A dark family past

Like the Dombeys, Pitts, Amises et al, les Dumas are famously père et fils, but there was of course also a grand-père, Thomas-Alexandre, or ‘Alex’ the first, who was a wildly romantic figure, a gallant and tragic hero, and the defining influence on his son’s life and work.

In his memoirs, of which he devotes more than 200 pages to his father’s life, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo, (Dumas père) remembers how, one night in 1806, when he was not yet four, he was woken with news of his father’s death: ‘taken by God’. He asked where God lived: heaven. Soon afterwards his mother found him with one of his father’s guns. He explained that he was going to heaven, ‘to kill God, who killed Papa’.

A boyhood memory of reading that passage has inspired Tom Reiss, an American journalist, to write The Black Count. Reiss began by making an appointment with the custodian of the Dumas museum at Villers-Cotterêts in Picardy, but arrived to find that she had died, leaving the papers he wished to see in a safe, with no combination. A cash donation of €2,000 to the Alexandre Dumas Memorial Safe Fund persuaded the deputy mayor of Villers-Cotterêts to permit a locksmith to open the safe, and though the first of many biographies was published in 1797, Reiss assures us that his is the first to be based on Dumas’ own papers.

The son of an aristocratic rogue and a black slave, ‘Alex’ was born in 1762, on the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), where slaves were known as ‘pieces of India’. To fund his passage home to France, the rogue sold his lovers and children, but out of fondness for Thomas-Alexandre sold him only ‘conditionally, with the right of redemption’ — pawned him, in other words — and when he succeeded to a marquisate he redeemed the lad and sent him to school in Paris.