Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Alexandre Dumas: author of The Three Musketeers About this episode Greg Jenner is joined in nineteenth-century France by historian Professor Olivette Otele and comedian Celya AB to learn about acclaimed novelist Alexandre Dumas. Alexandre was born to an innkeeper’s daughter and a legendary Black general who fought for Napoleon. After his father’s death the family grew up in rural poverty, but after a visit to Paris as a teenager, Dumas fell in love with the city and its theatre. Using his father’s connections he found a job there and was soon a successful playwright, before turning his attention to novels. He was a prolific author, writing such blockbusters as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Christo. But amidst the writing, Dumas also found plenty of time for romantic dalliances, political entanglements, and global travel. This episode explores his extraordinary life and the incredible works of literature he created, set against the turbulent background of French politics in the years after the Napoleonic wars.
If you’re a fan of French revolutionary politics, trailblazing Black figures and the messy personal lives of best-selling authors, you’ll love our episode on Alexandre Dumas.
If you want more Black history with Professor Olivette Otele, check out our episode on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. And for more figures from French history, listen to our episodes on Josephine Baker, Young Napoleon and Catherine de’Medici.
You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past.
Hosted by: Greg Jenner
Research by: Emma Bentley
Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner
Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner
Audio Producer: Steve Hankey
Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett
Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars
Transcript 11,319 words · 15 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Greg Jenner? This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
0:06 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
0:33 Speaker 02 Sometimes we all need an extra help in hand, especially with the tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report, and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you, and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system, and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and
1:16 Speaker 02 Slack. And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategising your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai/solve.
1:46 Speaker 03 BBC Sounds. Music. Radio. Podcasts.
1:50 Greg Jenner? Hello, Greg here. Just a reminder before we get going that episodes of Your Dead To Me are released on Fridays wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else, first on BBC Sounds.
2:06 Greg Jenner? Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are packing our book bags and travelling back to 19th century France to learn all about the acclaimed novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas. And to help complete our trio of Musketeers, we have two very special guests. In history corner, she's distinguished research professor of the legacies and memory of slavery at Soas, University of London. You may have read her wonderful book, African Europeans: An Untold History. And you will remember her from our episode on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. It's Professor Olivier Otele. Welcome back, Olivier.
2:43 Speaker 04 Oh, hello, Greg. Lovely to be back.
2:45 Greg Jenner? We're delighted to have you back. And in comedy corner, she's an award-winning rising star who won the Chortle Best Newcomer Award in 2022. Maybe you've seen one of her sold-out live runs at the Edinburgh Fringe or Soho Theatre, I certainly have, or watched her on TV on Live at the Apollo, or heard her on all kinds of podcasts, including Off Menu and The Guilty Feminist. It's Celia AB. Welcome to the show, Celia.
3:05 Speaker 05 Hello. Thank you for having me.
3:07 Greg Jenner? Oh, it's lovely to have you in. Your first time on the show, which feels like a booking error. We should have had you on ages ago. I've been trying to get you on for ages.
3:14 Speaker 05 I will say, like, the difference between your intro and my intro is so funny. You're clear like a genius. And then it's like, and Celia's a clown.
3:22 Greg Jenner? But a very respected clown.
3:25 Speaker 05 Respected. Yes, it is I. It is I.
3:29 Greg Jenner? So, Celia, you are French Algerian. You grew up in Paris. How do you feel about history, French history? Did you do it at school?
3:39 Speaker 05 I didn't really like history at school. I like it a bit more now. But my, I would say, the bit of history I know the most about is the Algerian War.
3:49 Greg Jenner? It's not the funniest.
3:51 Speaker 05 No, but it's, but I like it. I like history also when it's like more specific. So like, day of the life of someone who lived in a period.
3:59 Greg Jenner? Okay, social history.
4:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's what I meant to.
4:01 Greg Jenner? Good stuff. And Alexandre Dumas, did you do him at school? Is he kind of like the French Dickens? Do you have to read him?
4:07 Speaker 05 So, the only thing I remember about Alexandre Dumas is that the first boy I was in love with lived on Dumas Street.
4:14 Greg Jenner? That's a good anecdote. We'll take it.
4:17 Speaker 05 That's, I'm gonna sound like, yeah, just for the listeners, I just got back from Australia. I'm a bit of a dum-dum today. I just found out he's a playwright, just now.
4:28 Greg Jenner? Just now.
4:29 Speaker 05 I thought he was a street.
4:32 Greg Jenner? Yes, we wouldn't really do an episode on the streets, but it's nice to know that there's a romantic link there for you, because he was a romantic writer.
4:39 Speaker 05 I'm excited to find out about this guy.
4:41 Greg Jenner? He's a great-
4:42 Speaker 05 I want to know what makes him tick.
4:43 Greg Jenner? I mean, he loved the ladies.
4:45 Speaker 05 Did he?
4:45 Greg Jenner? He did, so we will get into a bit of romance, but also, he wrote some serious books, so-
4:50 Speaker 05 Oh, exciting.
4:51 Greg Jenner? Lot to get through, okay.
4:59 Greg Jenner? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject, and I imagine some of you will know Dumas' work. Maybe you've read The Three Musketeers, or The Count of Monte Cristo, or watched many of the film or TV adaptations of them. Perhaps you enjoyed a baby-faced Leo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, or you've seen the romantic and bloody La Renne Margaux, a French cinema classic. And if you've been to Paris, you may have gone to the street named after him, or used a metro station named after Dumas. But who was the real man behind the stories? Was he as swashbuckling as his literary heroes? What life events inspired his epic novels? And just how many mistresses can one man have? Let's find out. Right, we shall begin the beginning. Celia, give us a guess on where you think the story starts.
5:44 Speaker 05 March 2020. No, I'm gonna say-
5:48 Greg Jenner? The Covid pandemic, you think?
5:49 Speaker 05 The Covid pandemic, yeah.
5:50 Greg Jenner? Right, okay.
5:51 Speaker 05 I think, okay, so I'm gonna say it's beginning of the 1800s. Does that sound good?
5:59 Greg Jenner? That sounds great, it sounds lovely. Olivier, more specificity, please.
6:03 Speaker 04 Yes, of course, he wasn't far off.
6:05 Greg Jenner? Oh, there we go.
6:06 Speaker 04 I mean, he was born Alexandre Dumas David de la Pailleterie on the 24th of July, 1802, in Villar-Quatre.
6:13 Greg Jenner? Okay.
6:14 Speaker 04 And he was the second son of General Thomas Alexandre Dumas David de la Pailleterie, and Marie-Louise Elisabeth Laboret, an innkeeper's daughter.
6:24 Greg Jenner? Okay, so the father has a fantastic name.
6:27 Speaker 04 Yes, he did.
6:29 Greg Jenner? And mum is an innkeeper's daughter, perhaps slightly less fancy.
6:31 Speaker 04 Less fancy, still, they made a baby, so-
6:34 Greg Jenner? They managed, yeah.
6:37 Speaker 04 So Thomas Alexandre, the dad, was of dual heritage or mixed race and he was born in Haiti to a minor nobleman and an enslaved woman. But Dumas decided to go by his mother's name, Dumas. Thomas Alexandre's father brought him to France, freed him because he was born an enslaved person, gave him a French education, including swordsmanship lessons with Chevalier de Saint-Jean.
7:05 Greg Jenner? Ah, we're harking back to a previous episode. So Celia, the Chevalier de Saint-Jean was a-
7:10 Speaker 05 You don't need to tell me. No, yeah, please, I need you.
7:13 Greg Jenner? Please do tell me, yeah. He was an incredible swordsman in France, but also amazing classical composer. So he was the French Mozart and he was an extraordinary character. And there's a movie that you worked on, Olivier, that people can watch about the Chevalier. And he was a biracial composer, born in Guadeloupe and became a French celebrity.
7:29 Speaker 04 The dad was involved in the revolution, but on the Napoleon side.
7:35 Greg Jenner? Ah, okay.
7:35 Speaker 05 Oh, okay.
7:36 Greg Jenner? Okay, so that's interesting. So Thomas Alexandre is this army general. So the sword fighting lessons with the Chevalier have paid off. So tell us about his military careers. This is the father of Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Alexandre.
7:51 Speaker 05 Say all of his names.
7:52 Greg Jenner? I mean, I can't, I mean, what was it, Paetere? It was a proper big old long-
7:56 Speaker 05 It was David.
7:57 Speaker 04 Thomas Alexandre David de la Paetere.
8:00 Speaker 05 Thomas Alexandre David de la Paetere.
