amazing classical composer.

So he was the French Mozart, and

he was an extraordinary character.

And there's a movie that you worked on, Olivet.

Yes, I did.

And he was a biracial composer, born in Guadeloupe and became a French celebrity.

The dad was involved in the revolution,

but on the Napoleonic side.

Ah, okay.

Oh, right.

Okay, so that's interesting.

So, Thomas Alexandre is this army general.

So, he's the sword-fighting lessons with the Chevalier have paid off.

So, tell us about his military career.

This is the father of Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Alexandre.

Say all of his names.

I mean, I can't, I mean, what was it, Paieterie?

It was a proper

Tomas-Alexandre David de la Paietri.

Tomason David de la Paétrie.

Well, he joined the Queen's Dragoons in 1786, and quite quickly by 1793, he was general-in-chief of the Army of the Alps and commanded 50,000 troops.

Wow.

Wow.

This is during the French Revolution.

Yes.

Absolutely.

He's in charge of 50,000.

That's a football stadium of troops.

Wow.

Yes.

What's the most responsibility you've had, Celia?

I used to manage a photography studio.

Okay.

And I was 19, and he was really small.

And

I wanted to be like a cool boss.

But I went straight into David Brent, like the I went straight into like office boss, like I was

so embarrassing.

Oh, dear.

So, me and Thomas are not that far off.

You're also a leader of men, yes.

Okay,

so see, he's in this kind of

elite regiment, he's in charge of

53,000 troops.

53,000 troops.

He's in charge of Tyrol, which is in the Alps.

So, is that Austria, Italy, Switzerland?

That's kind of that part of the world, Italy.

Exactly, yeah.

And thanks to Napoleon, actually.

And even racist Prussian soldier referred to him as the best soldier in the world.

So he was admired by people who didn't like people like him.

He was involved in many other things.

I mean, he was involved in Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.

He helped allegedly quell the revolt in

Cairo in 1798.

I mean, so he was admired.

So I'm immediately getting a sense that the kind of Musketeer's book is basically fan fiction for Alexandra's own dad.

Yeah, it must be so hard to to have a dad this impressive.

I'm very lucky.

But there's a tragic twist in the tale.

His heroic father, this soldier in charge of a vast army, he'd gone to Egypt with Napoleon.

We did an episode on young Napoleon, if people listen.

But there is a tragic twist of the father that passes away when Alexandra is very young.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, he was captured in Egypt, in prison for two years, freed, but came back partially paralysed, almost blind in one eye, deaf in

one ear.

And he tried desperately and repeatedly to petition Napoleon for compensation.

He was not successful, really.

And eventually he died of stomach cancer in 1806 when Alexandre was just three years old.

And that really plunged the family into poverty.

The thing was that Alexandre actually worshipped his father.

How do you imagine his childhood going from that point?

That's a pretty rough start to life, isn't it, Celia?

Yeah, that would have been awful.

Like, also, in terms of like romanticizing your dad, like we all growing up think that our dads are like heroes, but his dad was actually very impressive.

Yeah, literally a hero.

And to try and cling on to the last memory you have of him, that would be really hard.

And the mum as well.

Oh my god.

Yeah, it's a really sad start.

So

you say they were plunged into poverty.

Man, we're talking Le Miserable sort of on the streets begging for scraps type.

You know, is he singing like Anne Hathaway?

What kind of poverty are we talking?

Is he as poor as Anne Hathaway?

Was he as beautiful as Anne Hathaway crying in the street?

Not quite.

He moved

with his maternal grandparents in their hotel in Villa Arcotre.

Okay.

So, not quite that level of poverty.

He was educated at home by his mother and older sister.

And when he was 10 years old, a cousin died and left him money to join the seminary.

But Dumas wasn't keen on being a priest, really.

Right.

How would you get out of going to seminary school if you were Alexandra Celia?

So let's say, okay, let's do an act out.

Tell me, I have to go to a priest school.

Celia, I am your grandmother, and I am sending you to priest school.

Sorry.

I think, do you know what?

I think I would go, but like, I would.

Is this called Skything?

You'd Scythe.

That's the one.

I would Skype.

It would be like,

what's that film, Bueller?

Ferris Bueller's Day.

Ferris Bueller.

Like Ferris Bueller's Day.

Duma, Duma, Duma.

I think I would like, yeah, I would be like, I would go just because I like structure, but I would be like, I think I'd be a cool priest.

Like, do you know the little white thing there?

Oh.

Probably wouldn't wear that.

Okay.

Probably would like.

You'd be a hip priest.

Yeah, I'd leave it open.

You'd wear Nikes.

Yeah.

I kind of like the idea of confession.

That's like a podcast.

Okay.

All right.

Alexandra did not go.

He went on the run.

No, he didn't, actually.

He lied to his mama.

He said he wanted money to buy an inkwell and he went on spent it on bread and sausage and escaped to the forest.

But his mother, I mean, as all mothers, quickly forgive him

and the seminary idea was dropped.

It's not quite Count of Monte Cristo level escape, is it?

Sort of buying a sausage and running to the woods.

He went camping.

He went to Grastonbury.

With his sausage roll, just like, bye, don't want to be a priest.

Went to Gregg's, went to the woods.

Okay.

all right.

So he doesn't go to seminary school.

No.

Where does he go instead?

Does he get an education?

You said he got an education, but what level of education?

Yeah, he does.

I mean, he attended Paris School where he was taught by the very famous abolitionist L'Abbe Grégoire, but he was not a very attentive student, so he learned little French literature and history.

