Tea at Trianon: Meet Alexandre Dumas

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 3, 2022

Meet Alexandre Dumas

From Medium:

He was a prolific writer, publishing more than 100,000 pages in his lifetime across a wide variety of subjects and genres. He is best known for his adventure novels, which used a heavily fictionalized version of French history as the basis for their plots. Among the best known are The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Twenty Years After (1845), Queen Margot (1845), and The Man in the Iron Mask (1847). All have been made into successful films (some multiple times) and have been a part of popular culture for over 150 years.
Though he was a prolific writer who earned a huge amount of money, Dumas was often on the verge of bankruptcy, at least in part because of his free spending on his many mistresses; some scholars estimate that he had as many as forty during his lifetime. In this he was again like Dickens, who wrote feverishly in order to support two separate families, with his wife in one house and his mistress in another.
In 1851, both to escape his creditors and a disapproving new French regime, Dumas moved to Belgium. In 1859 he moved again, this time to Russia, where his novels were hugely popular. From 1861 to 1864 he joined the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi in the movement for Italian unification, founding a newspaper while in Italy. Upon his return to Paris, he wrote several well-received travel books about Italy (yet another thing he had in common with Dickens, who wrote the travelogue Pictures from Italy in 1846).
Dumas died on December 5, 1870, the same year as Dickens. Like Dickens, he left a literary legacy rarely equaled. Also like Dickens, he is not read as widely today as he should be. The language of his novels is a bit flowery at times, something common in all novels of the time that only ended with Hemingway and the Modernist movement in the 1920s. You should still read them, as they are swashbuckling page-turners with just the right amount of romance. (Read more.)