8:02 Speaker 04 Well, he joined the Queen's Dragoons in seventeen eighty-six and quite quickly, by seventeen ninety-three, he was general in chief of the army of the Alps and commanded fifty thousand troops.
8:15 Greg Jenner? Wow.
8:16 Speaker 05 Wow.
8:17 Greg Jenner? So this is during the French Revolution.
8:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely.
8:19 Greg Jenner? So he's in charge of fifty thou- that's a football stadium of troops.
8:22 Speaker 05 Wow.
8:23 Speaker 04 Yes.
8:24 Greg Jenner? What's the most responsibility you've had, Celia?
8:26 Speaker 05 I used to manage a photography studio.
8:30 Greg Jenner? Okay.
8:31 Speaker 05 And I was nineteen and it was really small and I wanted to be like a cool boss, but I went straight into David Brent, like, I went straight into like office boss, like, I was like, so embarrassing.
8:42 Greg Jenner? Oh dear.
8:43 Speaker 05 So me and Thomas are not that far off.
8:47 Greg Jenner? You're also a leader of men, yes, okay. So, see, he's in this kind of, this kind of elite regiment, he's in charge of fifty three thousand troops.
8:55 Speaker 04 Fifty three thousand troops, yes.
8:57 Greg Jenner? He's in charge of Ittiral, which is in the Alps, so is that Austria, Italy, Switzerland, that's kind of that part of the world, Italy, isn't it?
9:04 Speaker 04 Exactly, yeah. And thanks to Napoleon, actually, and even racist Prussian soldier referred to him as the best soldier in the world. So he was admired by people who didn't like people like him. He was involved in many other things, I mean, he was involved in Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.
9:22 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
9:22 Speaker 04 He helped allegedly quell the revolt in Cairo in seventeen ninety eight, I mean, so he was admired.
9:29 Greg Jenner? So I'm immediately getting a sense that kind of Musketeers book is basically fanfiction for Alexandra's own dad.
9:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, it must be so hard to have a dad this impressive, I'm very lucky.
9:40 Greg Jenner? But there's a tragic twist in the tale, this heroic father, this soldier in charge of a vast army, you know, he'd gone to the, gone to Egypt with Napoleon. We did an episode on Young Napoleon, if people want to listen, but there is a tragic twist, the father passes away when Alexandra is very young.
9:55 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely, I mean, he was captured in Egypt, imprisoned for two years, freed, but came back partially paralyzed, almost blind in one eye.
10:05 Greg Jenner? Right.
10:06 Speaker 04 Death in the, in one ear, and he tried desperately and repeatedly to petition Napoleon for compensation. He was not successful, really, and eventually he died of stomach cancer in eighteen oh six, when Alexandre was just three years old. And that really plunged the family into poverty. The thing was that Alexandre actually worshipped his father.
10:30 Greg Jenner? Hmm, how do you imagine his childhood going from that point? That's a pretty rough start to life, isn't it, Selia?
10:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, that would have been, like, also in terms of, like, romanticizing your dads, like, we all, growing up, think that our dads are like heroes, but his dad was actually very impressive.
10:44 Greg Jenner? Yeah, literally a hero.
10:45 Speaker 05 And to try and cling on to the last memory you have of him, that would be really hard, and the mum as well, oh my god.
10:51 Greg Jenner? Yeah, it's a really sad start, so, so that, you say they were plunged into poverty, I mean, we're talking la miserable, sort of on the streets, begging for scraps type, you know, is he singing like, like Anne Hathaway? What kind of poverty are we talking?
11:03 Speaker 05 Is he as poor as Anne Hathaway?
11:05 Greg Jenner? Was he as beautiful as Anne Hathaway, crying in a street?
11:08 Speaker 05 Not quite.
11:10 Speaker 04 He moved, he moved into, with his maternal grandparents in their hotel in Villa Cotre.
11:18 Greg Jenner? Okay.
11:18 Speaker 04 So not quite that level of poverty. He was educated at home by his mother and older sister. And when he was 10 years old, a cousin died and left him money to join the seminary. But Duma wasn't keen on being a priest, really.
11:32 Greg Jenner? Right. How would you get out of going to seminary school if you were Alexandra Selya?
11:37 Speaker 05 Hmm. So let's say, okay, let's do an act out. Tell me I have to go to preschool.
11:43 Greg Jenner? Selya, I am your grandmother and I am sending you to priest school.
11:47 Speaker 05 Sorry.
11:50 Speaker 05 I think, do you know what? I think I would go, but like I would, is it called skiving?
11:54 Greg Jenner? You'd skive, that's a good, yeah.
11:55 Speaker 05 I would, I would skive. It would be like, um, what's that film, Bueller?
12:00 Greg Jenner? Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
12:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, Ferris Bueller. Like Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
12:04 Greg Jenner? Duma, Duma, Duma.
12:06 Speaker 05 I think I would, yeah. I would be like, I would go just because I like structure. But I would be like, I think I'd be a cool priest. Like, do you know the little white, like, thing there?
12:14 Greg Jenner? Oh.
12:15 Speaker 05 Probably wouldn't wear that.
12:16 Greg Jenner? Okay.
12:17 Speaker 05 Probably would like.
12:17 Greg Jenner? You'd be a hip priest.
12:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'd leave it open.
12:20 Greg Jenner? You'd wear Nikes.
12:21 Speaker 05 Yeah. I quite like the idea of confession. That's like a podcast.
12:24 Greg Jenner? Okay. All right. Alexandra did not go. He went on the run.
12:28 Speaker 04 No, he didn't actually. He lied to his mama. He said he wanted money to buy an inkwell and he went on spend it on bread and sausage. And escaped to the forest.
12:41 Speaker 04 You know, but his mother, I mean, as all mothers, quickly forgave him. And, and the seminary idea was dropped.
12:49 Greg Jenner? It's not quite Count of Monte Cristo level escape, is it? Sort of buying a sausage and running to the woods.
12:53 Speaker 05 Yeah. You went camping. You went to Glastonbury.
12:59 Greg Jenner? With his sausage roll, just like, bye, don't want to be a priest.
13:02 Speaker 05 Went to Greg's, went to the woods.
13:06 Greg Jenner? Okay, all right, so he doesn't go to seminary school.
13:09 Speaker 04 No.
13:09 Greg Jenner? Where does he go instead? Does he get an education? You said he got an education, but what level of education?
13:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, he does. I mean, he attended a parish school where he was taught by the very famous abolitionist, Abbe Grégoire. But he was not a very attentive student, so he learned little French literature and history. But he did read the Bible, Le Baron Buffon, Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe and classical mythology.
13:33 Greg Jenner? Okay, so he wasn't paying attention to class, but he was reading. He was diving into the classics.
13:39 Speaker 06 Wow.
13:40 Greg Jenner? Okay, so he's taught by this famous abolitionist, Abbe Grégoire, who's a sort of great intellectual and campaigner against slavery, which is a hugely important thing happening at the time, because of course Napoleon reintroduced slavery. But we should talk about Napoleon, because this is peak Napoleon era, right? Napoleon makes himself, he crowns himself emperor in 1804, which is the most Napoleonic thing you can do. And presumably that influences Alexandre's childhood, Napoleonic wars, all the kind of drama. How does that affect him?
14:10 Speaker 04 Quite strongly, because the wars lasted throughout his childhood. 1803, 1813, so you have various coalitions of European countries against the first French Empire under Napoleon. 1814, for example, the Cossacks marched through Villa Cotteré. And Dumas's mother tried to move the family around several times, but they kept running into different foreign troops. Young Alexandre even saw Napoleon twice.
14:38 Greg Jenner? Wow.
14:38 Speaker 04 And he described him as pale, sickly and impassive.
14:43 Greg Jenner? Oh, that's a pretty brutal review, Celia.
14:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, Napoleon is probably like, didn't say short, though.
14:51 Speaker 05 Because they're short.
14:51 Greg Jenner? Actually, I'm a child my age, so.
14:56 Greg Jenner? So Cossack troops were literally in his town. I mean, that must be scary, right, to have foreign troops marching through your town as you, as a little boy?
15:04 Speaker 04 Yes, it was, but he also found his place, because he was carrying water to surgeons after the battle. So they were trying to make a, you know, make a space for themselves in that environment. And then we learn that a Prussian officer informed Napoleon had surrender. And you have Louis the Eighteenth was named king.
15:24 Greg Jenner? Yes.
15:24 Speaker 04 And just to give you some background, the Bourbon dynasty, he was part of Bourbon dynasty.
15:29 Greg Jenner? Yeah, the Bourbon dynasty is sort of, they're put back on the throne, right?
