CHAPTER 9
ALEXANDRE DUMAS FILS
AN ILLEGITIMATE SON INHERITS HIS FATHER’S TALENTS—AND VICES
1824–1895
AS THE BASTARD CHILD OF A BRILLIANT, FAMOUS WRITER AND A MODEST DRESSMAKER, ALEXANDRE DUMAS FILS EXPERIENCED RIDICULE, HEARTBREAK, AND DESPAIR. TODAY, HOWEVER, HE IS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE LEADING FRENCH DRAMATISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
AT SEVEN, ALEXANDRE WAS NOT THE YOUNGEST BOY ATTENDING THE VAUNTED Institution Goubaux, near Paris, but he was the least sophisticated, and certainly the poorest. His classmates were the sons of nobles and aristocrats; they led lives of privilege and were accustomed to socializing with children, and adults, of their social class. They were also exceptionally precocious and could be cruel. The new boy in school was a convenient and attractive target. He used the wrong fork at dinner, didn’t understand their jokes, and seemed perplexed in class. His worst offense was that he was an outsider.
Alexandre was clearly different from them—from his provincial accent, to his naïveté, to his questionable parentage, to the fact that he had Haitian blood. One of the boys recognized Alexandre’s mother, Marie-Catherine Labay, when she came to visit the boy at school. It was with barely restrained glee that the boy identified Labay as his family’s seamstress. As it turned out, Labay counted many of the boys’ parents as customers. This discovery provided the bullies with even more ammunition to use against Alexandre.
Dumas fils saw himself as a preacher, a man charged with showing society the error of its ways. His plays focused on morality, yet Dumas fils fathered an illegitimate child with another man’s wife. Alexandre Dumas Fils (1824-95) in his study (b/w photo), French Photographer, (19th century) / Private Collection / Ken Welsh / The Bridgeman Art Library International
Labay had been supporting the boy to the best of her abilities when his wayward father, Alexandre Dumas, reappeared in their lives, years after abandoning them. One of the most celebrated authors in Europe, Dumas père was a man with an outsized personality. He began his career as a playwright, and was an integral part of the theater scene, writing and producing plays, dating leading ladies, and founding the Théâtre Historique in Paris, a venue that ultimately left Dumas bankrupt. He then immersed himself in fiction, writing a series of novels that followed the exploits of a musketeer named d’Artagnan. The first of these, the wildly popular The Three Musketeers, dazzled readers and established him as a master storyteller. The sequels, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, were enormous successes. His position in Parisian literary circles was elevated further by a string of successful plays he penned, including Henri III et Sa Cour and Antony, which were beloved by theater audiences and critics alike.
Dumas awoke one day and decided to claim Alexandre as his son. He feared losing his namesake and petitioned the court for custody. Labay, unmarried, poor, and without powerful contacts, opposed Dumas in court and lost. Despite the fact that Dumas had turned his back on his son when the boy was an infant, Dumas was awarded custody in the spring of 1831. Labay was devastated. Dumas, in an act of cruelty, forbade the boy from seeing his mother. He then immediately enrolled the seven-year-old in boarding school. Dumas did not take into consideration the impact such an upheaval would have on his son, who was until that time a sheltered, provincial, poverty-stricken young boy. The results were disastrous.
ONE OF THE BOYS RECOGNIZED ALEXANDRE’S MOTHER, MARIE-CATHERINE LABAY, WHEN SHE CAME TO VISIT THE BOY AT SCHOOL. IT WAS WITH BARELY RESTRAINED GLEE THAT THE BOY IDENTIFIED LABAY AS HIS FAMILY’S SEAMSTRESS.
The students at Institution Goubaux taunted Alexandre mercilessly, hiding his books, tripping him in the hallway, stealing his food at mealtimes, and scribbling obscenities about his mother in their notebooks. The latest assault had been verbal. Laughing, the boys called him names—including a word he had never heard. Alexandre holed up inside an empty classroom. There he sat, crossed-legged on the cold floor with the heavy, leather-bound dictionary pilfered from the library perched on his lap. He browsed through the book until he found what he was looking for. It stared up at him, silently, from the yellowed pages: bastard. According to the dictionary, the word described a “natural” child, one who was born out of wedlock. The seven-year-old read the definition over and over. He knew his parents were not married, but he did not know, until that moment, that there was a name for what he, Alexandre, was. He remained in the empty room for a good hour, emerging, dazed and red-eyed, during dinner. A prefect ushered him into the dining room. Alexandre merely toyed with his food, unable to summon an appetite.