But he did read the Bible, Le Baron Buffon, Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and classical mythology.

Okay, so he wasn't paying attention to class, but he was reading.

He was diving into the classics.

Okay, so he's taught by this famous abolitionist, Abbé Grigoire, who's a sort of great intellectual and campaigner against slavery, which is a hugely important thing happening at the time, because, of course, Napoleon reintroduces slavery.

But we should talk about Napoleon, because this is peak Napoleon era, right?

Napoleon makes himself emperor.

He crowns himself emperor in 1804, which is the most Napoleonic thing you can do.

And presumably that influences Alexandra's childhood, the Napoleonic Wars, all the kind of drama.

How does that affect him?

Quite strongly because the wars lasted throughout his childhood, 1803, 1813.

So you have various coalitions of European countries against the first French Empire under Napoleon.

1814, for example, the Cossacks marched through Villa Cotre,

and Dumas's mother tried to move the family around several times, but they kept running into different foreign troops.

Young Alexander even saw Napoleon twice.

Wow.

And he described him as pale, sickly, and impassive.

Oh,

that's a pretty brutal review, Celia.

Yeah, Napoleon is probably like, didn't say short though.

Actually, I'm shy for my age, so.

So, Cossack troops were literally in his town.

I mean, that must be scary, right, to have foreign troops marching through your town as you

as a little boy.

Yes, it was, but he also found his place because he was carrying water to surgeons after the battle.

So they were trying to

make a space for themselves in that environment.

And then we learned that a Prussian officer informed them Napoleon had surrendered.

And you have Louis XVIII was named king.

Yes.

And just to give you some background, the Bourbon dynasty, he was part of the Bourbon dynasty.

Yeah, the Bourbon dynasty is sort of, they're put back on the throne, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

The brother Louis XVI had been guillotined during the revolution.

So the king is there.

Even after the restoration, Alexandre kept the name Dumas, despite the fact that it was actually linked, it was a link between the father and Napoleon.

So he could have used that link.

He didn't.

He chose Dumas as a name.

So then say, I'm still going to be Dumas, even though my dad fought for Napoleon, who's now the bad guy.

That's quite a...

It's quite a gamble, Celia.

Yeah.

I have nothing funny to say about that.

I'm just really touched about hearing about his life and stuff.

You know, the fact he chose the name, I was really intrigued by that.

It's like a form of militancy.

Yes.

Very young already.

I'm going to, you know, take my mother.

And not just because she was an enslaved, and I mean,

you know, all that, but also because it's a woman.

You know, you don't take the woman's name at the time.

It was really something, I mean, something really striking.

Definitely.

I find it really touching.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

I bet his mum was like, got emotional about it as well.

Yeah, and she's keeping him safe.

You know, Cossacks are in the village, she's keeping him safe.

It's an extraordinary story where the mum is perhaps quietly sort of in the background, just going, just hide over there, and we'll just wait for the troops to go.

And meanwhile, Napoleon, pale, sickly, and impassive.

Do you think the books would have sold as well if he'd been Alexandre Dumas de la, what's it?

Alexandre Dumas Davie de la Paétie.

You know, that's that's quite a mouthful.

That can't fit on a book cover, can it?

No.

Do you have a stage name?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

Was it hard to choose that?

Did you, was that a decision that...

It was kind of like natural, because the first time I did stand-up, I used my real name, and my real name is quite like, it sounds really Arabic.

And the first gig I did was in Birmingham.

And people can't say those words in Birmingham.

So when they introduced me on stage, it was like word soup.

And I was like, I want to make it easier for the whites.

And also, I quite like the separation.

Also, I just thought I'll just change it for like a couple gigs.

And then eight years later, I'm stuck.

Yeah.

But after the Napoleonic Wars, Olivet, the Bourbon monarchs are, you know, they're trying to restore calm to France, which you know, they're doing their best.

So is that does that mean that Alexander's sort of teenage years are a bit more chill?

There's no more troops in the streets?

Uh chilled, I'm not sure.

I mean, he became

France, so I know.

Yeah,

he still became an underclerk at 14 and worked for a solicitor in Crepy.

So while he was working as an underclerk, he skipped work and went to Paris one day and fell in love with the city and the theatre.

And he eventually moved to the city in 1823 when he was 20.

Oh, lovely.

He had a big day out as a teenager and went, oh, it's so exciting.

Yeah.

And then he moved to the city in his 20s.

To be 20 in Paris.

Oh,

if only.

Where was he before again?

He was in Villaire Coutre, you know,

kind of bourgeois little place, protected little place.

And Paris is much more exciting.

Yeah, of course.

And he also, he's a bit of a pool shark.

He plays billiards.

He's really good at billiards.

So yeah.

In fact, he's so good, he won a quite impressive prize.

Do you want to guess what the prize was?

So we're in 1800.

Yep.

A Samsung LED TV

and a brand new car.

No, it was probably

a bottle of beer.

More than one bottle of beer.

100 bottles of beer.

600 glasses of absinthe.

Which is

so much absinthe.

We don't know if he drank it, we don't know if he tried to stick it in the bus and bring it home.

600 glasses of absinthe.

Surely there's a better transportation method.

One bottle's not, I think.

I don't know.

I don't know.

That's all we know.

600 glasses.

So we don't know if he tried to ship it home, if he tried to drink it all in one evening and poison himself.

I don't know.

But there we go.

600 glasses of absinthe.

And what happened after Alexander moved to Paris and drank all his absinthe?

Did he wake up one morning in a bush and then think, I'm moving to Paris?