15:31 Speaker 04 Exactly, exactly. The brother Louis the Sixteenth had been guillotined during the revolution. So the king is there. Even after the Restoration, Alexandre kept the name Dumas, despite the fact that it was actually linked, it was a link between the father and Napoleon. So he could have used that link. He didn't. He chose Dumas as a name.
15:50 Greg Jenner? So then say, I'm still gonna be Dumas, even though my dad fought for Napoleon, who's now the bad guy. It's quite a it's quite a gamble, Celia.
16:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, I have, I have nothing funny to say about that. I'm just really touched, like about hearing about his life and stuff.
16:06 Speaker 04 You know, the fact he chose the name, I was really intrigued by that. It's, it's like a form of militancy.
16:12 Speaker 05 Yes.
16:12 Speaker 04 Very young already. I'm gonna, you know, take my mother. And not just because she was an enslaved and, I mean, the, you know, all that. But also because it's a woman, you know, you don't take the woman's name at the time. It was really something, I mean, something really striking.
16:28 Speaker 05 Definitely. I find it really touching.
16:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
16:31 Greg Jenner? Yeah, it's beautiful.
16:31 Speaker 05 I bet his mom was like, got emotional about it as well.
16:34 Greg Jenner? Yeah, and she's keeping him safe. You know, Cossacks are in the village, she's keeping him safe. It's an extraordinary story where the mom is perhaps quietly, sort of in the background, just going, just, just hide over there and we'll just wait for the troops to go. And meanwhile, Napoleon pale, sickly and impassive. Do you think the books would have sold as well if he'd been Alexandre Dumas de la, what's it, Alexandre Dumas, David de la Paix? You know, that's, it's quite a mouthful.
16:56 Speaker 05 I can't, I can't fit on a book cover, can I?
16:57 Greg Jenner? No. Do you have a stage name?
16:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, I do.
17:00 Greg Jenner? Yeah. Was it hard to choose that? Did you, was that a decision that?
17:04 Speaker 05 It's, it was kind of like a natural, because the first time I did stand up, I used my real name. And my real name is quite like, it sounds really Arabic. And the first gig I did was in Birmingham. And people can't say those words in Birmingham. So when they introduced me on stage, it was like word soup. And I was like, I wanna make it easier for, for the whites. And, and also I quite like the separation. Also, I just thought I'll just change it for like a couple gigs. And then eight years later, I'm stuck. Yeah.
17:33 Greg Jenner? But after the Napoleonic Wars, Olivier, the Bourbon monarchs are, you know, they're trying to restore calm to France, which, you know, they're doing their best. So is that, does that mean that Alexandre's sort of teenage years are a bit more chill? There's no more troops in the streets?
17:47 Speaker 04 Uh, chilled, I'm not sure. I mean, he became-
17:51 Greg Jenner? It's still France, as I know.
17:52 Speaker 04 Yeah. He, he still became an enanos clerk at 14 and worked for a solicitor in Crepi. So while he was working as an enanos clerk, he skipped work and went to Paris one day and fell in love with the city and the theatre. And he eventually moved to the city in 1823, when he was 20.
18:11 Greg Jenner? Oh, lovely.
18:12 Speaker 05 Wow, 20!
18:13 Greg Jenner? He had a big day out as a teenager and went, oh, it's so exciting!
18:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
18:17 Greg Jenner? And then he moved to the city in his, in his twenties.
18:19 Speaker 05 To be 20 in Paris.
18:21 Greg Jenner? Ah, if only.
18:24 Speaker 05 How, where was he before, again?
18:27 Speaker 04 He was in Villard Coteret, in a kind of bourgeois little place, protected little place. And Paris is much more exciting.
18:36 Greg Jenner? Yeah, of course. And he also, he's a bit of a pool shark. He plays billiards. He's really good at billiards, Celia. In fact, he's so good, he won a quite impressive prize. Do you want to guess what the prize was?
18:47 Speaker 05 So we're in the 1800s.
18:48 Greg Jenner? Yep.
18:49 Speaker 05 A Samsung LED TV! And a brand new car. And I was probably, um, a bottle of beer.
18:58 Greg Jenner? More than one bottle of beer?
18:59 Speaker 05 A hundred bottles of beer.
19:01 Greg Jenner? 600 glasses of absinthe.
19:04 Greg Jenner? Which is, and so much absinthe. We don't know if he drank it, we don't know if he tried to stick it on the bus and bring it home.
19:11 Speaker 05 600 glasses?
19:11 Greg Jenner? 600 glasses of absinthe.
19:13 Speaker 05 Surely there's a better transportation method?
19:15 Greg Jenner? I don't know.
19:16 Speaker 05 More bottles, no, I think?
19:17 Greg Jenner? I don't know, I don't know. That's all we know. 600 glasses.
19:20 Speaker 05 Wow!
19:21 Greg Jenner? So we don't know if he tried to ship it home, if he tried to drink it all in one evening and, you know, poisoned himself. I don't know. But there we go.
19:26 Speaker 05 600 glasses of absinthe.
19:28 Greg Jenner? And what happened after Alexandre moved to Paris and drank all his absinthe? Well, yeah, did he wake up one morning in a bush and then think, I'm moving to Paris?
19:36 Speaker 04 No, actually, he continued his career. Two generals his father knew recommended him for a secretariat.
19:45 Greg Jenner? Oh, so daddy's friends?
19:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:46 Speaker 05 Never baby.
19:48 Greg Jenner? Never baby, yeah, okay.
19:49 Speaker 04 Duke d'Orléans, you know, no less. The assistant director of the office, Lasagne, a man called Lasagne, advised him, though, to educate himself further and to read people like Froissart, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Byron, Hugo, La Martine, so he needed further his education.
20:08 Greg Jenner? So he's reading the classics. He's reading the, so Froissart is a great, what, 14th century medieval historian of France, who wrote about Joan of Arc, or not Joan of Arc, just before Joan of Arc, but all these sort of great, great writers. But I'm going to have to stop you there because you said Monsieur Lasagne.
20:21 Speaker 05 Monsieur, yeah, there's a lot of layers to this guy.
20:24 Greg Jenner? Hey, hello. You said you were jet lagged, so that's an excellent joke.
20:29 Speaker 05 I wrote that before coming in.
20:32 Greg Jenner? Monsieur Lasagne, that's a great, I'd love to be called Monsieur Lasagne.
20:38 Speaker 05 Is there a Mrs. Lasagne?
20:41 Speaker 05 He sleeps under lots of them.
20:45 Greg Jenner? Okay, so Monsieur Lasagne is telling him, read the classics, educate yourself. And then by 1818, 1819, Alexandre's, what, 16, 17? He's a young guy, but he's, you know, he's approaching adulthood. Does he start to write? Does he?
21:00 Speaker 04 Yes, I mean, he's fascinated by literature. He met somebody called Adolphe de Levenne, a well-educated son of a count, as you do, who'd been exiled from Sweden for complicity in the king's murder.
21:12 Greg Jenner? Oh, excellent, good.
21:13 Speaker 04 So a bit of an edge there.
21:14 Speaker 05 Wow, how did they meet?
21:16 Greg Jenner? Yeah, he sounds quite sexy.
21:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
21:19 Greg Jenner? An exiled Swedish count who's been implicated in the murder of a king, that's quite, it's quite Dumas, isn't it? It's quite a romantic novel, yeah?
21:26 Speaker 05 Is he seeing anyone?
21:30 Speaker 04 So you have Lévenne and Dumas started to collaborate on act and plays and verse comedies. I mean, it was a fruitful collaboration because they wrote Late Into the Night, Fuel by Wine and Hot Punch.
21:45 Greg Jenner? Okay.
21:46 Speaker 04 But he was also writing solo though, not very successfully. His first kind of verse strategy, Les Grak, wasn't that good. I mean, according to himself, he said he gave it its due by burning it.
22:00 Greg Jenner? Oh, have you ever burned anything you've written and have you ever gone that intense?
22:06 Speaker 05 I think everyone is like a bit embarrassed by the first thing that you write. Instead of burning it, I performed it every day at the Edinburgh Festival.
22:15 Speaker 05 That was my way of doing it and thank you so much for coming.
22:18 Greg Jenner? Hey, you know, it's burned into my memory.
22:22 Speaker 05 No, I've definitely like deleted stuff that I was embarrassed about. But also for some reason, I have a video on my phone of the first time I really bombed. And it's seven minutes long and I cannot delete it.
22:34 Greg Jenner? Really?
22:35 Speaker 05 I can't watch it. I can't delete it. I don't know why it's there.
22:38 Greg Jenner? Is it sort of motivational for you?
22:40 Speaker 05 I don't know. I think it's because I'm like reading to like ego death.
22:45 Speaker 05 Do you know ego death?
