Alexandre Dumas

This show is produced, edited, and hosted by Landon Solano.

The original text of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

Theme song by Magic Solo.

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Soon, Ferdinand Philippe started to treat Sobanska more coolly, which mystified the countess until she learned about Leontine Fay, an acclaimed actress around Ferdinand Philippe's age.

Ferdinand Philippe was quite the theatergoer, often hitting shows in the company of his father's secretary, an aspiring writer by the name of Alexandre Dumas.

While Dumas would soon find his own fame as a playwright, followed by even bigger fame as a novelist, he and Ferdinand Philippe's discussions of contemporary plays in the Orleans library focused more on actresses than on scripts.

Dumas, also a famous womanizer, was soon seeing the actress Virginie Pourrier, who performed in Dumas' Henry III and His Court.

Has he read Erkmann Chatrian, Victor Hugo? Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbullier, Renan.

Has he read Gustave Droz's Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé, and those books which leave for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has he read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris? Has he read or heard the plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those titans of modern literature whose names will be household words all over the world for hundreds of years to come? He has read La Terre, this kind-hearted, refined humorist.

When Mark Twain visits a garden, does he smell the violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle? No, he goes in the faraway corner where the soil is prepared.

Hear what he says.

Spencer and the Fairy Queen introduced literal translations of whole stanzas from Ariosto, just as Ariosto had incorporated famous passages from the classical writers.

Besides the difficulty involved in the complexity of the story and the multitude of personages, and even the great Alexandre Dumas himself is relatively simple, other troubles are put in the way of the reader both from the style and from the machines, to use the old term.

Ariosto and the manner of style is not only the despair of any translator, but the despair also of the critic, and of the reader who is biased by the judgment of the critic.

The footnotes of Huell are sprinkled with apologies and lamentations, not for the poverty of the translation, but for the extravagances in the style of his original, which refused to be put into any imitation of Pope's Homer.

But I really enjoyed it.

And when I think about the classics that I have, I've got some Alexander Dumas.

I still have them on my bookshelf.

I think it's also really interesting that when I think of all the authors I read in high school, they're all white guys.