French Literature · 1 books
Alexandre Dumas fils was born on July 27, 1824, in Paris, and died on November 27, 1895, in Marly-le-Roi, near Paris. He was the illegitimate son of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, born to a seamstress named Marie-Catherine Labay, and his childhood was defined by the ambiguity of his status — recognized by his father in 1831 but raised outside the household, acutely aware of the social position that illegitimacy carried in nineteenth-century bourgeois France. He became one of the most successful playwrights and moralists of his time, and his single most famous work — the play La Dame aux camélias, adapted from his own novel — became, in Verdi’s operatic version as La Traviata, one of the most performed musical works in the world.
He was educated partly in Paris and partly through the efforts of his father, who, once he acknowledged him, made considerable provision for his son’s education. Alexandre fils spent time in a series of schools and institutions, some of them not conducive to happiness. He was intelligent, formed strong opinions early, and was exposed — through his father’s social world — to a Parisian culture of excess, generosity, and recklessness that he would spend his mature literary career analyzing and criticizing with a severity that sometimes surprised those who knew his father.
In his early twenties he formed a relationship with a Parisian courtesan named Marie Duplessis, a woman of striking beauty and exceptional social skill who had risen from provincial poverty to become one of the best-known figures of Parisian demi-monde society. The relationship lasted about a year, from 1844 to 1845. Marie Duplessis died of tuberculosis in February 1847, aged twenty-three. Dumas fils wrote the novel La Dame aux camélias in four weeks, and it was published in 1848. The stage adaptation, produced in 1852 after initially encountering censorship difficulties, was an immediate and enormous success. It remained in the repertoire of French theaters continuously for decades.
The novel and play tell the story of Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan who falls genuinely in love, attempts to leave her previous life, and is persuaded by her lover’s father to sacrifice the relationship for the sake of the family’s social position. She complies, suffering the consequences in silence, and dies of tuberculosis before the truth is understood. The work is sentimental in structure but precise in observation; its portrait of the specific social mechanisms that destroy the possibility of genuine feeling in a class-stratified society was recognized immediately as something more than mere melodrama. Verdi’s La Traviata, premiered in Venice in 1853, made the story universal.
Dumas fils did not rest on this success. He became a moralist — a writer of what were called pièces à thèse, thesis plays, in which social problems were examined and argued through the medium of domestic drama. The plays addressed questions that the French bourgeoisie preferred not to discuss directly: illegitimacy, divorce, the position of women in marriage, the double standard by which male sexual conduct was judged against female sexual conduct. Le Fils naturel, 1858, drew on his own experience of illegitimacy. L’Ami des femmes, 1864, examined the situation of women in unhappy marriages. Denise, 1885, returned to the question of women who had transgressed against the sexual code and sought rehabilitation.
He was elected to the Académie française in 1874, a recognition of his position as a major figure in French cultural life. He received the treatment he had made central to his own subject: he was legitimate, recognized, and fully installed in the establishment that had once judged his father’s working habits and his own birth with equal suspicion.
He married twice. His first marriage, in 1864, was to Nadejda Naryschkine, a Russian princess whom he had known for some years; she died in 1895. He married again shortly before his own death later that year.
His relationship with his father remained complicated throughout their lives. The elder Dumas was everything his son was not: expansive, financially careless, politically romantic, and constitutionally unable to sit still. The son was precise, moralistic, and deeply uncomfortable with the social contradictions his father navigated by charm. Yet they were connected, obviously and permanently, by talent, by the circumstances of the son’s birth, and by the literary world they shared.
He died on November 27, 1895, in Marly-le-Roi. His reputation declined substantially in the twentieth century, when the thesis drama fell out of fashion and the moral architecture of his plays came to seem rigid. But La Dame aux camélias has never been out of favor, in its theatrical, novelistic, and operatic forms, and it continues to demonstrate that sentiment and social analysis can occupy the same work without either destroying the other.
The trajectory of La Dame aux camélias from novel to play to opera is itself a literary-historical story worth following. The novel Dumas fils wrote in 1848 was a direct account of a personal experience, emotionally raw and structurally tight. The stage adaptation of 1852, which he wrote himself, compressed and theatricalized the story, giving it the form that Verdi then adapted. Verdi’s La Traviata, which premiered in 1853, made the story universal in a way that its literary source never quite achieved, because the operatic medium dissolved the story’s social specificity into a more absolute emotional register. The result is that the opera is now better known than the novel, and the novel is often encountered as a source text rather than as a primary work. This is an injustice worth correcting: the novel is sharper, more ironic, and more socially precise than its operatic descendant, and it rewards reading on its own terms.
His plays on social themes were taken seriously as contributions to public debate in a way that is difficult to imagine for drama today, when the theater’s role in shaping public opinion has been largely displaced by other media. The French debates in the 1870s and 1880s about divorce law, about the legal status of illegitimate children, and about the position of women who had transgressed against social norms were debates in which Dumas fils participated not as a pamphleteer but as a playwright — which meant that his arguments were felt by audiences before they were analyzed by readers, and that their emotional force preceded and shaped the intellectual response.
At Classics Retold, we have published a new translation of La Dame aux camélias — a text that has been adapted and transformed so many times that it deserves to be encountered in its original form, as the precise and moving novel Dumas fils wrote in four weeks in 1848, before the adaptations began.