22:46 Greg Jenner? Sure.
22:47 Speaker 05 If something good happens to you, you shouldn't like let it feed your ego. But if something bad happens to you, you shouldn't let it impact your ego. And that video, I think, is the one thing keeping me stable.
22:55 Greg Jenner? Okay.
22:55 Speaker 05 Like I can always be humbled by watching me bomb in Birmingham in 2017.
23:00 Greg Jenner? Okay.
23:00 Speaker 05 There's an awful bit in the video where there was one woman in the front row who was kind of like still smiling. And I go, she gets it. And she just like shook her head like.
23:12 Greg Jenner? So Dumas burned it and Celia, you digitally recorded it forever. So in 1830, Dumas was again, I mean, France again thrown into, you know, we talk about the French Revolution. We get another French Revolution.
23:26 Speaker 04 Yes.
23:26 Greg Jenner? The 1813 July Revolution. Do you know this one, Celia?
23:29 Speaker 05 The 14th of July. Oh no, that was a different one.
23:33 Greg Jenner? Yeah, yeah.
23:33 Speaker 05 I love revolutions in July.
23:35 Greg Jenner? Yeah, well, it's sunny. You're out in the streets, you know, barbecue weather. You think, actually, I don't really like the king, you know.
23:42 Speaker 05 I don't know this revolution.
23:43 Greg Jenner? This is the 1830. It's called the Three Day Revolution. It's basically the Glastonbury of revolutions. Do you want to tell us about it, Olivier?
23:50 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, it's not supposed to be funny, though.
23:54 Greg Jenner? Sorry, sorry.
23:55 Speaker 05 Try and stop us.
23:56 Greg Jenner? Yes.
23:58 Speaker 04 So you have Charles the Tenth, who was brother of Louis the Eighteenth, deposed and replaced with the Duke d'Orléans. And in a letter to Dumas, claimed that he was sent by Marquis de Lafayette and the Duke on the mission to acquire gunpowder. I mean, he probably exaggerated, but he did approach Lafayette and about forming a National Guard in the Vendee region. But the king told Dumas to return to poetry.
24:25 Greg Jenner? Oh, stick to poetry is quite the burn.
24:29 Speaker 05 It's so sassy.
24:30 Greg Jenner? Isn't it?
24:31 Speaker 05 You know, the more I learn about the king,
24:35 Speaker 05 the more I side with the Swedish guy.
24:40 Greg Jenner? Louven, yeah. Okay, well, luckily for literature lovers, Dumas obeyed the royal decree of sticking to poetry. And he started banging out plays.
24:48 Speaker 04 Absolutely. I mean, between eighteen twenty-nine and fifty-one, quite a long time. He started a new play on the Parisian stage every year except one. He pioneered two new genres.
25:00 Greg Jenner? Wow.
25:01 Speaker 04 Romantic historical drama and modern drama. And the plays often featured illegitimate or poor heroes struggling against societal obstacles and harriands who become victims to their lovers. We have eighteen of his plays staged at the Comédie Française, which is huge, which was huge at the time. But many of those plays were also in the Théâtre des Boulevards. So he was basically writing for kind of bourgeois theatre-going public.
25:30 Greg Jenner? So the kind of middle-class audiences.
25:32 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
25:33 Speaker 05 Did he get a lot of people copying him after that?
25:36 Speaker 04 I think so. At some point, the genre, the kind of people lost interest. So it came back in the twentieth century, mid-twentieth century, rather.
25:46 Speaker 05 But he invented it, he did.
25:48 Speaker 04 I mean, that's what they say. I'm always wary about that.
25:51 Greg Jenner? It's always hard to know who invents a genre, isn't it?
25:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:54 Greg Jenner? Yeah. But I suppose what's interesting is that he's living through extraordinary historical times. But he's writing about the past, so he can talk about the present without anyone getting in trouble. So it's that sort of thing of you're kind of holding up a mirror to now by going, oh, no, it's the seventeenth century, actually.
26:08 Speaker 05 What if I do the Reinhard Seres book?
26:10 Greg Jenner? Hmm.
26:10 Speaker 05 Do you know that one?
26:11 Greg Jenner? No, tell me, yeah.
26:12 Speaker 05 Um, okay.
26:15 Greg Jenner? You're regretting opening your mouth now, aren't you? Yeah.
26:18 Speaker 05 Okay, ju- just for the listeners, I would know this normally, but again, I'm a dum-dum today. It's um, an absurdist book about everyone turning into rhinoceruses.
26:33 Greg Jenner? Rhinocerai, rhinocerou?
26:35 Speaker 05 Rhinocerou. But it was actually about the rise of fascism.
26:40 Greg Jenner? Oh, it's always the Nazis, isn't it? It's always the Nazis.
26:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
26:43 Greg Jenner? Lovely. I don't know that book. I'll have to look that up. Thank you. Alexandre Dumas is writing these kind of impressive stories set in the past, right? See, there's a, there's one called Henry III and His Court, or Henri III. There's one called Antony. What's the general theme of his work?
26:59 Speaker 04 Yes, he wrote Henri III et sa cour, set in July 1578, exactly in the past, at the court of Henry III.
27:06 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
27:06 Speaker 04 The last valois monarch, and he received 6,000 francs for the sale of the manuscript.
27:12 Greg Jenner? That's good money.
27:14 Speaker 04 Antony, 1831, was about an illegitimate hero who was unable to marry his love because of social position.
27:21 Greg Jenner? Right, okay.
27:21 Speaker 04 And in the end, she begs him to kill her.
27:24 Greg Jenner? Oh.
27:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:26 Greg Jenner? You said he was funny, Olivier. That doesn't sound very funny. Okay, anything else that's a bit cheerier?
27:32 Speaker 04 Another, another one, La Tour de Nelle, 1832. That was his most successful romantic drama, and it was about Margaret of Burgundy.
27:41 Greg Jenner? Yes.
27:41 Speaker 04 Who killed her lovers.
27:42 Greg Jenner? Okay.
27:45 Greg Jenner? I'm sensing a theme.
27:47 Speaker 04 Yes. I mean, he was very successful though, because you have 800 consecutive performances. That, that's absolutely huge.
27:55 Greg Jenner? Okay, that is amazing. That's extraordinary. That's like, that's like mousetrap level, isn't it? Of having a play that just runs and runs and runs.
28:00 Speaker 04 Exactly.
28:01 Greg Jenner? But you, you said he's funny, but so far I'm hearing everyone dies.
28:06 Speaker 04 He was, he was having a go at a genre that seemed to be working, so he kept writing those ones. I mean, throughout the 1830s, romantic dramas started to be less popular, so he had to shift his focus as well. To something slightly different, that is still into the romantic kind of aspect of things, though.
28:22 Greg Jenner? Okay. In 1832, Céline, we get another French revolution. This one's more famous. This one's the Anne Hathaway revolution. This is Les Misérables.
28:30 Speaker 05 I like to call that Dance Dance Revolution.
28:35 Greg Jenner? So we have the barricades in the streets.
28:36 Speaker 05 Yes.
28:37 Greg Jenner? This time, Dumas, he has to leave France. He's in trouble.
28:41 Speaker 05 This, how old is he around this time?
28:44 Greg Jenner? He's about twenty nine. He's late twenties.
28:47 Speaker 05 So he's written, he's done all of this before twenty nine?
28:50 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
28:51 Speaker 04 Very prolific.
28:52 Speaker 05 Well, nepotism will get you anything. No, that's really, there was no phones back there.
28:58 Greg Jenner? That's it, right? He's just not on Instagram. The rest of us are just scrolling.
29:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, I could have an eight hundred day run of my beautiful play. But I'm too busy watching recipes.
29:09 Speaker 05 So he has to run away.
29:11 Greg Jenner? He has to flee. He gets in trouble with the king.
29:14 Speaker 05 What happened?
29:15 Greg Jenner? Olivier, why is the king annoyed at this sort of young upstart writer?
29:20 Speaker 04 Well, for some reason, he decided to officiate the funeral of a Bonapartist general. Something you shouldn't just do. We don't know why. Anyway, the king considered his arrest.
29:31 Speaker 05 We've all done corporates, all right?
29:36 Speaker 05 Tax bills in January, do you know what I mean? Check the date. But that was November, December.
29:44 Speaker 04 The problem is that he had to leave, though. He had to leave Paris. And so he went to the south of France and then to Switzerland.
29:51 Greg Jenner? Yeah, sure.
29:51 Speaker 04 So it wasn't too bad. And winter time, eighteen thirty two, thirty three, he, he, he published the accounts of his Swiss travels. So monetizing the thing.
