{"id":25362,"date":"2012-09-14T21:14:28","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T21:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=25362"},"modified":"2012-09-14T21:25:14","modified_gmt":"2012-09-14T21:25:14","slug":"the-third-musketeer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=25362","title":{"rendered":"The Third Musketeer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Third Musketeer<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2012-09-14
\n\u00a0
\nLeo Damrosch<\/a><\/strong>, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Emeritus
\nHarvard University<\/p>\n

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal,and the Real Count of Monte Cristo<\/a>.<\/em> By Tom Reiss<\/a>, 432 pp. Crown Publishers. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7.<\/p>\n

In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon<\/a> himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel \u201cThe Count of Monte Cristo<\/a>,\u201d written by his son, Alexandre Dumas<\/a>, who also drew upon his father\u2019s adventures in \u201cThe Three Musketeers<\/a>.\u201d Posterity remembers this son as Dumas p\u00e8re, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils<\/a>, also a writer, whose novel \u201cLa Dame aux Cam\u00e9lias<\/a>\u201d was the source for Verdi\u2019s<\/a> \u201cLa Traviata<\/a>.\u201d But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in \u201cThe Black Count,\u201d Tom \u00adReiss, the author of \u201cThe Orientalist,\u201d has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography.<\/p>\n

Despite Reiss\u2019s extensive research, the count remains a somewhat remote figure, since his contemporaries usually described him in conventional superlatives. The chief source of information is a highly romanticized memoir by his son, who was not yet 4 when he died, and who idealized him, in Reiss\u2019s words, as \u201cthe purest, noblest man who ever lived.\u201d Still, such language seems deserved. General Dumas was majestically tall (\u201chis proportions were those of a Greek hero\u201d), a crack swordsman and horseman (\u201clooking like a centaur\u201d), utterly fearless, generous to subordinates and a loving husband and father. He was also exceptionally good-looking, though the portraits that survive are less spectacular than the majestic Adonis depicted in the book\u2019s cover illustration.<\/p>\n

Dumas was born in 1762 at the western end of Saint-Domingue<\/a>, the colony that is now Haiti. Remarkably, the French Empire guaranteed protection and opportunities to people of mixed race, and when the boy\u2019s father brought him to France at the age of 14 he was able to receive a first-rate education and later to join the army.<\/strong> He never cared much for his feckless father, however, and took the name Dumas from his slave mother, about whom very little is known…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Third Musketeer The New York Times 2012-09-14 \u00a0 Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Emeritus Harvard University The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal,and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. By Tom Reiss, 432 pp. Crown Publishers. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7. In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,5,459,6],"tags":[11856,2407,11857,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-25362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-new-media","tag-alex-dumas","tag-alexandre-dumas","tag-leo-damrosch","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}