“My father is a great baby, of mine—born when I was quite a little child,” Dumas fils said of the senior Dumas, a charismatic, colorful, larger-than-life figure who spent much of his life fleeing creditors and spurned lovers. akg-images
Alexandre was miserable and missed his mother terribly during his time at the Institute. He sometimes cried himself to sleep at night, pushing his face into his pillow to prevent his roommates from hearing him. He dreamed about returning home to his mother, where he felt safe and happy. He knew his absence pained his mother, and that she was desperately trying to regain custody of him.
For many years, Alexandre resented his father for whisking him away from Labay—and for leaving her for another woman after she gave birth to him. Although the two men would later become close, Alexandre admitted that he never truly forgave his father for the cruelty he unleashed on Labay. Dumas père’s actions were inexplicable. He was not a vengeful man by nature, but he had a tremendous ego and viewed Alexandre as an extension of himself, as his creation. His conceit seems to have inured him to Labay’s suffering.
THE HEIR TO A LITERARY LEGEND
Alexandre Dumas II, also known as Alexandre Dumas fils, was born in Paris, France, on July 27, 1824. His father—often called Alexandre Dumas père—was a handsome, magnetic, womanizing raconteur, with laughing blue eyes who would go on to become a literary giant. The senior Dumas was the son of a general in Napoleon’s army and the daughter of an innkeeper. His paternal grandmother was African, a Haitian slave, making Dumas one-quarter black.
Alexandre’s mother was a Belgian dressmaker. Fair-skinned and slightly plump, she was a simple, uneducated, warm woman. Nothing is known about her parents, and it appears that she herself was born out of wedlock. To explain the existence of her son, Labay told people that she had been married to an unstable man from whom she had fled. For a brief time, Dumas lived with Labay and the infant Alexandre. However, the writer balked at the idea of monogamy. Unable to adjust to domestic life, he quickly moved on, leaving his family and taking up with another woman. It was a pattern that Dumas would repeat many times in his life. Labay was heartbroken and did her best to raise Alexandre on her own. She was shocked and devastated when Dumas showed up out of the blue and claimed the boy.
In boarding school, the previously robust, cheerful Alexandre became sickly and cynical, and he was plagued by headaches and fits of anxiety. He worried constantly about his mother and obsessed about punishing his father for mistreating her. Being ostracized by his classmates further added to his distress. He got into frequent scuffles defending his mother’s honor—and his own.
“One thought he had the right to point the finger of scorn at my poverty because he was rich; another to laugh at my hardworking mother because his own parents led a life of leisure; a third to mock me as a working-class boy, because he had a noble father; yet another to despise me because I had no father, whereas he, perhaps, had two,” he later commented.
The experience left deep emotional scars, and Alexandre said that his mind “had never wholly recovered its balance.” It was at boarding school that he learned how unfair the world could be. It was a lesson that informed and shaped much of his work. As an adult he remarked, “[T]he bitterness which I felt in those days has never been entirely at rest, even in the happiest days of my life.”
The teenaged Dumas left boarding school and went to live with his
father and his father’s new wife, actress Ida Ferrier. Alexandre was furious over their union. Previously, Dumas had eschewed marriage, leaving Alexandre’s mother in a perpetual state of disgrace. “I wonder whether the man who reduced her to the position of a poor, unmarried mother, forced her to provide unaided for the needs of his child, ever realized what he was doing?” Alexandre wrote. If his father wanted to marry, he owed it to Labay to marry her.
Alexandre was not the only one who was surprised when Ida snared the notoriously footloose Dumas. The writer was attached to Ida but did not seem particularly enamored with her. Rumors spread that Ida earned this Don Juan’s gratitude by bailing him out of a financial jam. Alexandre and his stepmother clashed often. Caught in the middle, the elder Dumas sided with Ida.