30:00 Greg Jenner? Oh, okay. So he's a travel writer now.
30:02 Speaker 05 First person in the world to publish their Swiss accounts.
30:05 Greg Jenner? Hello. He travelled to Italy as well. I mean, he meets the Pope?
30:11 Speaker 04 I mean, he allegedly met the Pope.
30:14 Greg Jenner? Allegedly?
30:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, because, I mean, he was arrested by a papal police. So thanks to his revolutionary kind of reputation, so we're not quite sure he met.
30:25 Greg Jenner? The Swiss Guards in silly pajamas arrested him.
30:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. But he had to, he had to leave eventually. I mean, after his mother's death in eighteen thirty six, he went on another journey.
30:36 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
30:37 Speaker 04 But this time through Brussels in Germany.
30:39 Greg Jenner? Right. I mean, Celia, you're a touring comedian. Does, does travel inspire or does it tire?
30:46 Speaker 05 I think like it's nice for your eyes to see different things.
30:50 Speaker 05 Sorry, I'm a poet. Write this down. So I think it. I feel like monotony of like staying in the same city can kind of get your brain stuck
31:00 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
31:00 Speaker 05 And the same patterns. I think it inspires. Um, I think, yeah, definitely. I think it's also quite stressful because like you do need like something to anchor yourself, but it sounds like even looking back at his childhood, it feels like he's had to run away from different places and bumping into most more and more impressive people.
31:20 Greg Jenner? Yeah, I mean, he knows the Duke de L'Or, he's met the king, he's now hanging out with the Pope, we're being arrested with by the Pope. He's a quite well-connected guy.
31:28 Speaker 04 Very well-connected. I mean, he, again, his father was a general and he's coming from la paetrerie, I mean, aristocracy.
31:37 Greg Jenner? But we should say again, he's mixed race, right? So he's moving through Europe, through France, but he's a mixed-race man with a slightly competitive, difficult relationship with his father, who was a Napoleonist general. So these countries have been invaded by Napoleon. Napoleon is not necessarily everyone's best favorite friend. So it's kind of interesting being the son of a guy who invaded Italy and then going, hello.
31:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, that's why he chose Dumas to kind of perhaps, yes, be a bit further away from that as well.
32:04 Greg Jenner? Right. Okay. Okay. That makes sense.
32:09 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
32:36 Speaker 02 Sometimes we all need an extra helping hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task like turning a folder or scattered notes into a report, and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you and Claude Design. Now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing. Attach your design system and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack.
33:19 Speaker 02 And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai/solve.
33:46 Speaker 07 Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.
34:06 Speaker 08 To this day, Ordinary would not have done anything and I would have not been able to put it out if Book Talk didn't back it up and if my wife and a friend didn't back it up.
34:14 Speaker 07 Amazing.
34:15 Speaker 08 Pretty crazy how like, just one thing.
34:18 Speaker 07 Right.
34:18 Speaker 08 I mean, I bet we could point to nine different things in our careers where it's just one thing, all of a sudden. If that one thing didn't happen, then I wouldn't be here.
34:25 Speaker 07 What you're talking about right now is what I've been talking about since the beginning of my career. There's these things outside of you
34:33 Speaker 08 Yeah.
34:33 Speaker 07 that make everything happen. These other forces somehow came into contact with each other and helped propel you to this place.
34:43 Speaker 08 It's just insane.
34:44 Speaker 07 Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
34:56 Greg Jenner? Well, let's break from politics and plays. Let's talk about the other big P. Let's talk about his big P.
35:02 Speaker 05 His passion?
35:03 Greg Jenner? His passion. His passion for the ladies. Alexandre Dumas was a player.
35:12 Greg Jenner? I mean, actually, I mean, Alexandre's love life, was it as saucy as Monsieur Lasagna's reading list?
35:18 Greg Jenner? Even more. Even more saucy.
35:19 Speaker 05 The sauce was bechamel. That was so stupid.
35:24 Greg Jenner? Okay, he married, right? Alexandre, he found a wife, he settled down, he married her, and that was the love of his life, yes?
35:30 Speaker 04 Hmm, no, not quite. Eighteen forty, he married his mistress, Ida Ferrier, who was an actress. They soon separated, she moved to Florence in eighteen forty-four, they never saw each other again.
35:42 Greg Jenner? Great.
35:44 Speaker 04 But he didn't stop there, though. He had, oh well, allegedly, he had forty mistresses throughout his life.
35:50 Greg Jenner? Four zero.
35:51 Speaker 04 Four zero, and claimed.
35:53 Greg Jenner? Forty mistresses.
35:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, but that's not it. Dumas himself said, "I don't want to exaggerate, but I really believe that up and down the world, I have more than five hundred children."
36:05 Greg Jenner? How do you even?
36:07 Speaker 05 What's the math?
36:08 Greg Jenner? I mean.
36:09 Speaker 05 Can anyone do quick maths?
36:10 Greg Jenner? No.
36:11 Speaker 05 It's five hundred divided by forty?
36:13 Greg Jenner? I mean, yeah.
36:14 Speaker 05 Can we get? Oh, no. But you can, you can say anything, can't you?
36:19 Greg Jenner? I mean, sure.
36:20 Speaker 05 No one's gonna be like, "All right, bring them."
36:23 Greg Jenner? Producer Steve tells me that's twelve and a half kids per mistress, so.
36:27 Speaker 05 Wow.
36:28 Greg Jenner? That's, uh.
36:31 Greg Jenner? Which statistically means that some of those probably had twenty kids, because, you know, law of averages, bell curves.
36:35 Speaker 05 I find it so funny, like, the idea of a man bragging about how many kids they've got, like, now they're trying to hide them.
36:40 Greg Jenner? Yes, it's the opposite Boris Johnson effect, isn't it?
36:45 Greg Jenner? But he's going around going, "Five hundred kids."
36:47 Speaker 05 Was he going for fifty thousand?
36:49 Greg Jenner? He's building his own army, like Daddy. "I shall have my own Dumas army."
36:55 Speaker 05 Forty mistresses.
36:56 Greg Jenner? Okay, Olivette, from a legal point of view, in terms of inheritance law, how many of those five hundred kids does he actually recognise legally? And say, "This is my son, this is my daughter."
37:07 Speaker 04 Well, he recognised five of them.
37:11 Greg Jenner? Oh my god.
37:14 Greg Jenner? So ninety-nine percent of his kids, he's like, "You're dead to me."
37:17 Speaker 04 Or maybe four, four or five.
37:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
37:20 Greg Jenner? Wow, okay, who are the, who are the kids he recognises? Do, you know, do we have a kind of roll call of, like, official Dumas heirs?
37:26 Speaker 04 Yes, we do, I mean, we have Alexandre Dumas' fils.
37:29 Greg Jenner? Yes.
37:29 Speaker 04 With the dressmaker Catherine, or Catherine Labay. And Dumas' fils went on to become famous because he wrote the, the novel La Dame aux Camélias.
37:38 Greg Jenner? Yeah, the Ladies and the Camelias, yeah, it's a wonderful one.
37:40 Speaker 04 And then you have Marie-Alexandre Dumas with Belle Crell-Sameur. Uh, Henry Bauer with Anna Bauer, who was the wife of an Austrian merchant in Paris.
37:49 Greg Jenner? Great, so he's, he's, his wives, his mistresses are cheating on their husbands. Great, that's also lovely.
37:55 Speaker 04 Michaela, uh, Clely, Josefa, Elizabeth Cordier with Emily Cordier, who was nineteen at the time when Dumas was fifty-seven. When they were in a relationship. What do they talk about?
38:08 Greg Jenner? Uh, yeah, you, you pulled a face there, Salia, that we could best, best be described as smell the fart. It was an absolute.
38:16 Speaker 04 She was nineteen, he was fifty-seven.
38:18 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
38:19 Speaker 04 They probably didn't talk right.
38:20 Greg Jenner? No, okay. Whatever did they get up to? I think we know. We found the twelve and a half kids, uh, statistical, uh, bulk up there.
38:27 Speaker 04 Even worse than that, in his later years, his son and, and him would sometimes have the same mistresses. Sorry, say that again? His son. Would have, that they would share mistresses.
38:37 Greg Jenner? Yeah. So Alexandre Feis, junior, all for one and one for all, right? That's, uh, that's what the Musketeers would say.
38:43 Speaker 05 You know what's crazy? It's like, I know so much about, it's like, I mean, I know so much about him now.
38:49 Speaker 05 So like, I get it.
38:52 Speaker 05 I think like, he sounds really charming. He's had a lot of stuff. Interesting things happened to him in his life.
