"There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever."

— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

The Black Musketeer

Inspired by the achievements and the struggles of his mixed-race father, the author of The Three Musketeers created heroic fictional characters that made him the best-selling author in the world.

There is hardly anyone who hasn't read or heard about The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. But not many people know that these immortal characters were created by a grandson of a slave who had to teach himself to read and write.

Alexandre Dumas remains one of the world's most well-known authors, almost 150 years after his death. The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo have inspired generations of readers and prompted hundreds of film adaptations, plays and even video games. What inspired Dumas himself was a long family history of injustice and prejudice — and the life of his father, a real hero.

The writer's father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born in 1762 on a plantation on Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), among French nobility and African slave labor. Thomas-Alexandre's fate was twisted from the very start: His father, French diplomat Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, purchased his mother, Marie-Cesette Dumas, to be his slave — and concubine. She bore him a son and three daughters. When young Thomas-Alexandre turned 13, his father returned to France. He took Thomas with him, but left behind the boy's mother and siblings — whom he sold to the plantation's next owner.

Although the marquis gave his son the education appropriate for a noble youth in France at the time, including horseback riding and fencing, Thomas-Alexandre could not hide his mixed bloodline. He grew up tall, strong, educated — and black.

France might have been very liberal then, but Thomas-Alexandre would always be reminded that he was not like other noble sons in Paris. One night, Thomas-Alexandre took a beautiful white Creole woman to see a play at Nicolet's Theater. When three officers from an elite naval unit approached their box, he knew they were looking for trouble. One of the men, Officer Titon, complimented the lady's breasts and offered to show her around Paris, as if Thomas-Alexandre wasn't there. When Dumas responded to the insult, the officers called him a mulatto and tried to force him to kneel and beg for their permission to be excused. The woman fled the ugly scene, while the men were taken outside by a theater guard. The incident ended when Titon decided not to press charges. Thomas-Alexandre had to swallow his pride.

With four generations of nobility on his father's side, Thomas-Alexandre expected an officer's position when he decided to fulfill his duty to France by enlisting in the army. French race laws canceled out his right to the position, however. Undeterred, Thomas-Alexandre enlisted as a private. The outraged marquis prohibited his son to use the noble family name with a low rank. That was the pivotal moment when Thomas-Alexandre took his destiny into his own hands: He signed the enlistment order with his slave mother's last name — Alexandre Dumas, "son of Antoine and Cesette Dumas" — completely erasing his father's noble pedigree and precious family name from his story. Just two weeks later, the marquis passed away unexpectedly. Thomas-Alexandre did not attend his funeral.

What followed is one of the most remarkable military careers in French history: Thomas-Alexandre worked his way from a quiet post in a province to a commanding position in the "Black Legion" to brigadier general in the regular French army. Within a year, he was promoted to commander in chief of the French Army of the Western Pyrenees. Despite his mixed race, General Dumas soared from the lowest military rank to leading an army in just seven years.

When General Dumas came to serve under Napoleon's command, tension flared between the two immediately. Dumas disapproved of Napoleon's ruthlessness and the way French troops abused the locals. Napoleon demoted him whenever he could, yet couldn't help but admire his bravery and strategic skills. The enemy, the Austrian army — both in awe and fear of him — nicknamed General Dumas "The Black Devil."

General Dumas was faithfully by Napoleon's side when the French armada invaded Egypt in 1798. Sent on the most impossible missions, General Dumas never backed down, from storming the city walls of ancient Alexandria to delivering ransom to the desert Bedouins for the captured French soldiers. The fearless black general looked so large and dominating next to the short-statured Napoleon, some Egyptians mistook him for the commander in chief. That didn't help his popularity with Napoleon.

The increasingly paranoid Napoleon didn't wait long to get rid of the inconvenient hero. Shortly after General Dumas boarded a ship to return home, it made a stop in Taranto, Italy. Dumas and his companions were captured as prisoners of war and locked up in a dungeon. Napoleon did nothing to free his loyal compatriot. Dumas stayed underground for two years until one of his fellow generals finally came to rescue him. Dumas emerged partially paralyzed, blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. He returned home to his wife and children, but never recovered, dying a painful death five years later from stomach cancer and in dire poverty. The family was denied a general's military pension by the spiteful Napoleon.

When the general died, Alexandre Dumas the future writer was just a toddler. His time with his heroic father was short, but filled with stories of epic adventures. The family could not afford to educate him, but Alexandre had fire in his veins: He taught himself to read and write. Inspired by the stories of his father's incredible life, Alexandre resolved not to let any circumstances defeat him. When he was 20 years old, Alexandre Dumas moved to Paris to start a new life with nothing but loose change in his pocket.

