Alexandre Dumas, fils

From Philosopedia

Alexandre Dumas, fils (27 July 1824 - 27 November 1895)

The chief creator of the 19th century comedy of manners, Dumas wrote La Dame aux camélias (Camille, 1848), which became a sensation. Verdi adapted it.

Dumas was the bastard son of a bi-racial father, Dumas père, who died a Catholic. His paternal great-grandparents were a white French nobleman and a young black Haitian woman, something about which his classmates taunted him.

Dumas fils may or may not have been a philosophic naturalist, but he earned the enmity of the Vatican, which included in its Index of Prohibited Books all his novels as well as, in 1880, La question du divorce.

He thought there should be a revolt against romantic morality, he exposed excesses of the wealthy, he smiled at bourgeois Puritanism, and he propounded psychological as well as social questions.

“If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted on men,” Dumas once wrote, “He would kill Himself.”

In 1864, he married Nadejda Naryschkine, with whom he had a daughter. After Naryschkine's death, he married Henriette Régnier.

He was buried at Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. Dumas’s Parisian tomb relates that “death interests me much more than life, for life belongs to time while death forms part of eternity.”

Joseph McCabe called Dumas a deist who was inclined to mysticism.

{CB; CE; ILP; JM; RAT; TRI; TYD}