No, actually, he continued his career.

Two generals his father knew recommended him for secretariat.

Oh, so daddy's friends.

Yeah, of Duc d'Or's baby De De Dead.

Duc Never Baby, yeah, okay.

Duc d'Orléans, you know,

no less.

The assistant director of the office, La Sagne, a man called Lazagne, advised him, though, to educate himself further and to read people like Froissat, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine.

So he needed to further his education.

So he's reading the classics.

He's reading the

Frosois, a great, what, 14th-century medieval historian of France who wrote about Joan of Arc, or not Joan of Arc, just before Joan of Arc, but all these sort of great, great writers.

But I'm going to have to stop you there because you said Monsieur Lasagna.

Monsieur Lasagne, yeah.

There's a lot of layers to this guy.

Hey,

hello.

You said you were jet lag, so that's an excellent joke.

I wrote that before coming in.

Monsieur lasagna,

I'd love to be called Monsieur Lasagne.

Is there a missus, Lazagne?

He sleeps under lots of her.

Okay, so Monsieur Lazagne is telling him, read the classics, educate yourself.

And then by 18, 18, 19, Alexander's, what, 16, 17?

He's a young guy, but he's, you know, he's approaching adulthood.

Does he start to write?

Does he...

Yes, I mean, he's fascinated by literature.

He met somebody called Adolphe de Leuven,

a well-educated son of a count, as you do, who'd been exiled from Sweden for complicity in the king's murder.

Oh, excellent, good.

So, a bit of an edge.

Oh, he says, Wow.

How did they meet?

Yeah, he sounds quite sexy.

Yeah, at least, yeah.

An exiled Swedish count who's been implicated in the murder of a king.

That's quite

Dumas, isn't it?

It's quite a romantic novel.

Yeah.

Is he seeing anyone?

So you have Levain and Jumao started to collaborate on

act and plays and verse comedies, I mean it was a fruitful collaboration because they wrote Late Into the Night, Fuel by Wine and Hot Punch.

Okay.

But he was also writing solo though, not very successfully.

His first kind of verse strategy, Les Grac,

wasn't that good.

I mean, according to himself, he said he gave it its due by burning it.

Oh.

Have you ever

burned anything you've written and have ever gone that intense?

I think everyone is like a bit embarrassed by the first thing that you write.

Instead of burning it, I performed it every day at the Eden Room Festival.

That was my point of doing it.

And thank you so much for coming.

Hey, you know,

it's burned into my memory.

Yeah,

it's no, I've definitely like deleted stuff that I was embarrassed by.

But I also, for some reason, I have a video of my phone of the first time I really bombed.

And it's seven minutes long and I cannot delete it.

Really?

I can't watch it.

I can't delete it.

I don't know why it's there.

Is it sort of motivational for you?

I don't know.

I think it's

because I'm reading to ego deaf.

Do you know ego deaf?

If something good happens to you, you shouldn't let it feed your ego.

But if something bad happens to you, you shouldn't let it impact your ego.

And that video, I think, is the one thing keeping me stable.

I could always be humbled by watching me bomb in Birmingham in 2017.

There's an awful bit in the video where there was one woman in the front row who was kind of like still smiling.

And I go, she gets it, and she just like shook her head.

So, so Dumas burned it, and Celia,

you digitally recorded it forever.

So, in 1830, Dumas was again, I mean, France again thrown into it, you know, we talk about the French Revolution, we get another French Revolution,

the 1813 July Revolution.

Do you know this one, Celia?

The 14th of July.

Oh no, that was a different one.

Yeah, yeah.

I love revolutions in July.

Yeah, well, it's sunny.

You're out in the streets, you know, barbecue weather, you think, actually, I don't really like the king.

I don't know this revolution.

This is the 1830s, it's called the three-day revolution.

It's basically the Glastonbury of revolutions.

Do you want to tell us about it, Olivet?

I mean, it's not supposed to be funny, though.

Sorry.

So you have to...

Sorry, try and stop us.

So you have Charles X, who's brother of Louis the XVIII,

deposed and replaced with the Duc d'Orléans.

And in a letter, Dumas claimed that he was sent by the Marquis de Lafayette and the Duke on the mission to acquire gunpowder.

I mean, he probably exaggerated, but he did approach Lafayette about forming a national guard in the Vendée region.

But the king told Dumas to return to poetry.

Oh,

stick to poetry, it's quite the burden.

So sassy, isn't it?

You know, the more I learn about the king,

the more I side with the Swedish guy.

Leuven, yeah.

Okay, well, luckily for literature lovers, Dumas obeyed the royal decree of sticking to poetry and he started banging out plays.

Absolutely.

I mean, between 1829 and 51, quite a long time, he started a new play on the Parisian stage every year, except one.

He pioneered two new genres:

romantic historical drama and modern drama.

And the plays often featured illegitimate illegitimate or poor heroes struggling against societal obstacles and heroines who become victims to their lovers.

We have 18 of his plays staged at the Comédie Française, which is huge, which is huge at the time.

But many of those plays were also in the

Théâtre des Boulevards.

So he was basically writing for kind of bourgeois theatre-going public.

So kind of middle-class audiences.

Absolutely.

Did he get a lot of people copying him after that?

I think so.

At some point, the genre kind of people lost interest, so it came back in the 20th century, the mid-20th century, rather.

But he invented it.

He did.

I mean, that's what they say.

I'm always wary about that.

It's always hard to know who invents a genre, isn't it?

Yeah.