In spite of his limited education, Alexandre Dumas showed immense literary talent, and much like his father, quickly rose through the ranks of Parisian society. But when he became a literary sensation and rich, critics went after him. They said a mixed-race man with no formal education couldn't possibly have written all those novels. It got worse. At one of the lavish dinner parties regularly thrown by Dumas in his mansion, a guest at the table compared General Dumas to a monkey. Always in good spirits, Alexandre Dumas retorted with ease: "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, sir, my family starts where yours ends."

For years, Dumas stoically absorbed every racial insult thrown at him. His revenge was the immense popularity of his works. He put something of the brave general into all of his main characters. His father's memories of the incident at the theater served as inspiration for D'Artagnan's many troubles in Paris as a provincial outsider. The general's war stories gave rise to the four musketeers, who got in trouble with government figures, but never lost their sense of honor. His father's capture and time in the Italian prison became the main plot device in The Count of Monte Cristo. Clearly, Dumas was not letting any family history go to waste — it all fueled his imagination.

Alexandre Dumas was prolific and successful in every genre, publishing more than 100,000 pages in his lifetime, including plays, historic novels, travel memoirs of Russia and a culinary encyclopedia. He lived life to the fullest, earning fortunes from his writing and spending them all on parties and romantic affairs. A contemporary described him as "one of the most generous, large-hearted people in the world." He was rumored to have had close to 40 lovers and to have fathered several children, one of whom, known as Alexandre Dumas the son, became a successful writer in his own right.

Alexandre Dumas died in 1870. In 2002, French President Jacques Chirac hosted a momentous event: The ashes of Alexandre Dumas, a grandson of a slave, were transferred to a mausoleum in the Panthéon of Paris, next to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo and René Descartes. On the day of the ceremony, all of Paris was outside while people in the rest of the country were glued to their TV sets to watch a once-in-a-lifetime scene: a coffin draped in blue velvet and escorted by four guards on horseback, dressed as four musketeers.

To this day, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas is one of the most decorated military officers of color. The Three Musketeers, its sequels and The Count of Monte Cristo, all based on his exploits, have been translated into more than 100 languages and continue to be international bestselling novels.

"She was the most complete incarnation of womankind that has ever existed."

— Franz Liszt on Marie Duplessis

MARIE DUPLESSIS

The Original Pretty Woman

French courtesan Marie Duplessis lived a short life, but her tragic story inspired some of the most well-known and beloved works of literature, theater, music and film.

The 1990 Hollywood hit Pretty Woman, with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, is one of the most popular romantic comedies of all time. Combining both the traditional Cinderella tale and a modern cinematic trope of "the hooker with a heart of gold," Pretty Woman is a classic film in which love conquers all.

What lies beneath is the much darker real-life story of a 17thcentury French courtesan, Marie Duplessis, whose life inspired a best-selling novel, a famous play, one of the most popular operas in history and many hit movies, including Pretty Woman.

Marie Duplessis was born Alphonsine Rose Plessis into a peasant family in Normandy, France, in 1824. Her father, Marin Plessis, an illegitimate child of a prostitute and a priest, was a raging alcoholic, who beat his wife, Marie, mercilessly, especially for giving him two daughters and no son. Marie escaped the abusive marriage by finding a job as a maid in a distant city, hoping to make enough money to save her two children, but she died when Alphonsine was only 6 years old.

Marin promptly abandoned his daughters, and Alphonsine spent several years on her own, surviving by begging for food and shelter from relatives and local farmers. As she grew older, Alphonsine found work as a laundry girl. It was not until she turned 13 and her beauty started to blossom that Marin returned — and promptly found a way to make money off his daughter by setting her up with a local septuagenarian bachelor with a bad reputation. Alphonsine spent every weekend at the house of the old man, who paid her several times her laundress wage. From then on, Alphonsine's father passed her from one pair of hands to another, until she ended up on the streets of Paris at 15, alone and often hungry for days.

Eventually, Alphonsine found a job at a dress shop. A quick learner hungry to advance in the new city, she soaked up Parisian culture, the latest fashion and what the lifestyle of the rich was like. Both her taste and her beauty grew more refined every day. Petite, with ivory skin, huge dark eyes and delicate features, Alphonsine attracted the attention of many, until a Parisian widower in his 40s offered her a rented flat and a monthly cash stipend, which greatly exceeded her meager shop wages, in exchange for her affection. Her career as a Parisian courtesan was launched. For her new life, Alphonsine adopted a more noble-sounding name: She added a "du" and became Marie Duplessis. Hoping to erase her dark past as an impoverished and homeless provincial girl, she also honored the memory of her mother, Marie, as well as the Virgin Mary.

