Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas born into poverty in 1802. Complicating his life was his African ancestry which gave rise to much racist behaviour against him despite being seven eighths French. Raised by his mother after his Fathers death by age 4 he was a voracious reader. At age 20, with the restoration of the French Monarchy he went to Paris to attend on...

The book is considered a literary classic today. According to Luc Sante, "The Count of Monte Cristo has become a fixture of Western civilisation's literature, as inescapable and immediately identifiable as Mickey Mouse, Noah's flood, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood. (Wikipedia)

The Queen's Necklace dramatises an unsavoury incident in the 1780s at the court of King Louis XVI of France involving the King's wife, Marie Antoinette. Her reputation was already tarnished by gossip and scandal, and her implication in a crime involving a stolen necklace became one of the major turning-points of public opinion against the monarchy,...

Excerpt: "It was a winter night, and the ground around Paris was covered with snow, although the flakes had ceased to fall since some hours. Spite of the cold and the darkness, a young man, wrapped in a mantle so voluminous as to hide a babe in his arms, strode over the white fields out of the town of Villers Cotterets, in the woods, eighteen...

The Conspirators (original French title: Le chevalier d'Harmental) is a novel written by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet, published in 1843. Dumas reworked a preliminary version by Maquet; this was the beginning of their collaboration which was to produce eighteen novels and many plays.[1] The dramatisation of the novel – in five acts, a...

The Vicomte de Bragelonne opens an epic adventure which continues with Louise de La Valliere and reaches its climax in The Man in the Iron Mask. As the third instalment of the d'Artagnan Romances, this book serves as a transition from the notorious three musketeers and their Gascon friend to the lives of other French and English characters - youth...

Margaret of Valois (French: Marguerite, 14 May 1553 – 27 March 1615) was a French princess of the Valois dynasty who became queen consort of Navarre and later also of France. By her marriage to Henry III of Navarre (later Henry IV of France), she was queen of Navarre and then France at her husband's 1589 accession to the latter throne. Their...

Dumas constructs the plot around the notion that the Man in the Iron Mask is the twin brother of Louis XIV, Philippe, who had been concealed and imprisoned from birth by his father, Louis XIII, and his mother, Anne of Austria, "for the good of France". Only a very few people living at the start of the novel know of Philippe's existence; these...

A sequel of sorts to La Reine Margot, this is another classic romantic adventure set against the political in-fighting between Henri III and his brother Duc d'Anjou, as well as the religious wars that raged in the 16th century in France, spearheaded here by the dashing Henri de Guise, Le Balafré. (Excerpt from Goodreads)

"The War of Women" is an 1845 novel by Alexandre Dumas. Set during the Fronde, the novel tells the story of naive Gascon soldier, Baron des Canolles, who is torn between love for two women.