![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() (Her surname, meaning "of the farm", was bestowed on her because managing a sugar plantation was her occupation as a freewoman.) Reiss is excellent on the colonial attitudes to race exemplified by Alex's father, who, after Marie-Cesette died when the boy was 12, though proud of his strapping son, sold him into slavery to pay for his passage back to Normandy. Dumas was a " batarde" - the product of a relationship between his aristocratic French father, Marquis Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, and a freed slave, Marie-Cesette Dumas. Reiss's subject is the first Alexandre Dumas, who proves to have had a stranger life than many portrayed in his son's and grandson's fictions.ĭumas was born in 1762 in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). The Black Count is a study of a hitherto obscure historical figure, General Alexandre (Alex) Dumas – not the famous Alexandre Dumas père, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, nor the novelist's playwright son, who wrote the classic La dame aux camélias. ![]()
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