DUMAS, ALEXANDRE (son). – Novelist and playwright, b. 27 July 1824 in Paris, d. 27 November 1895 at Marly-le-Roi. The natural son of the author of Les Trois Mousquetaires, he found the doors of the society of his time closed to him and was therefore obliged to seek out less rigorist circles, plunging at a very young age into the ambiguous world of pleasure-seekers, which he rechristened the demi-monde and about which he wrote a drama bearing this title. It is therefore understandable that, at the age of twenty-three, he should have chosen as the plot of one of his novels the story of a fallen woman, whom he represented as redeemed by a so-called sincere love, and that the crowds, already prepared by Romanticism, should have been moved on reading the sad vicissitudes of Maria Duplessis in La Dame aux camélias (1847), later adapted as a drama, translated into various languages, and set to music by Verdi under the new title Traviata.
The titles of his subsequent works have a kind of common air, and the problem that seemed most urgent to D. continually recurs in them: that of safeguarding the family against the rampant spread of vice and against infidelity in marriage. The remedies he suggests are: respecting the laws of nature, banning marriages of convenience, protecting children against the crimes of their fathers, etc. At times he draws near to Christianity, for example in Idées de M.me Aubray: indeed, only this could occasionally give D.’s words that accent of profound evidence which convinces; yet these fleeting allusions do not suffice to redeem him from the numerous episodes of stark realism.
The following works by D. are on the Index: « Omnes fabulae amatoriae » (Decree of 22 June 1863); La question du divorce (Decree of 21 June 1880).