The New
York Times reported on October 9, 1860, that
“…All
travelers, and particularly all lovers of
archaeological researches, will be rejoiced to learn
that Pompeii and Herculaneum have fallen into the
hands of Alexander Dumas, and that he has the
authority to reveal their beauties to the world.”
(Late 1860 was a turbulent time for Naples; Garibaldi had taken the city and kingdom in September, and the final battle against the Bourbons at the siege of Gaeta would begin in November.) Indeed, Dumas had been awarded the cultural plum of Director of Antiquities—including the directorship of the National Museum—by his good friend, Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Wait.
Which Dumas are we talking about here? Answer: Alexandre
Dumas, père (French for "father"—thus, Sr. or “the
elder”) (1802-1870), the author of such popular historical
adventure novels as The Count of Monte Cristo and
The Three Musketeers, as well as hundreds of other
novels, non-fiction books, and magazine articles. His
novels are still very popular, and he is one of the most
widely read French writers of all time.*
(*Père is to be distinguished from his son, Alexandre Dumas, fils, the popular playwright, famous for, among other works, the 1848 novel, La dame aux camélias (Camille or The Lady of the Camellias). Verdi's opera, La Traviata, with libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, was based on that novel.)
The
elder Dumas had quite an interest in Naples. He first
visited the city and kingdom in 1835. He came in on a
false passport under the name of "Guichard" in order to
avoid recognition; not only was he already a well-known
author, but he was considered by the Bourbon rulers of
Naples somewhat of a subversive because of his
participation in 1830 in the revolution that had
overthrown Bourbon cousin Charles X from the throne of
France. Dumas’ state of incognito in Naples lasted
about two weeks before someone ratted him out. He was
expelled.
Dumas was
certainly one of Europe’s great graphomaniacs. His two
weeks in Naples sufficed (although he may have had help
from his famous team of researchers and ghost writers) to
crank out in serial form in France between 1841-44 a
500-page book about Naples called Le Corricolo.
The corricolo,
explains Dumas in the introduction, is similar to the
English “Tilbury,” a light, open two-wheeled carriage
drawn by one horse and able to carry two persons, but in
Naples it’s usually 15 persons and this is just the way to
get around and see all the sights—good fun! Indeed, The
Corricolo was a delightful hodge-podge of the sights
of Naples plus a good dose of tradition, culture and
recent political history (such as the section dedicated to
the late king, Ferdinand IV, the Re
Nasone). Before The Corricolo came
out, Dumas had already published a multi-volume series on
800 (sic—he liked to write) famous crimes in history,
incorporating Naples’ own and infamous Joan I from the 1300s.
Alexandre
Dumas, père
Dumas’
dislike for Bourbon monarchies (whether French or the
Neapolitan version on whom he blamed the death of his
father) crops up much later in 1860. By this time, Dumas
was outrageously famous and decided to put his outrageous
fame at the disposal of Mr. Swashbuckle, himself, Giuseppe
Garibaldi, a character whom Dumas would have been forced
to invent for one of his many adventure novels had he
(Dumas) not already met him (Garibaldi) and found out that
such persons really do exist. Dumas gathered up one of his
many young lady friends and sailed his yacht, the Emma,
down to Sicily to join Garibaldi’s famous One Thousand on
their way to oust the Bourbons of Naples and unite Italy.
By then, Dumas was 58 years old and out-girthed (photo),
yea, even the heftiest swashbuckle in the armory, but he
and Garibaldi hit it off, so Dumas sailed back to
Marseilles to pick up weapons for Garibaldi. He became a
gun-runner for the invasion! That invasion was successful
and Dumas was given his plush job at the museum and a
beautiful home, an ex-royal casina (small house) in the Chiatamone
section of Naples. (That building was torn down in 1921
—amid protest, by the way— but a street near the Castel dell’Ovo is still called via Alessandro Dumas)
Dumas started his own newspaper in Naples called L’independente. (Benedetto Croce later called the journal “more Garibaldian than Garibaldi.”) Interestingly, Dumas had been in favor of an Italian confederation of sorts between north and south and spoke out against the outright annexation of the Kingdom of Naples by the north. This prompted some hostile reaction in Naples, but the paper survived and even did well for a while.
During
this, his second stay in Naples, Dumas published The
Memoirs of Garibaldi as well as his own Sanfelice,
a novel based on the Neapolitan
Republic of 1799. He also wrote The Bourbons of
Naples, a history of the deposed dynasty in which
Dumas claims to avail himself of recently discovered
documents in the archives of Naples. As part of his
cultural duties, Dumas then took Garibaldi up on the
challenge of writing a new work describing the history,
archaeology and culture of Naples and environs. Thus
appeared Naples et ses provinces, serialized first
in France in Le Monde in 1861; it was published
two years later in serial form in Dumas’ own L’independente
in Naples. At the same time, he squeezed in his Travel Impression: in
Russia, based on the two years he had spent there
in the late 1850s. The book contains a splendid tribute to
Pushkin.
Dumas
left Naples in 1864 and died in France in 1870. In
2002, his remains were removed from the cemetery in his
home town of Villers-Cotterêts in northern France to the
Panthéon in Paris to rest with the likes of Voltaire and
Victor Hugo. It took a while for Dumas to receive that
honor, some say, because of racial discrimination; Dumas'
paternal grandmother, Marie-Cesette Dumas, was an
Afro-Caribbean and had been a slave in Haiti. (Thus the
name Dumas is a matronymic. A. Dumas' grandfather was
Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie—a name as noble
as it was long. He let his son, Thomas-Alexander (our
Dumas' father) enlist in the French army on the condition
that he not use the real family name. This son became a
general in the army of Napoleon, and his son, our hero,
was born on July 24—the fifth of Thermidor in the tenth
year of the Republic—as "Alexander Dumas Davy de la
Pailleterie.")
In
speaking of Pushkin, Dumas might well have been writing
his own epitaph: "A poet has not only two souls but two
mothers. He goes down to one in the tomb, as Pushkin did;
but one watches over his grave with jealous care, and
desires to know how her son died; and the name of this
second mother is POSTERITY."
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