Book Review: 'The Black Count' By Tom Reiss | The Real-Life Count Of Monte Cristo : NPR: The novelist Alexandre Dumas — the one known for penning The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers — is often referred to as "Alexandre Dumas, pere." This is to distinguish him from his son, also a writer, who is identified as "Alexandre Dumas, fils." The thing is, there is an even older Alex Dumas who, while not a professional writer, made quite a name for himself in Revolutionary France. For the father of Alexandre Dumas, pere, the sword was mightier than the pen, and this larger-than-life figure's story heavily influenced the fiction of his literary offspring.
Historian Tom Reiss went to France specifically to uncover the papers and tell the story of this forgotten Dumas, the titular "Black Count" of Reiss' fascinating new book. Thomas-Alexandre (later, simply Alex) Dumas was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue to a blackguard French aristocrat named Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie and one of his black mistresses. According to Reiss, the island colony — known as the "pearl of the West Indies" — accounted for two-thirds of France's overseas trade in the late 18th century.
