the old intelligentsia who ‘enjoyed’ endless revivals of Racine.
Historical fiction was already the
genre du jour
, but Dumas had a diamond instinct for giving people a good time. Coming after the nit-picking authenticity of Sir
Walter Scott, the moralizing of Prosper Merimée and Victor Hugo, and the colonial primitivism of James Fenimore Cooper, his writing was a hurricane of fresh air.
Once his plays had made him rich, a media revolution swept him away from the theatre and into a new form, the serial. In Paris, as in London, newspapers began to use serialized novels as weapons
of mass destruction in their circulation wars. In the mid-1830s, two popular Parisian newspapers decided to accept advertising and were immediately locked in a deadly battle for new readers.
A writer as prolific, crowd-pleasing and gifted with narrative as Dumas was a natural for the new
roman feuilleton
and his new serials were soon auctioned for massive sums. The first of
these was
The Three Musketeers
. It came out in 1844, overlapping with
The Count of Monte Cristo
, which in turn ran almost concurrently with
La Reine Margot
. This, the
story of the feisty princess forced into a political marriage with the future Henri IV, was cobbled together in three months for a newspaper called
La Presse
, after its editor had sacked
Balzac because his gloomy work had started a haemorrhage of readers.
Dumas was writing the way his father had fought, on a Herculean scale. He wrote around ten thousand words a week, working for fourteen hours at a stretch without revising or even punctuating,
dropping finished pages on the floor for his secretaries to pick up, correct and rush round to the printers.
Then a new law was passed which imposed a hefty tax on newspaper profits, and Dumas’s income fell dramatically. Within a few years the theatre he owned had to be sold, as did his house, a
folie-de-grandeur called the Château deMonte Cristo, which was bought by an American dentist. In 1851, Dumas was made bankrupt.
Who cares about going bust, when a man has
panache
? Dumas immediately wrote his way out of debt, producing another forty-three novels, eleven plays, travel books, history books and his
six-volume autobiography over the next ten years, all while travelling, lecturing, supervising foreign productions of his plays and planning to open a restaurant. Finally, in 1870, he suffered a
stroke in September, lingered on in the care of his son for a couple of months, and died on 5 December.
Dumas was eulogized by Victor Hugo, the literary lion-king of the day, and his works sold a further three million copies over the next twenty-three years alone. Once the cinema was invented,
they inspired over two hundred films. Such popularity cannot be entirely forgiven. At the time I first drove through Aramitz on my way into the mountains, Dumas’s remains lay in an obscure
cemetery north of the capital, not in the Panthéon in Paris, where most great French writers are interred.
Recipes
Poule au Pot Henri IV
(or, in Béarnais, our Henry,
nouste Henric
)
Occasionally, you find an ironic version of this recipe, featuring nothing but the liver and giblets of the chicken, chopped and mixed with breadcrumbs, then wrapped in cabbage
leaves or sausage casing and poached. This was the
poule verte
, the poor man’s chicken, which, so the legend goes, was all that the peasants could afford until good King Henry
brought peace and prosperity to the land. A quick glance at the subsequent history of France suggests that the poor peasants were probably stuck with
poules vertes
until well after the
Revolution, but hey – why spoil a good story?
The full version, with a real chicken, is a classic Sunday lunch dish in the Béarn. Pierre Koffmann remembers it as the traditional dish for the harvest supper, finished off with a
blanket of poached
brioche
dough, and served between the charcuterie and the roast. It is one of those accommodating recipes that can
Historical fiction was already the
genre du jour
, but Dumas had a diamond instinct for giving people a good time. Coming after the nit-picking authenticity of Sir
Walter Scott, the moralizing of Prosper Merimée and Victor Hugo, and the colonial primitivism of James Fenimore Cooper, his writing was a hurricane of fresh air.
Once his plays had made him rich, a media revolution swept him away from the theatre and into a new form, the serial. In Paris, as in London, newspapers began to use serialized novels as weapons
of mass destruction in their circulation wars. In the mid-1830s, two popular Parisian newspapers decided to accept advertising and were immediately locked in a deadly battle for new readers.
A writer as prolific, crowd-pleasing and gifted with narrative as Dumas was a natural for the new
roman feuilleton
and his new serials were soon auctioned for massive sums. The first of
these was
The Three Musketeers
. It came out in 1844, overlapping with
The Count of Monte Cristo
, which in turn ran almost concurrently with
La Reine Margot
. This, the
story of the feisty princess forced into a political marriage with the future Henri IV, was cobbled together in three months for a newspaper called
La Presse
, after its editor had sacked
Balzac because his gloomy work had started a haemorrhage of readers.
Dumas was writing the way his father had fought, on a Herculean scale. He wrote around ten thousand words a week, working for fourteen hours at a stretch without revising or even punctuating,
dropping finished pages on the floor for his secretaries to pick up, correct and rush round to the printers.
Then a new law was passed which imposed a hefty tax on newspaper profits, and Dumas’s income fell dramatically. Within a few years the theatre he owned had to be sold, as did his house, a
folie-de-grandeur called the Château deMonte Cristo, which was bought by an American dentist. In 1851, Dumas was made bankrupt.
Who cares about going bust, when a man has
panache
? Dumas immediately wrote his way out of debt, producing another forty-three novels, eleven plays, travel books, history books and his
six-volume autobiography over the next ten years, all while travelling, lecturing, supervising foreign productions of his plays and planning to open a restaurant. Finally, in 1870, he suffered a
stroke in September, lingered on in the care of his son for a couple of months, and died on 5 December.
Dumas was eulogized by Victor Hugo, the literary lion-king of the day, and his works sold a further three million copies over the next twenty-three years alone. Once the cinema was invented,
they inspired over two hundred films. Such popularity cannot be entirely forgiven. At the time I first drove through Aramitz on my way into the mountains, Dumas’s remains lay in an obscure
cemetery north of the capital, not in the Panthéon in Paris, where most great French writers are interred.
Recipes
Poule au Pot Henri IV
(or, in Béarnais, our Henry,
nouste Henric
)
Occasionally, you find an ironic version of this recipe, featuring nothing but the liver and giblets of the chicken, chopped and mixed with breadcrumbs, then wrapped in cabbage
leaves or sausage casing and poached. This was the
poule verte
, the poor man’s chicken, which, so the legend goes, was all that the peasants could afford until good King Henry
brought peace and prosperity to the land. A quick glance at the subsequent history of France suggests that the poor peasants were probably stuck with
poules vertes
until well after the
Revolution, but hey – why spoil a good story?
The full version, with a real chicken, is a classic Sunday lunch dish in the Béarn. Pierre Koffmann remembers it as the traditional dish for the harvest supper, finished off with a
blanket of poached
brioche
dough, and served between the charcuterie and the roast. It is one of those accommodating recipes that can
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