Catherine Labay was heartbroken when Alexandre Dumas was awarded legal custody of their son. Although Dumas had abandoned Labay and the child years earlier, the French court decided the case in his favor. akg-images / Gilles Mermet
Although Dumas fils disapproved of his father’s bohemian lifestyle, he was extremely fond of the man, and impressed by his literary accomplishments. In turn, Dumas pére was a proud father who loved to boast about his son’s successes. Journey from Paris to Cadiz, 1846 (oil on canvas), Giraud, Eugene (1806-81) / Musee de la Ville de Paris, Musee Carnavalet, Paris, France / The Bridgeman Art Library International
“It is not my fault, but yours, that the relationship between us is no longer father and son,” Dumas wrote in a letter to Alexandre. “You came to my house where you were well received by everyone, and then, suddenly, acting on whose advice I do not know, decided to no longer recognize the lady who I regarded as my wife.”
FRIENDSHIP … AND FORGIVENESS
Father and son remained cordial but distant until 1844, when Dumas and Ida separated. Alexandre, then twenty, moved in with his father in Saint-Germainen-Laye, some 20 miles (32 km) from Paris. The two became the best of friends and were nearly inseparable. They were frequently seen together in the trendiest Parisian salons and restaurants. The father often introduced Alexandre as his “finest work.” He told him, “[W]hen you, too, have a son, love him as I love you, but do not bring him up as I have brought up you.”
THE FATHER OFTEN INTRODUCED ALEXANDRE AS HIS “FINEST WORK.” HE TOLD ALEXANDRE, “[W]HEN YOU, TOO, HAVE A SON, LOVE HIM AS I LOVE YOU, BUT DO NOT BRING HIM UP AS I HAVE BROUGHT UP YOU.”
Dumas had grown wider, Alexandre, taller. The son had auburn hair and pleasant features. He dressed well and presented a fine figure. It was the elder Dumas, however, who received the most attention. Dumas was at the height of his career; a celebrity in Europe, he was received by French royalty. Alexandre had matured and come to accept his father for the brilliant, charming, and flawed individual that he was. He adored his father, but he loathed his propensity for boasting, his often-boorish behavior, and his inability to manage his finances. Dumas père went through money like water and was perpetually in debt, despite the fortunes he made off his books and plays. “If he does not supply me with a good example,” Alexandre quipped, “he gives me a good excuse.”
Writer and confidante George Sand sympathized with Alexandre. “He needs a life of excesses if he is to keep the enormous blaze going,” she wrote in a letter to Alexandre. “You will never change him, and you will always have to carry a double weight of glory, yours and his: yours with all its fruits, his with all its thorns. What do you expect? He has engendered your great gifts, and feels that he has discharged his duty to you … It is not a little hard and difficult, at times, to be one’s father’s father.”
Larger than life, the senior Dumas was a force of nature, as enchanting as a sun shower, and as destructive as a hurricane. “He is at one and the same time, frank and dissembling,” explained a countess who knew him. “There is no falsity in him. He very often lies, but he does not know that he is lying. He begins (as we all do) by telling some necessary, some careless untruth. He retells some apocryphal story. A week later, both the story and untruth have become, for him, the truth. He is no longer lying, but believes implicitly in the accuracy of what he has been saying. He persuades himself, and so persuades other people.”
Although the two Dumas men enjoyed each other’s company, they were very different. Alexandre, remarked the same woman, “is, primarily, a man with a sense of responsibilities. He is scrupulous about fulfilling them. You will not find in him the warm expansiveness, which is characteristic of his father. His childhood was tempestuous … His great defect is disenchantment, which is in him, the bitter fruit of experience.”
HIGH DRAMA—ONSTAGE AND IN REAL LIFE
Alexandre’s first novel, La Dame aux Camellias, The Lady of the Camellias, was based on his passionate, tragic love affair with Marie Duplessis, a Parisian courtesan renowned for her beauty. Duplessis succumbed to tuberculosis a year after Alexandre broke with her. Filled with regret over ending the relationship, Alexandre was planning to beg Duplessis to take him back when he learned that she had died. He channeled his disillusion and heartbreak into a novel. Later, he adapted the novel for the stage, in the hopes of earning enough money to pay his—and his father’s—bills. The play, which inspired Verdi’s La Traviata, was a tremendous success; it launched Alexandre Dumas fils’s career as a dramatist. French critic Théophile Gautier praised the play, noting in a review, “One is conscious, throughout, of a new and fresh mind at work, of a wit which does not hoard up its best sallies in a notebook for use when the right moment comes.” The money Alexandre earned from the play allowed him to move his mother into a better apartment.