With her striking beauty and rapidly improving social skills, Marie Duplessis quickly ascended the social ladder of the Parisian elite — changing each benefactor for a better one, while managing to remain in the good graces of most of them. They spent lavishly on her, and Marie in turn spent with abandon on clothes, horses, travel and furnishings. She also bought books and taught herself to write. From aristocrats to diplomats — young and old, single and married — no man could resist her charms, which were more than skin deep. Even though she developed the veneer of high society, she knew the streets as well. She was well-spoken and dressed like a high-society woman, but she also smoked, drank and danced in a way that proper ladies of her time never would. She was delicately feminine yet a prolific gambler. She had an angelic face and could discuss politics with the most educated men in Europe.

Among her many affairs, one inspired what would become her claim to immortality. In 1842, 18-year-old Marie met the young Alexandre Dumas, who was an illegitimate child of cerebrated French author Alexandre Dumas and a laundress. Two years later, the two began an affair. Marie was already famous and enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle provided by her benefactors. Dumas was struggling to make money and forge his own destiny as a writer in the shadow of his illustrious father. The affair only lasted a year. Dumas managed to talk Duplessis into running away from Paris to the countryside with him for a short while, but she became bored and returned to Paris. Already bitter because he couldn't afford to provide the lifestyle she desired, Dumas also suffered when he watched her fall passionately in love with another artist, the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. Marie pleaded with Liszt to take her with him on his world tour just as her health began to deteriorate due to tuberculosis (an all too common and tragic illness at the time known as "consumption"). Liszt declined and left Paris. He never saw her again.

Shortly after, Marie Duplessis succumbed to the disease. She spent the final years of her life desperately trying to get cured, while her benefactors left her one by one and her debts mounted. She died in 1847 at 23.

Her untimely death inspired Dumas, still reeling from the loss of his muse to another man, to write a novel entitled La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the Camellias in English). In it, Dumas the writer achieved in fiction what Dumas the lover couldn't in real life: He got the woman he so desperately desired to love him wholeheartedly and to sacrifice herself for his benefit. In the novel, a courtesan named Marguerite Gautier gives up her lifestyle and runs away to the countryside with her young lover, Armand Duval, a character Dumas based on himself. Eventually, Duval's father finds the lovers and pleads with Marguerite to leave Duval so that the illicit affair won't damage their noble family name. Convinced by the pleas of her lover's family, Marguerite sacrifices her true love by leaving young Duval, never telling him why, and dies from consumption, tragically alone.

The love story of a nobleman and "a whore with a heart of gold" both scandalized and touched the public. While the first book of poems by Dumas sold only 14 copies, La Dame aux Camélias became an overnight sensation, selling out the first and second printings. The play based on the novel received an even bigger response — after a sold-out run in Paris, over 20,000 printed copies of the play were sold overnight. At first, actresses rejected the role of Marguerite due to the scandalous nature of her profession. But it quickly became one of the most coveted female roles in theater and was performed by the world's leading actresses in various adaptations, most famously by the great Sarah Bernhardt, who played guerite in Paris, London and on Broadway. Although his real affair with Marie Duplessis had been short-lived, the success of La Dame aux Camélias inspired by their relationship propelled Dumas the son out of the shadow of his father.

In turn, the passionately written play provided inspiration for another great artist. After seeing the play in Paris, Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi created his most famous opera, La Traviata (Italian for "fallen woman"). Combined with Verdi's moving music, the story of the courtesan sacrificing her love for the sake of her noble lover's future was transformed into an emotional experience. La Traviata debuted in 1853 in Venice, followed by performances in 1856 in New York and Paris, and was immediately recognized as Verdi's best work. La Traviata is now one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide and a cornerstone of operatic culture. There is hardly a night when La Traviata is not staged somewhere in the world. The title role of Violetta has been performed by some of the most renowned sopranos in history, including Maria Callas and Anna Netrebko. Its melodies are widely used in countless TV ads and easily recognized even by those who have never stepped inside an opera house. The drinking song, "Libiamo," an aria performed by the heroine surrounded by her men, is a toast calling for celebrating life in the present moment and was recently used in a TV ad for Heineken.