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Dumas was the son of a gallant mulatto general,* a gigantic man who measured more round the calf than his wife did round her waist. Napoleon admired him. But when the general criticized him to his face, Napoleon flew into a rage and uttered the fateful words: "I never want to see or hear that man's name!" Son Alexandre inherited his disappointed father's huge frame, his Creole hair and skin, and a roistering penchant for dueling. But his career began humbly enough, with a job as a royal copyist under the Duke of Orleans. According to legend, he paid his way to Paris by winning 600 glasses of absinthe from an innkeeper at billiards, then exchanging his prize for cash.
The Paris in which Copyist Dumas soon became an author was an astonishing city of high living, wild revelry and the cancan. Its morals could be summed up in a cartoon of the times that showed a husband drawing a pistol on his wife's lover, while the lady screamed: "Have mercy on the father of your children!"
Authors Hugo, Balzac and Dumas did their best to set the tone, worked prodigiously to keep abreast of the time's fickle fancy. Balzac wrote so much that after his death his manuscripts were reportedly used for wrapping marmalade. Dumas' output was so enormous that when he lost a full-length play, he had no recollection of what it had been about. Nor did he care. He could (and did) write a novel in three days, a one-act comedy during a break in an afternoon's partridge shooting. He was not a fussy man, and he wrote on order a bestselling guide to Egypt, packed with breathless descriptions of his climbing of the pyramids and swimming in the Nile, without ever bothering to set foot in Egypt. His first grand success, the romantic drama Henri III—in which the bruises of passion on the heroine's milky shoulders cleverly turned black and blue before the audience's popping eyes—created such consternation that mother Dumas suffered a near-fatal stroke before the curtain had even gone up. Wrote one British critic: "From Dumas dates the inundation of the French theater with a bloody spate of slaughterings, incests, adulteries, violations, secret accouchements . . ."
Dumas' plays are rarely seen today. The shorter dramas are eight hours long; the longer ones, three nights. Scores of actors have to be kept running up and down the aisles and fighting duels in the boxes. Moreover, Dumas (as his enemies said) probably did write large parts of his works with a pair of scissors, cutting sections from the works of Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega and Hugo. To the critic who first pointed this out, Dumas graciously sent a huge pair of shears, along with a note urging the critic to try his hand with them.