Three Musketeers

THE TITANS (508 pp.)--Andre Maurois --Harper ($5.95).

After writing bushels of novels, Alexandre Dumas felt a need for fresh material. He started off toward the Orient in a fishing smack, taking with him a 19-year-old "admiral" decked out in a musical comedy sailor suit. As Dumas wrote to a friend: "The charming little creature is in the habit of becoming a woman at night." Her name was Emilie Cordier, and she became pregnant just before the fishing smack ran into Giuseppe Garibaldi, then busy invading Sicily with his famed "Thousand." Forgetting the Orient, Dumas and the expectant admiral hurried to the great patriot's aid and helped storm Palermo, Dumas wearing "an immense straw hat with three plumes."

In the next two years Dumas 1) became Garibaldi's director of antiquities, 2) helped excavate Pompeii, 3) founded a Neapolitan newspaper, 4) started one novel, one biography (of Garibaldi), a history of the Neapolitan Bourbons in eleven volumes, countless articles, and a sociological study entitled "The Origin of Brigandage." The admiral gave birth to a baby girl and was put on "half-pay." Said happy papa Dumas: "I don't want to exaggerate, but I really believe that, up and down the world, I have got more than five hundred children."

From Paris, Alexander Dumas Jr., most prominent of Dumas' illegitimate "Five Hundred," watched his old man's carryings-on with mingled affection and dismay. Critics have usually argued that Dumas fils (The Lady of the Camellias) was just a shadow of Dumas pere (The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte-Cristo). In this big, revealing study, France's Andre Maurois tries to put the matter in a different light. He sees three generations of the Dumas dynasty as three different expressions of a single theme: "For a whole century [they] played out, against a backcloth of France, the finest of all dramas--their life."

Death in Bed. Dumas pere's own father was a drama in himself. Son of a French marquis and a Santo Domingo Negro woman, he rose from trooper to general in Napoleon's army in a few years. General Dumas was famed for holding the narrow Bridge of Brixen singlehanded against a whole Austrian squadron. He quarreled fiercely with Bonaparte, who put him on "the unemployed list" as soon as he had no further need of him. Broken in spirit, Grandfather Dumas died in 1806, leaving on record the parting words: "Oh! Must a general who, when he was no more than thirty-five, had already been Commander-in-chief of three armies, die at forty, like a coward, in his bed?"

The fighting general's glory was reaped by his writing son. All the general's humiliations were avenged when the author of Musketeers walked across Paris like a king, carrying mountains of debts on his huge shoulders, fearing nothing, not even death. "She will be kind to me," he said, "because I will tell her a story."

Flight from Temptation. The grandson, Alexandre Jr., inherited the huge Dumas frame and champagne padding, the Dumas courage and independence--only the exuberant vitality was missing. Dumas pere could write for twelve hours at a stretch without even feeling tired, but Dumas fils found writing an "exhausting physical labor," which caused dizziness and cramps. Senior lavished money on courtesans, wept his eyes out when they died--and rushed on to the arms of his latest conquest. But his bastard son, haunted since childhood "by the problem of seduced women and natural children," decided at an early age that his own books would be dedicated to the saving of corrupted womanhood.

Young Dumas' famed novel, The Lady of the Camellias (made into a play by Dumas himself and into a grand opera--La Traviata--by Verdi) was based on his love for Courtesan Marie Duplessis. She supplied him with "intoxicating orgies of the flesh"--and he, in return, struggled to reform her, adored her most when she "played the part of the repentant Magdalene." Marie died of consumption at 23, and young Dumas never forgot her glamorous, terrible life. He became "The Man in Flight from Temptation," began to write plays in which seducers were condemned with such cold precision that Parisians were horrified. Complained Gustave Flaubert: "Preventing petticoats from being lifted has become a perfect mania with him."

Thoughts of Monsters. "The most difficult thing of all for the moralist," observes sage Author Maurois, "is to live in accordance with his own principles." Poor Alexandre failed manfully in his efforts to do so. Urging death as the proper penalty for adulterous wives, and crying, "Only the virgin man is invincible," he fell into bed with green-eyed Princess Naryschkine, wife of a Russian nobleman. She bore him a daughter (later legitimized by her marriage to Dumas) shortly after audiences were applauding his ferocious antiseduction drama A Natural Son. Young Dumas' ferocity only caused women to swarm round him. When a young actress said to him, "Feel how my heart's beating. Well, how do you find it?", he only growled, "I find it round."

When Senior died, Junior stepped naturally into his shoes as Grand Old Man of Paris. Yet he continued as "the sworn foe of adultery" with increasing success until his late 60s, when he fell in love with Henriette Escalier, a married woman young enough to be his granddaughter. She became his mistress; after she managed to divorce her husband and Dumas' wife died, they were married, five months before Dumas' death (1895). "I have sometimes seriously thought of entering a monastery," he groaned sometime before his last marriage.

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