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Bettie's Books
A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.
The Black Count
bookshelves: e-book, autumn-2012, biography, nonfiction, published-2012, history, napoleonic, slaves, adventure, families
Read from November 08 to 30, 2012
BOTWA re-read so soon, I hear you ask. BBC has it as book of the week and it will be lovely to hear it recapped.
BBC Blurb - In his new biography Tom Reiss reveals that Alexandre Dumas' father led a life of derring-do that is captured in his son's novels, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Born to a French nobleman, and a black slave in the colonies, the writer's father went on to rise rapidly through the ranks to become a general in the French army. General Alex Dumas' acts of heroism were met with great acclaim, but events conspired against him leading to an irrevocable reversal of fortune.
Read by Hugh Quarshie who appears regularly in BBC One's Holby City. Abridged by Richard Hamilton. Produced by Elizabeth Allard.
“Your life story is a novel; and people, though― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
they love novels wound between two yellow paper
covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come
to them in living vellum.”
-----------------------
Prologue Opening:
FEBRUARY 26, 1806
IT was nearly midnight on the night of February 26, 1806, and Alexandre Dumas, the future author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, was asleep at his uncle’s house. He was not yet four years old. He was staying there because his father was gravely ill and his mother thought it best for him not to be at home. As the clock struck, he was awakened by a loud knock. By the light of a lamp that burned by the bedside, he saw his cousin sit up, visibly frightened. Alexandre got out of bed. He recalled in his memoirs, forty-some years later:
My cousin called to me, “Where are you
going?”
“You’ll see,” I replied quietly. “I’m going
to open the door for Daddy, who’s coming to
say goodbye.”
The poor girl jumped out of bed, greatly
alarmed, grabbed me as I put my hand on the
doorknob, and forced me back to bed.
I struggled in her arms, shouting with all my
strength: “Goodbye, Daddy! Goodbye, Daddy!”
BRILLISCRUMPTABULOUS
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