38:58 Greg Jenner? At the start of the episode, Oliver, I, I listed some of the novels that have been turned into movies and, and TV shows. We, we haven't talked about novels yet, so we've talked about plays so far. He writes a lot of novels, but we, we'll know some of the, the big ones. Can you talk us through the novels? Is, is he pivoting to novel because it's a new genre? Is it just that he wants to tell longer stories that, you know?
39:17 Speaker 04 What he does is writing things that can be serialized.
39:21 Greg Jenner? Okay.
39:21 Speaker 04 And that can be put into, uh, magazines. Just to give you an example, Le Capitaine Paul earned the magazine siècle five thousand subscribers in just three weeks.
39:31 Greg Jenner? When you say serialized, this is what Dickens was doing too. He's writing chapters per week, like a new chapter each week in the magazine. So you have to subscribe to the magazine to read the novel.
39:39 Speaker 04 Yes. Wow.
39:40 Greg Jenner? So it's like a sort of serialized story. It's like a soap opera.
39:42 Speaker 04 And he got him five thousand subscribers?
39:44 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
39:44 Speaker 04 So amazingly, he's doing amazingly. So he carries on. He writes a novel called Georges about a biracial dual heritage son of a planter, possibly drawing on his own life. But his greatest success is of course with the D'Artagnan romances.
39:59 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
40:00 Speaker 04 So i- i- including the Three Musketeers serialized.
40:04 Speaker 04 For six years and the Count of Monte Cristo serialised for two years in eighteen forty four forty six. So it's working. It's a it's a type that is working. He also wrote popular series about the Valois monarchs and including the very famous La Reine Margaux.
40:22 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
40:22 Speaker 04 If you remember the movie.
40:23 Greg Jenner? Yeah, yeah, it's a wonderful movie.
40:24 Speaker 04 With Isabelle Ajani.
40:25 Greg Jenner? Yeah, I mean, that's the Queen Marguerite, I suppose. And for listeners, that's we've done an episode on Catherine de Medici. She is the baddie in that novel. She is the villain, right? She's she's kind of conspiring and poisonous and sinister. I mean, The Three Musketeers stories are so famous now from Hollywood. We all know All for One, One for All, and Men in Floppy Hats. But they're set in the seventeenth century. So they're set in the time of Louis XIV and Charles II. And they're really popular, aren't they? He's writing about a kind of romantic past.
40:55 Speaker 04 Yes, a romantic past. And people at a time where people need to wanted to dream about an imagined past. So it's working well for him, probably making him a lot of money and the way in more more popularity as well.
41:10 Speaker 05 Was that his big blockbuster, would you say?
41:12 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely. At the time, it was. And yes.
41:16 Greg Jenner? Monte Cristo is probably his biggest hit, you think? I mean, it's that's the one I mean, that's the one that Hollywood keeps remaking, doesn't it? Have you read Count of Monte Cristo?
41:23 Speaker 05 I did at school. And actually, the more I'm here, the more I remember that I have read all of these things in school. But yeah, there's it keeps being remade. There's an amazing one with Pianina that's come out that's like gone massive now.
41:36 Greg Jenner? Yeah, a big French one, isn't it?
41:37 Speaker 05 Yeah. It's kind of amazing. I've put in his life experience into different voices. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, everything kind of is the same thread, but like in different, you know, it's kind of.
41:47 Greg Jenner? You're right, because Georges is about, as you said, a biracial son of a planter. So that's about his family story. The Musketeers is sort of about his dad as a sort of great soldier. And then the Valois monarch is about kind of the political intrigues that he's sort of been involved with all the revolutions happening around him, La Reine Margaux. So it's he's he's drawing on his own life, but he's kind of putting it behind a veil so that he doesn't get in trouble.
42:08 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely. And you have the women's stories and characters, La Reine Margaux. I mean, with all the nuances that you can have in a character like that. Um, I I'm just thinking about something. You know, I sent you a picture. I was in Marseille.
42:22 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
42:23 Speaker 04 And I sent you a picture of a Chateau Dif.
42:25 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
42:25 Speaker 04 Because I kept thinking about this place, this tiny place that is really almost oppressive in in in the south of of of France and and to to think that he based his novel on on this place. I was just, I mean, I've been there many times, but I was just moved and excited.
42:40 Greg Jenner? That's it. A lot of his stories are based on real historical events, aren't they? D'Antoni was a real guy.
42:44 Speaker 05 Was it?
42:44 Greg Jenner? Yeah, and the Musketeers were real and you know, D'Antoni was real.
42:47 Speaker 05 That's so cool.
42:48 Greg Jenner? We should mention, however, the the ghostwriter.
42:52 Speaker 04 Uh huh.
42:53 Greg Jenner? Auguste Macet, who no one, but we're not doing a podcast about this guy.
42:58 Speaker 04 Yes.
42:58 Greg Jenner? He had a, he had a kind of secret co-writer.
43:01 Speaker 04 He did. He was really criticised about that. Macet helped him with development and ideas. Uh, but Dumas wrote the novels. Uh, he was accused.
43:13 Greg Jenner? Um, that's interesting. So as a, as a, as a stand-up, you have, you you write your own shows, but you have a director who?
43:19 Speaker 05 Sometimes, yeah, you can, I think some stand-up will have directors, uh, like, but like, directors take on different roles. So like, the way I've used them is more like architectural, just because I'm too much of a silly billy for structure. And that's medical.
43:35 Greg Jenner? You're whimsical.
43:38 Greg Jenner? You have a diagnosis of whimsical.
43:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly.
43:41 Greg Jenner? Uh, so Olivier, Macet is is the ideas guy, but Dumas is doing the typing. He's, he's actually there with quill in hand, writing these serialised novels, these huge, I mean, Monte Cristo is a massive novel.
43:52 Speaker 04 It it seems to me that it was a collaboration between the two development ideas. It's a bit like they're brainstorming.
43:57 Greg Jenner? Okay.
43:58 Speaker 04 And then the, uh, Dumas is the one writing the novel. Um, the problem is that not everyone liked that. For example, in in eighteen forty-five, there's a journalist who accused him of running a, quote, a novel factory. And, yeah.
44:12 Speaker 05 Oh.
44:12 Speaker 04 Because he's producing so much, people are starting to say, that can't be him and it can't be possible. The journalist also used the term, he's using a negre, which has a double meaning. It means a black enslaved person from the colonies and a ghostwriter in mainland France.
44:28 Greg Jenner? Oh, really?
44:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:30 Greg Jenner? Right, so there's a sort of allusion there to his mixed-race heritage, do you think?
44:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, definitely. And the fact that he's not doing the work himself. But Dumas answered quite rightly by saying that he had research assistants in the same way Napoleon had generals.
44:46 Speaker 05 Oh, that's sick.
44:47 Speaker 04 And he sued the journalist and he won.
44:49 Greg Jenner? That's quite a comeback, isn't it?
44:50 Speaker 05 Yeah. The more popular he got, it probably had more and more people trying to be contrarian as well. I imagine journalists wanting to.
44:58 Greg Jenner? Yeah, taking, take sort of shots at him.
45:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, which is often the thing with like mixed-race people. Like, there's often accusations of like.
45:05 Speaker 04 You can't do it yourself.
45:06 Speaker 05 You can't do it yourself. Who's really doing this? Yeah.
45:08 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
45:09 Speaker 05 Yeah.
45:09 Speaker 04 And it's interesting because they even accused him of plagiarism. It can't come from your, your brain, so you're using young writers to do, to do the work again. But the thing is, he never covered up the names of the collaborations. He was really open about it. And when other writers' names were not included, it wasn't his decision, it was the publisher's decision.
45:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
45:30 Speaker 04 Now, we can argue that he could have fought it, but we don't know what actually happened.
45:33 Greg Jenner? Okay.
45:33 Speaker 05 And it's probably like, there were probably a lot of writers doing that, like using ghostwriters and stuff at the time. And that's why, like, that's where these accusations came from, but editors couldn't believe that he didn't. But it's funny to think of like journalism being like kind of the same as it is now, like, do you know what I mean?
45:53 Greg Jenner? Some things never change. Welcome to history, Celia.
45:56 Speaker 05 First day, first day here.
45:57 Greg Jenner? Yeah, first day, first day, welcome. So Dumas is an incredible superstar of, of writing and, you know, saying he's doing a play every year for those thirty years. He's writing these vast novels, you know, co-creating them with, with MacKay. And of course, he's incredibly rich now. He's laughing all the way to La Bonne. And he built himself a fancy little chateau. Celia, what do you think he calls it? What would you call it?
46:20 Speaker 05 Where is the chateau, please?
46:22 Greg Jenner? Where, where is the chateau? It's in northern France, isn't it?