But I suppose what's interesting is he's living through extraordinary historical times, but he's writing about the past, so he can talk about the present without anyone getting in trouble.

So it's that sort of thing of you're kind of holding up a mirror to now by going, oh no, it's the 17th century, actually.

What is like the Rhinoceros book?

Do you know that one?

No, tell me, yeah.

Okay.

You're regretting opening your mouth now, aren't you?

Okay,

just for the listeners, I wouldn't know this normally, but again, I'm a dum-dum to lay.

It's an absurdist book about everyone turning into rhinoceroses.

Rhinoceros?

Rhinocero?

Rhinocero.

But it was actually about the rise of fascism.

Oh, it's always the Nazis, isn't it?

Yeah, it's always the Nazis.

Yeah, lovely.

I don't know that book.

I'll have to look that up.

Thank you.

Alexandre Dumas is writing these kind of impressive stories set in the past, right?

So

there's one called Henry III and His Court, or Henri Tois.

There's one called Antony.

What's the general theme of his work?

Yes, he wrote Henri Troi et Sacour,

set in July 1578, exactly in the past, at the court of Henry III, the last Valois monarch.

And he received 6,000 francs for the sale of the manuscript.

That's good money.

Antony, 1831, was about an illegitimate hero who's unable to marry his love because of social position.

And in the end, she begs him to kill her.

Oh, yeah.

You said he was funny, Olivet.

That doesn't sound very funny.

Okay.

Anything else that's about cheerier?

Another one, La Tour de Nelle, 1832.

That was his most successful romantic drama, and it was about Margaret of Burgundy, who killed her lovers.

Okay.

I'm sensing a theme.

Yes.

I mean, he was very successful, though, because you have 800 consecutive performances.

That's absolutely shocking.

Okay, that is amazing.

That's extraordinary.

That's like mousetrap level, isn't it?

Of having a play that just runs and runs and runs.

Exactly.

But you said he's funny, but so far I'm hearing everyone dies.

having a go at a genre that seemed to be working, so he kept writing those ones.

I mean, throughout the 1830s, romantic dramas started to be less popular, so he had to shift his focus as well.

To something slightly different.

It's still into the romantic kind of aspect of things, though.

Okay.

In 1832, Celia, we get another French Revolution.

This one's more famous.

This one's the Anne Hathaway Revolution.

This is Les Misrabe.

I like to call that Dance, Dance Revolution.

So we have the barricades in the streets.

Yes.

This time, Dumas, he has to leave France.

He's in trouble.

How old is he around this time?

He's about 29.

He's late 20s.

Oh, wow.

So he's written, he's done all of this before 29.

Yeah.

Very prolific.

Well, nepotism will get you anything.

No, it's not.

That's really imp there was no phones back there.

That's it, right?

He's just not on Instagram.

The rest of us are just scrolling.

Yeah.

I could have an 800-day run of my beautiful play.

I'm too busy watching recipes.

So he has to run away.

He has to flee.

He gets in trouble with the king.

What happened?

Olivet, why is the king annoyed at this sort of young upstart rival?

Well, for some reason, he decided to officiate the funeral of a bonipartist general.

Something you shouldn't just do.

We don't know why.

Anyway, the king considered his arrest.

We've all done corporates, all right?

All right.

tax bills in January.

Do you know what I mean?

Check the dates, but that was November, December.

The problem is that he had to leave, though.

He had to leave Paris, and so he went to the south of France and then to

Switzerland.

Yeah, so it wasn't too bad.

And winter time, 1832-33,

he published the accounts of his Swiss travels, so monetizing the thing.

Oh, okay, so he's a travel writer now.

First person in the world to publish their Swiss accounts.

Hello.

He traveled to Italy as well.

I mean,

he meets the Pope.

I mean, he allegedly met the Pope.

Allegedly?

Yeah, because I mean, he was arrested by papal police.

So,

thanks to his revolutionary kind of reputation.

So, we're not quite sure he met with Pope.

The Swiss guards in their silly pajamas arrested him.

Yeah, right.

Absolutely.

But

he had to leave eventually.

I mean, after his mother's death in 1836, he went on another journey.

but this time through Brussels in Germany, right?

I mean, Celia, you're a touring comedian.

Does travel inspire or does it tire?

I think it's nice for your eyes to see different things.

Sorry, I'm a poet.

Write this down.

So

I feel like monotony of

staying in the same city can kind of get your brain stuck in the same patterns.

I think it inspires.

I think, yeah, definitely.

I think it's also quite stressful because you do need something to anchor yourself.

But it sounds like, even looking back at his childhood, it feels like he's had to run away from different places and bumping into

more and more impressive people.

Yeah, I mean, he knows the Duc d'Orléans, he's met the king, he's now hanging out with the Pope.

We're being arrested by the Pope.

This is a quite well-connected guy.

Very well-connected.

I mean, he, again, his father was a general and he's coming from La Paitri, I mean,

aristocracy.

But we should say again, he's mixed-race, right?

So

he's moving through Europe, through France, but he's a mixed-race man with a slightly competitive, difficult relationship with his father, who was a Napoleonist general.

So these countries have been invaded by Napoleon.

Napoleon's not necessarily everyone's best favorite friend.

So it's kind of interesting being the son of a guy who invaded Italy and then going, Hello!

Yeah, I mean, that's why he chose Dumas to kind of perhaps

be a bit further away from that as well.

Right, okay, okay, that makes sense.

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Well, let's break from politics and plays.

Let's talk about the other big P.

Let's talk about his big P.

His passion.

His passion.

