Enlisting as a private in the Queen’s Dragoons at age 24, he changed his name to Dumas, his slave mother’s maiden name. The general’s own father pawned the boy and took him to Paris to make a gentleman of him. His novelist son paid homage to his father’s legendary stature, manliness, athletic prowess and bravery in his best-known protagonists-e.g., Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo and the swashbuckling D’Artagnon in The Three Musketeers. Taken prisoner on the way back from Egypt, his health was ruined after two years' imprisonment in Italy. Born to an aristocratic French father and a slave mother in Saint-Domingue, Dumas became a general in the French Revolution and served under Napoleon, by turns lauded as a hero and vilified as a black insurgent. Dumas’ final residence and the military archives at the Chateau de Vincennes, the author provides a vivid sense of who Dumas was and how he attained such heights and fell so low after the French Revolution, being nearly forgotten by the time of his death in 1806. A compelling new work by literary detective Reiss ( The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, 2005) tracks the wildly improbable career of Alexandre Dumas’ mixed-race father.
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