,
Orsay Museum , Paris Dumas was born in Paris, France, the
illegitimate child of (1794–1868), a
dressmaker, and novelist
Alexandre Dumas. In 1831 his father legally recognized him and ensured that the young Dumas received the best education possible at the
Collège Bourbon. At that time, the law allowed the elder Dumas to take the child away from his mother. Her agony inspired the younger Dumas to write about tragic female characters. In almost all of his writings, he emphasized the moral purpose of literature; in his play (1858) he espoused the belief that if a man fathers an illegitimate child, then he has an obligation to legitimize the child and marry the woman (see
Illegitimacy in fiction). At boarding schools, he was constantly taunted by his classmates because of his family situation. These issues profoundly influenced his thoughts, behaviour, and writing. Dumas' paternal great-grandparents were Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a
Saint Dominican nobleman and
Général commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of
Saint-Domingue—now
Haiti—and
Marie-Cessette Dumas, an African woman enslaved by the Marquis. Their son
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas became a high-ranking
general of
Revolutionary France. In 1844, Dumas moved to
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, to live with his father. There he met
Marie Duplessis, a young
courtesan who would be the inspiration for the character Marguerite Gauthier in his romantic novel
La Dame aux camélias (
The Lady of the Camellias). Adapted into a play, it was titled
Camille in English and became the basis for
Verdi's 1853 opera,
La traviata, Duplessis undergoing yet another name change, this time to Violetta Valéry. Although he admitted that he had done the adaptation because he needed the money, he had great success with the play, which started his career as a dramatist. He was not only more renowned than his father during his lifetime, but also dominated the serious French stage for most of the second half of the 19th century. After this, he virtually abandoned writing novels, though his semi-autobiographical
Affaire Clémenceau (1866) achieved some solid success. Dumas died at
Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, on 27 November 1895. ==Bibliography==