His passion for the ladies.

Alexandre Dumas was a player.

I mean, actually, I mean, Alexander's love life, was it as saucy as Monsieur Lesagne's reading list?

Even more.

Even more saucy than Marley Lucas.

Yeah, saucy by Chamel.

That was so stupid.

Okay, he married, right?

Alexander, he found a wife, he settled down, he married her, and that was the love of his life, yes?

No, not quite.

1840, he married his mistress,

Ida Ferrier, who is an actress.

They soon separated.

She moved to Florence in 1844.

They never saw each other again.

Great.

Okay, okay.

But he didn't stop there, though.

He had, oh, well, allegedly, he had 40 mistresses throughout his life.

4-0.

Four, zero, and claimed 40.

But that's not it.

Juma himself said, I don't want to exaggerate, but I really believe that up and down the world, I have more than 500 children.

How do you even what's the math?

I know, I mean.

Can anyone do quick maths?

No.

500 divided by 40.

I mean, yeah.

That's too much.

Can we get?

Oh, no.

But you can say anything, can't you?

I mean, sure.

No one's gonna be like, all right, bring them.

Producer Steve tells me that's 12 and a half kids per mistress.

So

that's

which statistically means that some of those probably had 20 kids because you know, law of averages, bell curves.

I find it so funny, like the idea of a man bragging about how many kids they've got.

Like now they try and hide them.

Yes, it's the opposite Boris Johnson effectiveness.

But he's going around going, 500 kids.

Where's he going for 50,000?

He's building his own army.

Like Like daddy.

I should have my own Dumas army.

40 mistresses.

Okay, Olivet, from a legal point of view, in terms of inheritance law, how many of those 500 kids does he actually recognise legally and say, this is my son, this is my daughter?

Well, he recognizes five of them.

Oh my God.

So 99% of his kids, he's like, you're dead to me.

Or maybe four, four or five.

Yes.

Ah, fantastic.

Wow.

Okay, who are the kids he recognizes?

Do we have a kind of role call of like official Dumas heirs?

Yes, we do.

I mean, we have Alexandre Dumas Fies.

Yes.

With the dressmaker Catherine or Catherine Labet.

And Dumas Fies went on to become famous because he wrote the novel La Dame O Camellia.

Yeah, the Ladies and the Camellias.

Yeah, that's all that.

And then you have Marie-Alexandrine Dumas with Belle Crelle Sammer.

Henry Bauer with Anna Bauer, who was the wife of an Austrian merchant in Paris.

Great, so

his wives, his mistresses are cheating on their husbands.

Great, that's all so lovely.

Okay.

Michaela Cleley Josepha Elisabette Cordier with Emily Cordier, who was 19 at the time when Dumas was 57.

What do they talk about?

Yeah.

You pulled a face there, Celia, that could best be described as smell the fart.

Yes, it was an absolute.

She was 19.

It was 57.

Yeah.

They probably didn't talk right.

No, okay.

Whatever did they get up to?

I think we know.

We found the 12 and a half kids statistical.

Even worse than that, in his later years, his son and him would sometimes have the same mistresses.

Sorry, say that again.

His son would have that, they would share mistresses.

Yeah.

So Alexander Fies, Jr.

All for one and one for all, right?

That's what the musketeers are.

You know what's crazy is like, I know so much about it.

I know so much about him now.

So like, I get it.

Like like I think like he sounds really charming.

He's had a lot of stuff.

Interesting things happen to him in his life.

At the start of the episode, Olivet, I listed some of the novels that have been turned into movies and and T V shows.

W we haven't talked about novels yet so we've talked about plays so far.

He writes a lot of novels but we know we'll know some of the the big ones.

Can you talk us through the novels?

Is is he pivoting to novel because it's a new genre?

Is it just that he wants to tell longer stories that, you know,

what he does is writing things that can be serialized

and that can be put into magazines.

Just to give you an example, Le Capitaine Poll earned the magazine siècle 5,000 subscribers in just three weeks.

When you say serialized, this is what Dickens was doing too.

He's writing chapters per week, like a new chapter each week in the magazine.

So you have to subscribe to the magazine to read the novel.

Yes.

Wow.

So it's like a sort of serialized story.

It's like a soap opera.

And he got him 5,000 subscribers.

Yes.

So amazingly, he's doing amazingly.

So he carries on, he writes a novel called George about a biracial dual heritage son of a planter possibly drawing on his own life but his greatest success is of course with the D'Artagnan romances yeah so including the three musketeers serialized for six years and the Count of Monte Cristo serialized for two years in 1844-46 so it's working it's a it's a a type that is working he also wrote popular series about the Valois monarchs and including the very famous Larine Margot, if you remember the movie

La Genie.

Yeah, I mean that's the Queen Marguerite, I suppose.

And for listeners,

we've done an episode on Catherine de' Medici.

She is the baddie in that novel.

She is the villain, right?

She's kind of conspiring and poisonous and sinister.

I mean, the Three Musketeers stories are so famous now from Hollywood.

We all know all for one and one for all and men in floppy hats.

But they're set in the 17th century, so they're set in the time of Louis XIV

and Charles II.

And

they're really popular, aren't they?

He's writing about a kind of romantic past.

Yes, a romantic past.

And people, at a time where people need to wanted to dream about an imagined past, so it's working well for him, probably making him a lot of money on the way and more popularity as well.

Well, again, big blockbuster, would you say?

Yes, absolutely.

At the time it was.

And yes, Monte Cristo's probably his biggest hit, do you think?

