okay I saw someone in my notes being sad that they never hear any positive Victor Hugo stories (honestly most Victor Hugo stories are just bizarre, like how do you even rank the seance thing or the bat present, like at a certain point there just has to be a classification off the good/bad beam that’s just “Romantic” so everyone can get on with life , but I digress)
Anyway I was reading Alexandre Dumas’ memoirs, and apparently early in his career, after a lag caused by multiple censor bans and refusals for all the usual show biz profit reaons, he had put on a play for a sort of Society Preview to get assessed to see if it would keep going? As you do (oh gad French theater in the 20s-30s was so big and so complicated please don’t ask me to explain it all right here but anyway)
and it was a success! But he had to do multiple edits to get permission to make it an ongoing play! Which, okay, he could do that! Except he also had to have an opening night party and entertain the Right People to get this play to be successul! Like, really, had to. So he wines and dines and schmoozes the necessary schmoozing all night and THEN has to go and look at his play and try to be creative and make necessary edits at Why O’Clock in the early morning–
and all the edits were already done. Done really well, by someone really good who totally knew the sort of thing Dumas would have written himself. And it was Why O’Clock in the morning, so he didn’t question the Magic Editing Elves too closely, he was just grateful and went to bed.
But Dumas found out later from a mutual friend who’d been in on it that Hugo and another friend had snuck into the writing studio while the party was going on and done the edits without telling anyone
because they were buddies and buddies do that
even in the memoirs years later Dumas is like YES HIGH FIVE THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY BACON PAL
so there you go, Victor Hugo, Study Buddy and Stealth Assistant Editor FOR FRIENDSHIP.
Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month
The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man.
That’s excellence.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y’all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
SWAG
I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
