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He had a chocolaty skin, soft negroid eyes, feminine hands. But he could raise four army muskets by inserting his fingers into the muzzles. In one Austrian battle he defended a bridge so fiercely that thereafter he was called "Horatius Codes of the Tyrol." Said admiring General Thiebault: "He is the only colored man whom I have forgiven his skin."
"I'll be ruined," cried Alexandre Dumas' mother just before his birth. But he had fair skin and hair (which later became kinky), blue eyes. As a boy he had a hard time learning the alphabet, but he wrote beautiful longhand. Said his mother: "Every idiot can write well!"
Soon young Alexandra's penmanship was supporting himself, the first of a long succession of mistresses and the best known of his various illegitimate children—Alexandre Dumas fils. Dumas was also trying to eke out his earnings by playwriting. Whenever the baby howled too long, Dumas slammed the future author of The Lady of the Camellias against the bed. "I can still see myself in the air," Dumas fils used to say with a shiver years later.
"The Crown Is Mine." "Melpomene and Thalia have been surpassed," cried the Romantics when Dumas' play Henri III was first presented. Pandemonium broke loose. The audience "stood up, as if seized with madness." "The crown is mine," cried Dumas, and bought himself chromatic waistcoats and a pince-nez dangling from a black ribbon.
The Revolution of 1830 momentarily interrupted his dramatic career. Dumas was about to start south with his latest mistress when news that street fighting had begun in Paris filled him with joy. He volunteered to go to Soissons, seize some badly needed powder. The commander of the arsenal, a former colonial officer, at first refused to surrender to the kinky-haired playwright. But the officer's wife cried: "Oh, my darling, yield! This is another revolt of the Negroes!" Dumas brought back the powder to Paris, was embraced by Lafayette and the Duke of Orleans, who said: "M. Dumas, you have just achieved your finest drama."
It was followed by Dumas' Anthony, a more sensational success than Henri III. Paris was ravished by Anthony's closing speech: "She resisted me. I have assassinated her."
Private Life, Public Saturnalia. Dumas' private life became a public saturnalia of love affairs, gargantuan gastronomy, successes in the theater, speculations on the Bourse, financial crashes, perpetual indebtedness from which he sometimes escaped by travels that took him to Russia, Transcaucasia, Africa.
One day Poet Gerard de Nerval sent a friend to Dumas. His name was Auguste Maquet. He brought Dumas a rough draft of an historical novel, soon published in two volumes as Le Bonhomme Buvat by Alexandre Dumas. Said Dumas: "The two most amusing volumes I have ever written." Maquet's name did not appear on the books. He got about $200.
In 1844 Maquet brought Dumas the rough draft of a novel about a Guardsman named D'Artagnan. The Three Musketeers had been born.