Alexandre was much more introspective, cynical, and brooding than his father. He was also deeply concerned about social mores and morality—a concern he was unable to reconcile with his personal life. He railed against adultery, yet engaged in a number of illicit affairs. He championed the family unit, yet ran off with another man’s wife. He pitied abandoned, unwed mothers, and their unfortunate offspring, yet he fathered a child with a married woman.
Whereas Dumas père willingly, and unrepentantly, submitted to vice, Alexandre did so begrudgingly. But he submitted nevertheless, making his later works startling for their hypocrisy. The older Alexandre got, the less tolerant he grew of his father’s many indiscretions and scandals. Dumas père fled France to avoid his many creditors. Dumas fils was left to settle his father’s accounts. “My father is a great baby, of mine—born when I was quite a little child,” Alexandre told friends.
“MY FATHER IS A GREAT BABY, OF MINE—BORN WHEN I WAS QUITE A LITTLE CHILD,” ALEXANDRE TOLD FRIENDS.
Alexandre was obsessed with sexual ethics and the status of illegitimate children—obsessions obviously born of his own life. Taunted as a boy for being a “bastard,” Dumas fils was unable to move past the circumstances of his birth, even as society embraced and showered him with accolades. His wealth and success surpassed that of many of his early tormentors, but Alexandre remained, very much, their victim. He was also a victim of his own moral weakness; an irony, given his foray into moralizing. Alexandre argued that female honor was a property, and as such merited legal protection. He encouraged the state to make wayward fathers claim and support their children. Oddly, the man who felt such compassion for his mother was a sexist, whose views often bordered on misogyny. Women were inferior creatures who must bend to the will of men. “Man can do nothing without God; woman can do nothing without man,” he contended.
Dumas fils’s self-righteousness increased with each year of his life. He came to see himself as a preacher, a man who must show an immoral society the error of its ways. “We are lost unless we hasten to place this great art in the service of important social reforms and the high hopes of the soul,” he said of drama. “Let us inaugurate, therefore, the useful theatre at the risk of hearing an outcry from the apostles of art for art, three words absolutely devoid of meaning.”
The senior Alexandre Dumas was nearly as famous for his romantic exploits as he was for penning popular hi
gh adventure novels such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. ©Photo12 / The Image Works
Produced in 1853, his play Diane de Lys centers on a love triangle that ends with a wronged husband killing his wife’s lover. Le Demi-Monde is populated with promiscuous, repentant women who attempt unsuccessfully to rehabilitate themselves through marriage. Un Père Prodigue follows the corruption of a son by his father. Le Fils Naturel hews most closely to Alexandre’s real life. In this 1858 play, an illegitimate son tries to convince his reluctant father to give him his name. His later works were filled with characters whose immorality brings about ruin, despair, and occasionally death. Writer Gustave Flaubert objected to Dumas fils’s constant moralizing, complaining, “What’s his purpose? Does he want to change human nature, write good plays, or become a Deputy?”
In the winter of 1864, Alexandre married his mistress, Nadeja Naryschkine. A Russian princess, Naryschkine left her husband—and country—to live with Dumas fils. When her husband died, she was able to remarry. Together, she and Alexandre had two daughters, Marie-Alexandrine-Henriette Dumas, born out of wedlock, and Jeanine Dumas, born in 1867. While still married, Alexandre began an affair with a woman named Henriette Régnier. Like Naryschkine, Régnier left her husband for Alexandre. After his wife’s death on June 26, 1895, Alexandre married Régnier, who had waited patiently for him for eight years.
Despite his cynicism, Dumas fils never gave up hope of uniting his parents. His mother remained single and lived alone with a servant in a comfortable house. His father was broke and ill but still a dynamic personality. Dumas père, now divorced, was not adverse to the idea of reuniting with Labay. Labay, however, dismissed the idea, telling a friend, “I am over seventy. I am always ailing, and live simply with one servant. Monsieur Dumas would blow my small flat to smithereens. It is forty years too late.” She died four years later in 1868. Dumas père died two years later, after a prolonged illness.
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