I was looking for a biography of Alexandre Dumas when I came across
Black Count by Tom Reiss. The book is about
Thomas-Alexandre de la Pailleterie (Alexandre Dumas' father). He was born in 1762 to a black slave mother and a fugitive white French nobleman in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) where both sugar and coffee plantations were plentiful. He later became a
general in the French Black Legion. Some of the inserts were taken from Alexandre Dumas' own memoirs about his father and it is clear that some of the tragedies that befall the Count of Monte Cristo were taken from his father's struggles because of his mixed race. He had conflicts with
Napoleon who, with a smaller stature, (
Alex Dumas was over 6 feet tall) felt inferior as many often mistook the General as Napoleon because of his warrior-like appearance. After commanding an army of nearly 50,000 and rising quickly through the ranks, when returning from Egypt he was captured, thrown into a dungeon and subjected to slow poisoning. He was released two years later but never recovered from his ordeal.
Note: There is a
Monte Cristi Province in the Dominican Republic near the border of Haiti which may have been why Alexandre Dumas chose the name for his fictional island.
