Alexandre Dumas

This text was taken from 'Celebrated Crimes', a series of essays on famous criminals and crimes by the author of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and 'The Three Musketeers', Alexandre Dumas, and contains the text from three of the books in the series. This volume contains books on • Beatrice Cenci, an Italian noblewoman committed of murder in the 16th century. • The Countess of Saint-Geran • Karl Ludwig Sand, convicted of murder in the early 19th...

Rousing, big, spirited, its action sweeping across oceans and continents, its hero gloriously indomitable, the last novel of Alexandre Dumas-lost for 125 years in the archives of the National Library in Paris-completes the oeuvre that Dumas imagined at the outset of his literary career. Indeed, the story of France from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, as Dumas vibrantly retold it in his numerous enormously popular novels, has long been absent...

Una noche de febrero de 1578, Louis de Clermont, señor de Bussy, es emboscado en un callejón de París por los favoritos del rey Enrique III. Diana de Meridor, que está retenida por el señor de Monsoreau, le acoge en su casa y el señor de Bussy, en medio del delirio por las heridas recibidas, cree tener una visión y se enamora perdidamente de ella. En medio de las intrigas políticas y los enfrentamientos de la nobleza cortesana que marcaron...

The beginning of the nineteenth century was a time of audacious enterprises and strange vicissitudes of fortune. Whilst Western Europe in turn submitted and struggled against a sub-lieutenant who made himself an emperor, who at his pleasure made kings and destroyed kingdoms, the ancient eastern part of the Continent; like mummies which preserve but the semblance of life, was gradually tumbling to pieces, and getting parceled out amongst bold adventurers...

France had been changed to a limited monarchy from an absolute one, and King Louis XVI had solemnly sworn to defend the new Constitution. But it had been remarked by shrewd observers that he had not attended the Te Deum at the Paris Cathedral, with the members of the National Assembly: that is, he would tell a lie but not commit perjury. The people were therefore on their guard against him, while they felt that his Queen, Marie Antoinette, the daughter...

Excerpt: "It was a winter night, and the ground around Paris was covered with snow, although the flakes had ceased to fall since some hours. Spite of the cold and the darkness, a young man, wrapped in a mantle so voluminous as to hide a babe in his arms, strode over the white fields out of the town of Villers Cotterets, in the woods, eighteen leagues from the capital, which he had reached by the stagecoach, towards a hamlet called Haramont. His assured...

Written in 1847, while Dumas was at the height of his powers, this play recounts the events leading up to the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of the French Huguenots-and the subsequent death of King Charles IX. The playwright focuses on the people inadvertently caught up in the slaughter-which, once started, cannot be repressed. By following the fate of two nobles, the Catholic Count Coconnas and the Huguenot Count de la Mole, and linking their stories...

Dr. Ivans, unable to make a living in London, migrates with his two daughters to Australia, where he hopes to make his fortune; one of his girls, Melida, is forced to leave her suitor, Williams, behind. Arriving in Australia, Ivans finds himself unable to improve his fortune-he's too willing to help the poor, and has a good reputation for charitable works. Then a group of gold miners, a motley crew of Frenchmen, send for him to heal a young miner...

While French writer Alexandre Dumas is best-known for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, many critics consider his Marie-Antoinette novels to be his greatest achievement. Indeed, he was working on a dramatization of The Queen's Necklace at the time of his death in 1870. This was never published, but French playwright Pierre Decourcelle then produced his own version of this work. A successful dramatist, Decourcelle did a brilliant...

Joseph Balsamo is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, inspired by the life and personality of Giuseppe Balsamo, commonly referred to as Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.