I mean,

that's the one that Hollywood keeps keeps remaking, isn't it?

Have you read Canto Monte Cristo?

I did at school.

And actually, the more I'm here, the more I remember that I have read all of these things in school.

But yeah,

it keeps being remade.

There's an amazing one on Pianinette that's come out that's like gone massive now.

Yeah, a big French one, isn't it?

It's kind of amazing I'd put in his life experience into different voices.

Like, do you know what I mean?

Like, everything kind of is the same thread, but like in different,

you know.

It's kind of.

You're right, because Georges is about, as you said, a biracial son of a planter.

So that's about his family story.

The Musketeers is sort of about his dad as sort of a great soldier.

And then the Valois Monique is about kind of the political intrigues that he's sort of been involved with, all the revolutions happening around him.

Lorraine Margault.

So

he's drawing on his own life, but he's kind of putting it behind a veil so that he doesn't get in trouble.

Absolutely.

And you have the women's stories and characters, Lorraine Margault, I mean, with all the nuances that you can have in a character like that.

I'm just thinking about something.

You know, I sent you a picture.

I was in Marseille, and I sent you a picture of Chateau Diff

because I kept thinking about this place, this tiny place that is really almost oppressive

in the south of France.

And to think that he based his novel on this place.

I was just, I mean, I've been there many times, but I was just moved and excited.

A lot of his stories are based on real historical events, aren't they?

D'Artagnan was a real guy.

Was he?

Yeah.

And the Musketeers were real, and D'Artagnan was real.

That's so cool.

We should mention, however, the

ghost writer

August Macket.

We're not doing a podcast about this guy.

He had a kind of secret co-writer.

He did.

He was really criticized about that.

Macket helped him with development and ideas, but Dumas wrote the novels.

He was like a director.

That's interesting.

So

as a stand-up,

you write your own shows, but you have a director who...

Sometimes, yeah, you can like, I think some stand-up stand-up will have directors.

But directors take on different roles.

So like...

The way I've used them is more like architectural, just because I'm too much of a silly billy for structure.

And that's medical.

You have a diagnosis of whimsical.

Yeah, exactly.

So Olivette, Mackay is the ideas guy, but Dumas doing the typing.

He's actually there with Quill in hand writing these serialized novels.

These huge, I mean, Monte Cristo is a massive novel.

It seems to me that it was a collaboration between the two development ideas.

It's a bit like they're brainstorming.

Okay.

And then Jumai is the one writing the novel.

The problem is that not everyone liked that.

For example, in 1845, there's a journalist who accused him of running a, quote, a novel factory.

And

because he's producing so much, people are starting to say that can't be him and it can't be possible.

The journalist also used the term, he's using a naigre, which has a double meaning.

It means a black enslaved person from the colonies and a ghost writer in mainland France.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Wow.

Right, so there's a sort of allusion there to his mixed-race heritage, do you think?

Yeah, definitely.

And the fact that he's not doing the work himself, but Dumas answered quite rightly by saying that he had research assistants in the same way Napoleon had generals.

Right.

He just sued the journalist and he won.

That's quite a comeback, isn't it?

Yeah.

The more popular he got, it probably had more and more people trying to be contrarian as well.

I imagine journalists wanting to.

Yeah, take sort of shots at him.

Yeah, which is often the thing with mixed-race people.

Like, there's often accusations of like...

You can't do it yourself.

You can't do it yourself.

Who's really doing this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's interesting because they even accused him of plagiarism.

It can't come from your brain, so you're using young writers to do the work again.

But the thing is, he never covered up the names of the collaborations.

He was really open about it.

And when other writers' names were not included, it wasn't his decision, it was the publisher's decision.

Now, we can argue that he could have fought it, but we don't know what actually happened.

And it's probably like there were probably a lot of writers doing that, like using ghostwriters and stuff at the time.

And that's why, like, that's where these accusations came from, but it just couldn't believe

that he didn't.

But it's funny to think of journalism being kind of the same as it is now.

Do you know what I mean?

Something's never changed.

Welcome to history, Celia.

First day.

Yeah, first day.

First day.

So Dumas is an incredible superstar of writing and play.

He's doing a play every year for those 30 years.

He's writing these vast novels, co-creating them with Mackay.

And of course, he's incredibly rich now.

He's laughing all the way to La Banque.

And he builds himself a fancy little chateau.

Celia, what do you think he calls it?

What would you call it?

Where is the chateau?

Please?

Where is the chateau?

It's in northern France, isn't it?

Yes, it's in the outskirts.

Yeah, so outside Paris.

D-Town.

D-Town.

Bring all the ladies to D-Town.

Okay.

For his 500 kids.

He calls it the Chateau de Monte Cristo.

That's sweet.

Is it sweet or is it cringe?

I can't tell.

Oh, that's his inner child work.

As you think.

I don't know.

I can't.

It's a bit like Shakespeare having a house called Hamlet House.

Hello, welcome to Hamlet House.

I don't know.

I feel like

it's slightly bordering on

fan fiction with

something made you have so much money.

Okay.

You want to celebrate it.

All right.

It cost him an absolute fortune.

But it had to be big for all of the absence.

Yeah, exactly.

But he didn't relax long, Olivetti.

He was off travelling again.

You know, he's already toured Europe or whatever.

But off he went again in 1846.

He did.

He was offered 10,000 francs by the Minister for Public and Information to travel to Algeria.

Ah.

Represent.

Was it to write that you had to go to Algeria?

Yeah, to observe, write, represent, as you said.

