The original Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762, the son of â??Antoine Alexandre de lâ??Isle,â? in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Antoine was a nobleman in hiding from his family and from the law, and he fathered the boy with a black slave. Later Antoine would discard his alias and reclaim his real name and titleâ??Alexandre Antoine Davy, the Marquis de la Pailleterieâ??and bring his black son across the ocean to live in pomp and luxury near Paris. But the boy would reject his fatherâ??s name, along with his noble title. He would enlist in the French army at the lowest rank, taking the surname â??Dumasâ? from his mother for his enlistment papers. Once heâ??d risen by his merits to higher rank he would not even sign his name â??Alexandre,â? preferring the blunt and simple form â??Alex Dumas.â?
Alex Dumas was a consummate warrior and a man of great conviction and moral courage. He was renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery, and his knack for pulling victory out of the toughest situations. But he was known, too, for his profane back talk and his problems with authority. He was a soldierâ??s general, feared by the enemy and loved by his men, a hero in a world that did not use the term lightly.
But then, by the wiles of conspiracy, he found himself imprisoned in a fortress and poisoned by unknown enemies, without hope of appeal and forgotten by the world. It was no accident that his fate sounds like that of a young sailor named Edmond Dantès, about to embark on a promising career and marry the woman he loves, who finds himself a pawn in a plot he never imagined, locked away without witnesses or trial in the dungeon of an island fortress called the Château dâ??If. But unlike the hero of his sonâ??s novel The Count of Monte Cristo, Alex Dumas met no benefactor in the dungeon to lead him to escape or to a hidden treasure. He never learned the reason for his trials, for his abrupt descent from glory to suffering. I had come to Villers-Cotterêts to find the truth of what befell this most passionate defender of â??liberty, equality, and fraternity.â?
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