46:24 Speaker 04 Yes, it's in the outskirts.
46:26 Greg Jenner? Yeah, so outside Paris.
46:28 Speaker 05 D town.
46:31 Greg Jenner? Bring all the ladies to D-Town. Okay. For his 500 kids. He calls it the Chateau de Monte Cristo.
46:40 Speaker 05 That's sweet.
46:41 Greg Jenner? Is it sweet or is it cringe? I can't tell.
46:44 Speaker 05 No, that's his inner child work.
46:46 Greg Jenner? As you think. I don't know, I can't, it's a bit like Shakespeare having a house called like Hamlet House. Hello, welcome to Hamlet House. I don't know, I feel like it's slightly, it's slightly bordering on.
46:55 Speaker 04 No, think about it. Something made you have so much money.
46:59 Greg Jenner? Okay.
46:59 Speaker 04 You want to celebrate it.
47:00 Greg Jenner? All right.
47:01 Speaker 04 I would.
47:02 Greg Jenner? It cost him an absolute fortune.
47:04 Speaker 05 And it had to be big for all of the absinthe.
47:06 Greg Jenner? Yeah, exactly. But he didn't relax for long, Olivier. He was off travelling again, you know, he's already toured Europe or whatever. But off he went again in 1846.
47:13 Speaker 04 He did, he was offered 10,000 francs to, by the Minister for Public Information, to travel to Algeria.
47:22 Speaker 05 Represent.
47:24 Speaker 05 Was it to rights that you had to go to Algeria?
47:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, to observe rights, representatives, you said.
47:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
47:31 Greg Jenner? To tell the French people about Algeria or to tell the Algerian people about Algeria. Like, who's it for? What's the?
47:36 Speaker 04 I think, given the colonial context, to try and tell them.
47:40 Greg Jenner? Right.
47:40 Speaker 04 How it was and how it should be.
47:42 Speaker 05 What year was this?
47:43 Greg Jenner? 1846.
47:44 Speaker 05 1846.
47:45 Greg Jenner? Yeah, and Mackay, his, his co-writer went with him. And so did his son, Alexandre Fils, you know, Junior, I'm going to call him Junior, sorry. They went as well, and they went on a, they went to a royal wedding on the way in Spain.
47:59 Speaker 04 Which, which shows that, you know, he had his connections to the elite of the country. And not just the country, actually, to across Europe.
48:08 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
48:08 Speaker 04 To be invited to those places.
48:10 Greg Jenner? Properly connected, but the following year, Celia, uh-oh, the creditors came in and turned out Alexandre Dumas did not have as much money as he thought he had. And he had to pay an awful lot of money to his ex-wife.
48:23 Speaker 05 Which one?
48:24 Greg Jenner? The, the, the one that lasted like four years and then was gone. Ida, was it?
48:27 Speaker 05 Ida Ferrier.
48:28 Greg Jenner? Yeah. So he's in trouble financially. He has to sell his chateau, doesn't he, for, for pittance of what he'd spent building it?
48:35 Speaker 05 That's a shame.
48:36 Greg Jenner? That's a real shame.
48:37 Speaker 05 Yeah. It's also a name, yeah, the name would feel so sad.
48:41 Greg Jenner? Yeah, exactly. It's devastating, isn't it? You're right, actually. Okay, I take you back. It's not cringe. It's sad. He had to sell the chateau that was...
48:47 Speaker 05 It's like if you had a house called Chateau de Greg Genin. So he has to sell his house.
48:51 Greg Jenner? Yeah, and then there's a coup in France, another revolution, the coup of Louis-Napoleon, eighteen fifty-one.
48:57 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
48:57 Greg Jenner? Where the president of France says, actually, I'm basically emperor now.
49:00 Speaker 04 Yes, yes. Obey me from now on.
49:03 Greg Jenner? French history's fun, isn't it?
49:05 Speaker 05 It's just about who's the most confident.
49:08 Speaker 04 But, you know, he used that as an excuse to kind of evade his creditors.
49:13 Greg Jenner? Oh, good. So he's on the run. Okay.
49:16 Speaker 04 He was on the run.
49:16 Greg Jenner? Where did he go?
49:17 Speaker 04 He went to Belgium.
49:18 Greg Jenner? Excellent.
49:19 Speaker 04 Stayed there for two years, but he didn't stop his lifestyle because he was living in luxurious, luxurious lifestyle on credit over there. Yes.
49:29 Greg Jenner? Good. So he's got his credit card. Yep.
49:31 Speaker 05 Amazing.
49:32 Greg Jenner? I mean, you know, extraordinary guy. He wouldn't have made a great sort of financial columnist or even a dating guru, but he is a great writer. Eighteen fifty-eight, he travels to Russia.
49:40 Speaker 04 He did. He even, he traveled to Russia. He made another investment. He bought a small boat that he called Emma. He landed in Genoa. He learned that Garibaldi was trying to unite Italy, so he's involved in politics again.
49:56 Greg Jenner? So this is Ressortimento, this is the unification of Italy.
49:59 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
50:00 Greg Jenner? He's getting involved in other people's politics.
50:02 Speaker 04 He's saying, well, let me help. Let me stay and help.
50:05 Speaker 05 Because he's like on the run, but he can't stay away from like the action. He cannot, like, I've never seen someone on the run just like meeting different leaders.
50:15 Greg Jenner? Yeah, just showing up to royal weddings and just going, oh, there's an Italian civil war, so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna help out. So he's got five thousand, he's got five thousand francs being given to him by Garibaldi to carry soldiers on his new yacht that he's just built.
50:29 Speaker 04 He gave Garibaldi.
50:30 Greg Jenner? Oh, he gave money. Okay, he gave money.
50:32 Speaker 04 In exchange, kind of return, they gave him the King's Summer Residence in Naples.
50:36 Greg Jenner? Lovely.
50:36 Speaker 04 He spent a few years there.
50:38 Greg Jenner? Yep.
50:38 Speaker 04 And he returned to Paris in eighteen sixty-four.
50:41 Greg Jenner? Great.
50:42 Speaker 05 I am fascinated by this guy.
50:44 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
50:45 Speaker 05 I don't know if I like him. I can't figure it out. Yeah, I can't figure out if I like the guy.
50:50 Greg Jenner? There's a roguish charm.
50:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
50:52 Greg Jenner? But yes, I, you know, on the, on the run from his creditors, that's one thing.
50:56 Speaker 05 I just, it's so funny how many times he's been on the run. Like, it's just, like, every few minutes, that's like the chorus in all of this. And now he's on the run again.
51:04 Greg Jenner? It's a callback. I mean, we need to talk very quickly, Olivier, about the end of his life. I mean, we could do so many podcasts on his writing career. Yeah, but the end of his life, ill health caught up with him, didn't it?
51:13 Speaker 04 Yes, I mean, he, he had an illness, possibly dropsy. He had, he ran into financial difficulties and eventually he died on the fifth of December eighteen seventy in his son's home. It would take the French state over a hundred years to recognise him as a literary figure, but almost as a state person because his remains were transferred to the Pantheon in two thousand and two. His popularity grew, but the, his importance as a national figure came much later.
51:48 Greg Jenner? Gotcha. And dropsy, we should say, I think is an illness where you have swelling of the body. It's, you know, it's not very nice. So he was, he was quite poorly in his life. He just missed the Franco-Prussian War, I think. He just missed the invasion of, of France by the Prussian Army. So he so nearly got another bit of history in, in there, but he just missed it, I think. So, so it's quite the life, Celia.
52:06 Speaker 05 Yeah. How old was he when he died?
52:08 Greg Jenner? He died in eighteen seventy, so he'd been about sixty-seven, give or take.
52:11 Speaker 05 That's quite a long life.
52:13 Greg Jenner? Yes, yeah, he saw some stuff.
52:16 Speaker 05 Do you know what, what the problem is, is that like you've like now started a thing where I feel like I just don't know enough. So I'm gonna go home and just read his whole Wikipedia page. I thought.
52:27 Speaker 04 Does it resonate with you? I mean, his, his life, are there things that resonate with you?
52:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think there's like, there's quite a few things in it that like.
52:34 Greg Jenner? You're flicking through your notebook. You've got quite a lot of notes there.
52:36 Speaker 05 I've got so, so many notes, but like from the Street of the Boy, I fancy.
52:41 Greg Jenner? There we go.
52:41 Speaker 05 To an entire man.
52:44 Greg Jenner? The nuance window.
52:50 Greg Jenner? It's time now for the nuance window. This is where Celia and I sit quietly for two minutes and make a start on reading The Count of Monte Cristo, while Professor Olivette steps into the literary salon to tell us something we need to know about Alexandre Dumas. So my stopwatch is ready, Olivette. Take it away.