To tell the French people about Algeria or to tell the Algerian people about Algeria.

Like, who's it for?

What's the.

I think, given the colonial context, to try and tell them

how it was and how it should be.

What year was this?

1846.

1846.

Yeah, and Mackay, his co-writer, went with him, and so did his son, Alessandre Fies,

Junior.

I'm going to call him Junior, sorry.

They went as well, and they went to a royal wedding on the way in Spain.

Which shows that he had his

connections to the elite of the country.

Not just the country, actually, across Europe to be invited to those places.

Properly connected.

But the following year, Celia, uh-oh, the creditors came in, and turned out Alessandre Dumas did not have as much money as he thought he had.

And

he had to pay an awful lot of money to his ex-wife.

Which one?

The one that lasted like four years and then was gone.

Ida, was it?

Idale.

Yeah.

So he's in trouble financially.

He has to sell his chateau, doesn't he?

For a pittance of what he'd spent building it.

That's a shame.

That's a real shame.

Yeah.

Yeah, the name would feel so sad.

Yeah, exactly.

That's devastating, isn't it?

You're right, actually.

Okay, I take it back.

It's not cringe.

It's sad.

He had to sell the chateau that was.

It's like if you had a house called Chateau de Greg General.

So he has to sell his house yeah and then there's a coup in france another revolution the coup of louis napoleon 1851 absolutely where the president of france says actually i'm basically emperor now yes yes obey me from now on french history's fun isn't it

just about who's the most confident

but you know he he he used that as an excuse to kind of evade his creditors oh good

so he's on the run okay he's on the run where did he go he went to belgium excellent stay there for two years but he didn't stop his lifestyle because he was living in

luxurious lifestyle on credit over there.

Yes.

Good.

So he's got his credit card.

Yep.

Amazing.

I mean, you know, extraordinary guy.

He wouldn't have made a great sort of financial columnist or even a dating guru, but he is a great writer.

1858, he travels to Russia.

He did.

He even traveled to Russia.

He made another investment.

He bought

a small boat that he called Emma.

He landed in Genoa.

He learned that Garibaldi was trying to unite Italy, so he's involved in politics again.

So this is Risorgimento, this is the unification of Italy.

Absolutely.

He's getting involved in other people's politics.

He's saying, well, let me help.

Let me stay and help.

Because he's like on the run, but he can't stay away in front of me.

Like, the action.

He cannot.

I've never seen someone on the run just like meeting different leaders.

Yeah, just showing up to royal weddings and just like, oh, there's an Italian civil war, so I'm just going help help out.

So he's got five thousand,

he's got five thousand francs being given to him by Garibaldi to carry soldiers on his new yacht that he's just built.

Oh, he gave money.

Okay, he gave money.

In exchange kind of return, they gave him um the king's summer residence in Naples.

Well, he spent a few years there.

Yep.

And he returned to Paris in 1864.

Great.

I I'm fascinated by this guy.

Yeah.

I don't know if I like him.

I can't figure it out.

Yeah, I can't figure out if I like the guy.

There's a roguish charm.

Yeah.

But yes,

on the run from his creditors,

that's one thing.

It's so funny how many times he's been on the run.

It's just like every few minutes, that's like the chorus in all of this.

And now he's on the run again.

It's a callback.

I mean, we need to talk very quickly, Olivet, about the end of his life.

I mean, we could do so many podcasts on his writing career.

But the end of his life, ill health caught up with him, didn't it?

Yes, I mean, he had an illness, possibly dropsy.

He ran into financial difficulties, and eventually he died on the 5th of December 1870 in his son's home.

It would take the French state over a hundred years to recognize him as a literary figure, but almost as a state person, because his remains were transferred to the Panthéon

in 2002.

His popularity grew, but his importance as a national figure

came much later.

Gotcha.

And dropsy, we should say, I think, is an illness where you have swelling of the body.

It's not very nice.

So he was quite poorly ended his life.

He just missed the Franco-Prussian War I think.

He just missed the invasion of France by the Prussian army.

So he so nearly got another bit of history

in there, but he just missed it, I think.

So it's quite the life, Celia.

Yeah, how old was he when he died?

He died in 1873 to be about 67, give or take.

That's quite a long life.

Yeah, he saw some stuff.

Do you know what the problem is is that you've now started a thing where I feel like I just don't know enough so I'm gonna go home and just read his whole Wikipedia page.

I thought does it resonate with you?

I mean his his life are there things that resonate with him yeah I think there's like there's quite a few things in it that like you're flicking through your notebook you've got quite a lot of notes there I've got so so many notes about like from the street of the boy I fancy there we go to an entire man

the nuance window

it's time now for the nuance window.

This is where Celia and I sit quietly for two minutes and make a start on reading The Count of Monte Cristo while Professor Olivet steps into the literary salon to tell us something we need to know about Alexandre Dumas.

So my stopwatch is ready, Olivet.

Take it away.

I like to talk about Dumas and prejudice against people of African descent in the 19th century, and in particular how life was like for Dumas.

He was the son of a minor aristocrat and the descendant of an enslaved person.

The first point is that it wasn't unusual at all.

Throughout the 18th and 19th century, we have a number of people of African descent from aristocratic families across Europe.

However, the way they were treated depended on whether they were wealthy and protected by the country's leaders or not.

Alexandre was attacked because of his ethnic background, but in many ways he was also protected by his class and his father's reputation as a respected general.

He was not wealthy enough to just be a man of leisure, as we have seen, but he made a very decent life with his writings and could afford to live in very bourgeois houses in and outside Paris.

