Alexandre Dumas wrote more than three hundred books — and himself gave grounds for the rumor that he did not write them alone. "The Dumas factory," the critics said. His collaborator Auguste Maquet supplied the drafts; Dumas rewrote them, adding dialogue, life, pace. All true. But no one else could have written The Musketeers.
He was born in 1802. His paternal grandfather was a French nobleman, his grandmother a black slave from Haiti; his father was one of Napoleon's generals. Dumas was proud of all three roots.
The Three Musketeers appeared in 1844, and The Count of Monte Cristo the same year, serialized in a newspaper. Readers waited each week for the next installment. Dumas promised them adventure, friendship, revenge, love — and kept his word. The newspapers that printed his novels could not raise the price of a subscription.
He earned enormous sums and spent them faster still. He built the Château de Monte-Cristo — and was ruined almost at once. He died in 1870, in his son's house, without a penny. A hundred years later his remains were moved to the Panthéon — beside Hugo and Zola.