Alexandre Dumas fils

Alexandre Dumas
Occupation	Author, novelist, playwright
Period	Romanticism

Alexandre Dumas, fils (27 July 1824 – 27 November 1895) was a French author and dramatist. He was the son (fils) of Alexandre Dumas, père, also a writer and playwright.

Biography

Dumas was born in Paris, France, the illegitimate child of Marie-Laure-Catherine Labay (1794-1868), a dressmaker, and novelist Alexandre Dumas. In 1831 his father legally recognized him and ensured that the young Dumas received the best education possible at the Institution Goubaux and the Collège Bourbon. At that time, the law allowed the elder Dumas to take the child away from his mother. Her agony inspired Dumas fils to write about tragic female characters. In almost all of his writings, he emphasized the moral purpose of literature and in his play The Illegitimate Son (1858) he espoused the belief that if a man fathers an illegitimate child then he has an obligation to legitimize the child and marry the woman.

Dumas' paternal great-grandparents were a white French nobleman and a Haitian woman. In the boarding schools, Dumas fils was constantly taunted by his classmates. These issues all profoundly influenced his thoughts, behaviour, and writing.

In 1844 Dumas moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to live with his father. There, he met Marie Duplessis, a young courtesan who would be the inspiration for his romantic novel The Lady of the Camellias. Adapted into a play, it was titled in English (especially in the United States) as Camille and is the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, La Traviata. Although he admitted that he had done the adaptation because he needed the money, he had a huge success with the play. Thus began the career of Dumas fils as a dramatist, which not only eclipsed that of his father during his lifetime but also dominated the serious French stage for most of the second half of the 19th century. After this, he virtually abandoned the novel (though his semi-autobiographical L'Affaire Clemenceau (1867) achieved some success).

File:Paris 9-16 January, 2009 257.JPG

Tomb of Dumas fils in Montmartre Cemetery.

On 31 December 1864, Dumas married Nadjeschda von Knorring (1826 – April 1895), daughter of Johan Reinhold von Knorring and wife, and widow of Alexander, Prince Naryschkine, whom he married at Moscow and with whom he had two daughters: Marie-Alexandrine-Henriette Dumas, born 20 November 1860, who married Maurice Lippmann and was the mother of Serge Napoléon Lippmann (1886–1975) and Auguste Alexandre Lippmann (1881–1960); and Jeanine Dumas (3 May 1867–), who married Ernest d' Hauterive (1864–1957), son of George Lecourt d' Hauterive and wife (married in 1861) Léontine de Leusse. After Naryschkine's death, he married in June 1895 Henriette Régnier de La Brière (1851–1934), without issue.

In 1874, he was admitted to the Académie française and in 1894 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.

Alexandre Dumas fils died at Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, on November 27, 1895 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. His grave is, perhaps coincidentally, only some 100 metres away from that of Marie Duplessis.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Lady of the Camellias (Camille) (1848)
• L'affaire Clemenceau (The Clemenceau Case) (1867)

Opera

• Verdi's La Traviata based on the novel The Lady of the Camellias

Plays

• Atalright Fine .......................................

. Emile de Girardin

• Heloise Paranquet (1866) coll. Durentin
• Les Idees de Madame Aubray (1867)

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH BOI

• La Femme de Claude (1873)
• Monsieur Alphonse (1873)
• L'étrangère (1876)
• Les Danicheff (1876) coll. de Corvin
• La Comtesse Romani (1876) coll. Gustave Fould
• La Princesse de Bagdad (1881)
• Denise (1885)
• Francillon (1887)
• La Route de Thebes (unfinished)

References

• Maurois, André (1957). The Titans, a three-generation biography of the Dumas. trans. by Gerard Hopkins. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. OCLC 260126.
• Lewis H. D. "A Critical Edition of the Manuscripts of 'La Route de Thebes' by Alexandre Dumas fils" Doctorate, University of Leeds, 1982

External links

• Works by Alexandre Dumas, fils at Project Gutenberg

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