53:05 Speaker 04 I like to talk about Dumas and prejudice against people of African descent in the 19th century, and in particular, how life was like for Dumas. He was the son of a minor aristocrat and the descendant of an enslaved person. The first point is that it wasn't unusual at all throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, where you have a number of people of African descent from aristocratic families across Europe. However, the way they were treated depended on whether they were wealthy and protected by the country's leaders or not. Alexandre was attacked because of his ethnic background, but in many ways, he was also protected by his class and his father's reputation as a respected general. He was not wealthy enough to just be a man of leisure, as we have seen, but he made
53:48 Speaker 04 a very decent life with his writings and could afford to live in very bourgeois houses in and outside Paris. However, racism against him was evident in many ways. His popularity with readers and theatre goers made him very well-known as a literary figure. In other words, he was a celeb in the 19th century. He was the symbol of what white, middle and upper-class France dreaded: a racially ambiguous man whose identity crossed several boundaries, especially at a time when so-called racial purity was advocated by the fathers of eugenics and race science. It was also the time when French Parliament voted for an act abolishing slavery, and that was in 1848.
54:30 Speaker 04 We have the government expecting and demanding, actually, former enslaved people forget about centuries of discrimination, as they had officially been granted citizenship, and that was very important. They were expected to get on with the order of things, for example, the white men on top of the social and cultural ladder and them at the bottom. In other words, except to be, officially except to be, second-class citizens and forget about the past almost overnight. So behind the prolific author and love interest, we should also bear in mind that Alexandre Dumas was a dual heritage man who had to navigate a cruel and profoundly racist society. He did it with panache and charm.
55:10 Greg Jenner? Amazing, Olivette. Thank you so much. Celia, any thoughts? No.
55:18 Greg Jenner? What if it said it all?
55:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, I could have listened to you talk for like an hour.
55:24 Speaker 04 It resonates with French society though.
55:26 Speaker 05 Yeah.
55:26 Speaker 04 That where you have to, as a dual heritage, you have to be always charming, otherwise it just doesn't work.
55:33 Speaker 05 One thing that I was thinking about is, sorry to interrupt you, is the report to class. Because in my experience in France, obviously there's quite a lot of racism in France, but we'll talk about racism but not classism in France, that's my experience. And like, I think that the position that he was in where he could be in with the higher societies because of his dad, but like still be a biracial man and suffering from that, do you know what I mean? Like the, it must have been quite a confusing place to be in for him. Like, and quite heartbreaking at times to kind of like be sitting at the top of all of these generals, but still being made to feel small because of the rampant racism, if that makes sense.
56:11 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
56:12 Speaker 05 That must have been really difficult.
56:13 Speaker 04 You know, you said that you don't know if you like him, you see? There's something there.
56:18 Greg Jenner? Yeah, you're coming around to it. Amazing. So what do you know now?
56:27 Greg Jenner? Great, it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Celia to see how much she has learned. Celia, are you feeling confident? You've taken many notes.
56:35 Speaker 05 I've taken so many notes, but most of them are all drawings. And for some reason, the 2002 has been written a million times. So we'll see, I'm excited.
56:44 Greg Jenner? Okay, okay.
56:45 Speaker 05 I'm excited.
56:46 Greg Jenner? Lovely, okay. Well, we've got 10 questions. We'll start question one. Here we go. Question one, what was Dumas' father's occupation?
56:54 Speaker 05 He was a general.
56:55 Greg Jenner? He was, he was a general in Napoleon's army. Question two, how did a young Alexandre Dumas avoid becoming a priest?
57:01 Speaker 05 He ran away and took a sausage and some bread into the woods.
57:05 Greg Jenner? He did, very good. Question three, what did the king tell Dumas to do after the July 1830 revolution?
57:11 Speaker 05 That's when he was sassy, right?
57:13 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
57:13 Speaker 05 That's, I think he said like, give up, don't, don't do this, queen. He was very sassy, he told him to give up.
57:19 Greg Jenner? He said, yeah, stick to poetry, don't do the army stuff. Yeah, that's right. Question four, in what literary medium did Dumas first make his name?
57:27 Speaker 05 Oh, there was plays.
57:28 Greg Jenner? It was, theatre.
57:28 Speaker 05 And, but he was working with another guy at first and then he was bad, like when he started working by himself.
57:33 Greg Jenner? Well done, well remembered. Question five, can you name two of the countries that Alexandre Dumas travelled to on his many adventures?
57:40 Speaker 05 Belgium and Russia.
57:42 Greg Jenner? Very good. Yeah, you could have had Algeria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland. Yeah, they got around. Question six, how many children did Alexandre Dumas claim to have?
57:50 Speaker 05 500 children, 40 mistresses. One guy.
57:55 Greg Jenner? Question seven, who was Dumas' most famous son, who he apparently shared mistresses with?
58:01 Speaker 05 Oh, that's the, um, and he wrote a book and he was also a writer.
58:07 Greg Jenner? He was, yeah, La Dame de Camille. Yeah, that's a lovely one. That's good. You're doing very well. Question eight, can you name two of Dumas' novels?
58:17 Speaker 05 Comme de Monte Cristo.
58:19 Greg Jenner? Beautiful.
58:20 Speaker 05 And of course, how could I forget about La Reine Magou?
58:24 Greg Jenner? Excellent. Well done. You could have had Le Capitaine Paul, Georges and Three Musketeers Romances, which are sort of several novels, very big. Question nine, what was the name of the opulent chateau Dumas built for himself using his writing income?
58:37 Speaker 05 Chateau de Monte Cristo.
58:41 Speaker 05 That was the bell when you.
58:42 Greg Jenner? Oh, we should have a Dumas musical. That'd be great, wouldn't it? And this for a perfect 10 out of 10. And I feel like you might get this one right because you wrote it several times. In what year was Dumas reburied in the Pantheon in Paris?
58:54 Speaker 05 2002.
58:56 Greg Jenner? 10 out of 10, Celia A B. Well done.
58:59 Speaker 05 Thank you, everyone.
59:00 Greg Jenner? You are the Dumas experts. Uh, thank you, Olivette, for a wonderful history lesson.
59:05 Speaker 05 Thank you so much for having me.
59:07 Greg Jenner? Thank you so much, Olivette. Thank you so much, Celia. And if you want more, Professor Olivette listener, check out episode on the Chevalier de Saint George. We've also got episodes on the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon, Catherine de Maniche. And of course, episodes on Josephine Baker, who was also buried in the Pantheon. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with friends. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In history corner, we have the outstanding Professor Olivette Otele from Soas, University of London. Thank you, Olivette.
59:32 Speaker 05 Thank you so much for having me.
59:34 Greg Jenner? It's been a pleasure. And in comedy corner, we have the superb Celia A B. Thank you, Celia.
59:38 Speaker 05 Thank you so much for having me. That was so fun.
59:40 Greg Jenner? It was fun. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we turn the pages of another forgotten historical epic. But for now, I'm off to go and rename my daughter Greg Jenner Fee and encourage her to write history books for kids. So I get to be rich and build a castle called the Chateau de Greg Jenner. Bye.
59:59 Greg Jenner? Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.
1:00:10 Speaker 09 From BBC Radio 4. The Russians will be launching a satellite sometime in the next three weeks.
1:00:15 Speaker 10 I'm Kim Cattrall, back with a new series of Central Intelligence.
1:00:19 Speaker 11 This is a CIA covert op, top secret.
1:00:22 Speaker 10 The drama podcast that tells the history of the CIA from the inside out. Starring Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn and me, Kim Cattrall.
1:00:31 Speaker 12 Ms Page, such a pleasure to meet a real American.
1:00:35 Speaker 09 Listen to Central Intelligence Series Two first on BBC Sounds.
1:00:42 Speaker 02 Sometimes we all need an extra help in hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack.
1:01:26 Speaker 02 And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai/solve.
1:01:52 Speaker 06 Ever wondered what you would do if you found yourself lost in the wild? If disaster struck, would you make the right decisions to stay alive? Real Survival Stories from the Noiser Podcast Network brings you astonishing tales of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations.
1:02:09 Speaker 13 It's the biggest tiger shark I've ever seen in my life. So I just swam. I just swam and swam as fast as I could.
1:02:17 Speaker 14 I realize those two parachutes tied up together is what a dead man sees. I am not going to survive.
1:02:24 Speaker 06 Real Survival Stories. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Previous Empress Matilda: civil war in medieval England Next Kellogg Brothers: a family feud and the creation of a cereal empire Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated