13878: (Chamberlain) Writer Dumas takes place in tomb of French icons (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Brian Love

     PARIS, Nov 30 (Reuters) - The remains of French writer Alexandre Dumas
left Monte Cristo castle on Saturday on the last leg of a journey to Paris
where he will be laid to rest beside his friend Victor Hugo and other
French luminaries.
     One of France's best loved and most prolific writers, Dumas is famed
for "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo." He died of a
stroke in 1870 and was buried in the town of Villers-Cotterets where he was
born 68 years earlier.
     In March, President Jacques Chirac decreed that Dumas' remains be
transferred to a crypt in the Pantheon, a state mausoleum and official tomb
of honour for icons of French history including fellow writer Hugo,
Rousseau and Voltaire.
     Dumas, the grandson of a female Haitian slave, enchanted readers
worldwide with than 250 plays and novels produced with an army of
assistants. But his own life was perhaps wilder than those of his most
fabled heroes.
     Dumas is said to have drawn much of his inspiration from the Caribbean
escapades of his father, a mulatto general in Napoleon's army, who died
when Dumas was four years old.
     Dumas' best loved works -- the adventures of the swashbuckling
musketeers and the epic tale of love-smitten vengeance in "The Count of
Monte Cristo" were rushed out in just two years in the mid-1850s.
     The last stop on Dumas' three-day, ceremonial journey to Paris was the
Chateau de Monte Cristo, the castle he had built in honour of the hero of
his novel.
     His remains were taken to the French Senate in the Latin Quarter of
Paris before a ceremony on Saturday evening at which Chirac was due to
preside over his entry to the Pantheon.
     French Senate President Christian Poncelet quoted a comment Victor
Hugo once made after Dumas paid him a visit during a period of exile on the
island of Guernsey: "I will return the visit at his grave."
     The Pantheon is the grave of more than 60 luminaries of arts, politics
and science. Plans to lay Dumas among them met resistance last year from
intellectuals, feminists and historians.
     They accused Dumas, renowned for his extramarital affairs and rakish
behaviour, of sexism and questioned whether a writer who employed 60
assistants to churn out commercially successful adventure stories deserved
to lie beside the giants of French literature.
     Dumas is best known abroad for "The Three Musketeers," which tells the
adventures of four heroes living during the reigns of the Louis XIII and
Louis XIV, and for their famous motto "All for One and One for All."
     He was widely credited for reviving the French romantic novel through
serialisation and had a huge story-telling talent that blended fiction and
fact until they were indistinguishable.
     He is equally renowned for his own life of torrid romance and
financial disaster.
     The self-educated Dumas worked in his hometown as a clerk and left for
Paris at a young age. He briefly stopped writing to join the revolution of
July 1830, travelled to Russia and at one time went to Italy at the
invitation of the insurgent Guiseppe Garibaldi.
     He rapidly amassed a fortune from his work and spent it just as
quickly on friends and mistresses. He once had to flee to Brussels to
escape his creditors and only returned when a friend paid his bills.
     One quotation attributed to Dumas epitomised his life:
     "The chains of wedlock are so heavy it takes two people to carry them,
sometimes three."