Alexandre Dumas (1802-70), or 'Dumas père' as he is sometimes known, is among the best known of all French novelists, which is hardly surprising as his key novels continue to attract a large popular audience, being adapted for popular serialization, cinema, and television.
Les Trois Mousquetaires appeared as a roman-feuilleton (serialized novel), in Le Siècle from March to July 1844, and was published in eight volumes later in the year. It is one of Dumas's truly great popular, pseudo-historical novels, whose appeal has never waned from its first appearance to the repeated revivals and adaptations in the press, cinema, and television. The names of D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis have become an integral part of world mass culture, having been initially discovered by Dumas in Courtilz de Sandras's fictionalized Mémoires de d'Artagnan (1700).
As with many of his novels, Dumas wrote Les Trois Mousquetaires in collaboration with Auguste Maquet (who provided the historical notes and sketched out the chapters). Historical accuracy was not a priority for him. Once he had set the scene for four dashing musketeers to defend Louis XIII against the manœuvres of Richelieu, Dumas was free to exploit all his talents for creating exciting and colourful narrative, held together by a sequence of duels, the ultimate of these being the conflict between D'Artagnan and the femme fatale Milady, agent of Richelieu and the repudiated wife of his friend Athos. This sexual confrontation adds a deeper and darker dimension to the novel, which culminates in the thrilling Gothic finale of Milady's execution.
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo marked a high point of the fashion for the roman-feuilleton when it appeared in Le Journal des débats between August 1844 and January 1846. It was also written in collaboration with Maquet, who again provided Dumas with chapter plans and historical and factual material. It offers a thrilling and sensational narrative of escape, social triumph, and revenge, which has retained a profound and lasting appeal in modern mass culture.
Dumas drew on his own previous revenge novel Georges and on the cause célèbre of François Picaud, who, wrongfully imprisoned under the Empire, returned after 1814 to exact violent retribution on his accusers. In Le Comte de Monte Cristo Edmond Dantès, an honest and rather naive sailor, is wrongly accused of being a conspirator by a rival for the affections of Edmond's finacée Mercedes. Imprisoned in the Château d'If, he escapes, discovers the treasure of Monte-Cristo, and returns to Paris to settle scores with Restoration society. His campaign of revenge becomes an epic conflict between good and evil, as Dantès, the agent of Providence, destroys high-society schemers and crooks. But Dantès is a rather Byronic hero and sweet revenge is complicated by a gnawing sense of guilt.
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