{"id":369,"date":"2020-07-01T17:00:34","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T17:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=369"},"modified":"2018-07-03T16:01:57","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T16:01:57","slug":"dumas-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=369","title":{"rendered":"Dumas\u2019 Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Dumas house<\/p><\/div>\n

Bonjour readers. Today we are in France, a little beyond Paris, visiting the so-called Chateau Monte Cristo. This was built by Alexandre Dumas p\u00e8re, <\/em>one of the most successful novelists of the nineteenth century. Begun in 1846 and finished in 1847, the Ch\u00e2teau\u2019s design was commissioned from Hippolyte Durand, the leading architect of the day, as something reminiscent of the Renaissance. The towers are surmounted by Dumas\u2019 initials carved in stone, together with his personal motto, and the head of Dumas himself appears amongst the series of heads of other famous writers (Shakespeare, Virgil, Goethe) which decorate the exterior at first floor height, looking out over the front door. The Ch\u00e2teau itself, then, is entirely fitting for a writer specialising in historical subjects like Dumas, a best-selling exponent of historical fiction.<\/p>\n

If you follow the winding path up the slope behind the Ch\u00e2teau through the parc anglais<\/em> (\u2018English park\u2019), threading through artificial rock arches and grottoes alive with the trickle of streams and pools, you find a miniature Gothic castle set on a miniature island, surrounded by a spring-fed moat. Reached by a stone bridge, and guarded at its entrance by a stone dog chained in a kennel, this is Dumas\u2019 \u2018cabinet de travail,\u2019 or \u2018study\u2019 to English folk. It was commissioned as a gothic pavilion surrounded by water, and is set with stones carved with the titles of eighty-eight of his works. Dumas called it the \u2018Ch\u00e2teau d\u2019\u00cef\u2019.<\/p>\n

The author most famously of The Three Musketeers <\/em>(1844) and The Count of Monte-Cristo <\/em>(1845-6) has of recent years largely fallen out of the French literary canon. But I am old enough to have read many of the French popular classics serialised at length in graphic form in the children\u2019s weekly Look and Learn, <\/em>and as a result the events of The Count of Monte-Cristo<\/em> are burnt into my memory \u2013 the unjust imprisonment of the hero Dant\u00e8s as a supporter of Napoleon during the Hundred Days, his fourteen years in solitary confinement in the island prison of the ancient Ch\u00e2teau d\u2019\u00cef in the bay of Marseilles, his eventual escape enabled by his substituting of himself for the dead body of his fellow-prisoner, friend and mentor, the Abb\u00e9, and his subsequent acquisition of the fabulous treasure of Cardinal Spada hidden within the labyrinthine series of grottoes of the island of Monte Cristo. Even read at full length (three fat volumes), it is a compulsive page-turner. It was also a founding romance for post-Napoleonic France. It was wildly successful both in France and in Britain, and the money it brought in funded the building of Dumas\u2019 palace and its grounds. The site was dubbed the \u2018Ch\u00e2teau Monte Cristo\u2019 by a friend, and with good reason, for the imagination of the author of The Count of Monte Cristo <\/em>is very clearly at work here.<\/p>\n

Within Dumas\u2019 novel, the Ch\u00e2teau d\u2019\u00cef is indeed something of a \u2018cabinet de travail\u2019; the imprisoned Abb\u00e9 occupies himself reading and studying and teaching Dant\u00e8s, ingeniously contriving paper, pens, penknife and ink from two old shirts, fish-head cartilage, a broken candlestick, and a mixture of soot, blood, and communion wine. Despite the privations of his cell he has an extensive library of memorised books: \u2018Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Tornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavel, and Bossuet\u2019. So, you might say that Dumas\u2019 Gothic tower is at once the most sumptuous of writer\u2019s sheds, a description of the privation of the writer\u2019s life, and a description of writerly ingenuity, which spins treasure from mind, body, and basic materials. Dumas was in fact far more fussy about his studying implements than the Abb\u00e9 could afford to be: he wrote in his essay \u2018Ah vous voil\u00e0 Dumas!?\u2019, printed in Mon Odyss\u00e9e \u00e0 la Com\u00e9die Fran\u00e7aise<\/em> in 1856: \u2018I am maniacal on this point; I cannot work without a certain sort of paper, I cannot write without certain sorts of pens, it is impossible for me to write anything with blue ink\u2019. And, by further contrast, Dumas, unlike the Abb\u00e9, was of course free to leave his prison when he chose, rather than being released only by death.<\/p>\n

The stream that flows downwards from Dumas\u2019 \u2018cabinet de travail\u2019 forks: one stream feeds the \u2018pool of Haid\u00e9e\u2019; the other runs directly under the Chateau Monte Cristo and into a \u2018bassin de dragon\u2019 which pours out below the terrace and into what was once an extensive view across the river-plain of the Seine. In Dumas\u2019 time the grounds were filled with\u00a0 monkeys, golden pheasants, peacocks, parrots and a vulture. Symbolically, it is the writer\u2019s confinement within the Chateau d\u2019If which is the source of this Eden-resembling domestic bliss. So, while the Chateau d\u2019If, as purpose-built writing-space, describes writing as imprisonment, the \u2018parc anglais\u2019 that surrounds it describes the pay-off: it shows Dumas, like the protagonist of The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em>, to have come into possession of fabulous wealth as a direct result of his years of captivity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bonjour readers. Today we are in France, a little beyond Paris, visiting the so-called Chateau Monte Cristo. This was built by Alexandre Dumas p\u00e8re, one of the most successful novelists of the nineteenth century. Begun in 1846 and finished in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[211,389,390,28,33,34,35,32,31,30,29,264,388],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alexandre-dumas","tag-chateau-dif","tag-chateau-monte-cristo","tag-history-of-reading","tag-literary-landmark","tag-literary-landscape","tag-literary-museums","tag-literary-pilgrimage","tag-literary-tourism","tag-literary-tourist","tag-love-of-literature","tag-nicola-watson-the-authors-effects","tag-the-count-of-monte-cristo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":371,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions\/371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}