However, racism against him was evident in many ways.

His popularity with readers and theatre goers made him very well known as a literary figure.

In other words, he was a celeb in the 19th century.

He was the symbol of what white middle and upper class France dreaded, a racially ambiguous man whose identity crossed several boundaries, especially at a time when so-called racial purity was advocated by the fathers of eugenics and race science.

It was also the time when the French Parliament voted for an act abolishing slavery, and that was in 1848.

We have the government expecting and demanding actually former enslaved people forget about centuries of discrimination, as they had officially been granted citizenship, and that was very important.

They were expected to get on with the order of things, for example, the white men on top of the social and cultural ladder, and them at the bottom, in other words, except to be officially accept to be second-class citizens and forget about the past almost overnight.

So, behind the prolific author and love interest,

we should also bear in mind that Alexandre Dumas was a dual heritage man who had to navigate a cruel and profoundly racist society.

He did it with panache and charm.

Amazing, Olivet, thank you so much.

Celia, any thoughts?

No.

What if it said it all?

Yeah, I could listened to you talk for like an hour.

It resonates with French society, though.

Yeah.

That where you have to, as a dual heritage, you have to be always charming, otherwise

it just doesn't work.

One thing that I was thinking about, is sorry to interrupt you, is the report to class.

Because in my experience in France, obviously there's quite a lot of racism in France, but we'll talk about racism but not classism in France.

That's my experience.

And like, I think that the position that he was in where he could be be in with the higher societies because of his dad but like still be a biracial man and suffering from that do you know i mean like the the yeah it must have been quite a confusing place to be in for him like and quite like heartbreaking at times to kind of like be sitting at the top with all of these generals but still being made to feel small because of the rampant racism if that makes sense like absolutely that must have been really difficult you know you said that you don't know if you like him you see yeah there's something there yeah you're coming around to him amazing so what do you now

great it's time now for the so what do you know now this is our quickfire quiz for selia to see how much she has learned selia are you feeling confident you've taken many notes i've taken so many notes but most of them are little drawings

oh and for some reason the 2002 has been written a million times so we'll see i'm excited okay okay i'm excited lovely okay well we've got ten questions we'll start question one here we go question one What was Dumas's father's occupation?

He was a general.

He was.

He was a general in Napoleon's army.

Question two.

How did a young Alexandre Dumas avoid becoming a priest?

He ran away and took a sausage and ate some bread into the woods.

He did, very good.

Question three, what did the king tell Dumas to do after the July 1830 revolution?

That's when he was sassy, right?

Yeah.

I think he said, like, give up.

Don't do this, queen.

He was very sassy.

He told me to give up.

He said, yeah, stick to poetry, don't do the army stuff.

Yeah, that's right.

Question four: In what literary medium did Dumas first make his name?

Oh, that was plays.

It was thes.

But he was working with another guy at first, and then he was bad, like when he started working by himself.

Well done, well remembered.

Question five: Can you name two of the countries that Alexandre Dumas traveled to on his many adventures?

Belgium and Russia.

Very good, yeah, good about Algeria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland.

Yeah, he got around.

Question six: How many children did Alexander Dumas claim to have?

500 children, children, 40 mistresses.

One guy.

Question seven.

Who was Dumas' most famous son who he apparently shared mistresses with?

Oh, that's the

Fies.

And he wrote a book and he was also a writer.

He was, yeah, La Dame a la Camille.

La Dame de Camille.

Yeah, that's good.

It's a lovely one.

That's good.

You're doing very well.

Question eight.

Can you name two of Dumas's novels?

Comte de Monte Cristo.

Beautiful.

And of course, how could I forget about Lorraine Mago?

Excellent, well done.

You could have had Le Captain Paul, Georges, and Three Musketeers' Romances, which are sort of several novels.

They're very big.

Question nine: What was the name of the opulent chateau Dumas built for himself using his writing income?

Chateau de Monte Cristo.

That was the bell when you got.

Oh, we should have a Dumas musical.

That'd be great, wouldn't it?

And this for a perfect 10 out of 10.

And I feel like you might get this one right because you wrote it several times.

In what year was Dumas reburied in the Panthéon in Paris?

2002.

10 out of 10 Celia AB.

Well done.

Thank you everyone.

You are the Dumas expert.

Thank you Olivette for a wonderful history lesson.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you so much Olivette.

Thank you so much Celia and if you want more Professor Olivette listener check out episode on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

We've also got episodes on the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon, Catherine de Medici and of course episodes on Josephine Baker who was also buried in the Panthéon.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with friends.

I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests.

In History Corner, we have the outstanding Professor Olivet Odele from SOAS, University of London.

Thank you, Olivette.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's been a great day.

Thank you, Celia.

And in Comedy Corner, we have the superb Celia A.B.

Thank you, Celia.

Thank you so much for having me.

That was so fun.

It was fun.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we turn the pages of another forgotten historical epic.

But for now, I'm about to go and rename my daughter, Greg Jenna Fi, and encourage her to write history books for kids so I get to be rich and build a castle called the Chateau de Greg Jenna.

Bye!

Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

From BBC Radio 4.

The Russians will be launching a satellite sometime in the next three weeks.

I'm Kim Cottrell, back with a new series of Central Intelligence.

This is a CIA Covert Op top secret.

The drama podcast that tells the history of the CIA from the inside out.

Starring Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn, and me, Kim Cottrow.

Ms.

Page, such a pleasure to meet a real American.

Listen to Central Intelligence Series 2 first on BBC Sounds.

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