Bøker av Alexandre Dumas Fils

The Clemenceau Case (1866) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas fils. Partly inspired by his own life, the novel takes the form of a letter written from prison to a powerful judge. Looking back on his experiences as an illegitimate child, Pierre Clemenceau provides a scathing critique of French society for its treatment of women and children. Born out of wedlock, Pierre Clemenceau is raised by a mother who tells him he has no father. Clemenceau is educated at a local school until the age of ten, at which point he is sent to a prominent boarding school for boys. There, he struggles to make friends and suffers bullying at the hands of a young American. Tortured day and night, Pierre grows distrustful and violent, and soon turns to a life of crime. As he relates the story of his life to a powerful judge, he declares himself innocent due to the circumstance surrounding his birth, and maintains the following: ¿My true crime¿for which earthly justice will not pursue me, but for which I will never pardon myself nor those who impelled me to, is that I have doubted, and sometimes blushed for my mother.¿ Filled with regret, he looks for answers from the society that made him doubt his mother in the first place, a society which allows men to escape the responsibilities of fatherhood with impunity. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Alexandre Dumas fils¿ The Clemenceau Case is a classic of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

Claudius Ruprecht was raised an orphan without any knowledge of his family. When he joins Wilna University, Claudius goes on a traveling tour through Germany, according to custom of the college. Upon his arrival in Munich, Claudius gets tangled in a fight and challenged to a duel by major von Sendlingen, an officer in cavalry regiment. After he wounds the major, Claudius seeks shelter with a girl he saved, and her father tries to help him escape. But major von Sendlingen is not the only one who is after Claudius. An old beggar woman recognizes him to be the son of a celebrated French sculptor, Clemencau, who married her daughter and killed her. Desperate for revenge, she conspires with the major and they make a plot against the young man.

Set in mid-19th-century France, the novel tells the love story between Marguerite Gautier, a demimondaine or courtesan and Armand Duval, a young bourgeois. Marguerite is nicknamed "lady of the camellias" because she wears a red camellia when she is unavailable for making love and a white camelia when she is available to her lovers. Armand falls in love with Marguerite and ultimately becomes her lover. He convinces her to leave her life as a courtesan and to live with him in the countryside. This idyllic existence is interrupted by Armand''s father, who, concerned with the scandal created by the illicit relationship, and fearful that it will destroy Armand''s sister''s chances of marriage, convinces Marguerite to leave. La Dame aux Camélias is a semi-autobiographical novel based on the author''s brief love affair with a courtesan, Marie Duplessis.

Adapted into a play, it was titled Camille in English and became the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, La Traviata, Duplessis undergoing yet another name change, this time to Violetta Valéry.Dumas was born in Paris, France, the illegitimate child of Marie-Laure-Catherine Labay, a dressmaker, and novelist Alexandre Dumas. During 1831 his father legally recognized him and ensured that the young Dumas received the best education possible at the Institution Goubaux and the Collège Bourbon. At that time, the law allowed the elder Dumas to take the child away from his mother. Her agony inspired Dumas fils to write about tragic female characters. In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired. Not being old enough to invent, I content myself with narrating, and I beg the reader to assure himself of the truth of a story in which all the characters, with the exception of the heroine, are still alive. Eyewitnesses of the greater part of the facts which I have collected are to be found in Paris and I might call upon them to confirm me if my testimony is not enough. And, thanks to a particular circumstance, I alone can write these things, for I alone am able to give the final details, without which it would have been impossible to make the story at once interesting and complete. . . .

Adapted into a play, it was titled Camille in English and became the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, La Traviata, Duplessis undergoing yet another name change, this time to Violetta Valéry.Dumas was born in Paris, France, the illegitimate child of Marie-Laure-Catherine Labay, a dressmaker, and novelist Alexandre Dumas. During 1831 his father legally recognized him and ensured that the young Dumas received the best education possible at the Institution Goubaux and the Collège Bourbon. At that time, the law allowed the elder Dumas to take the child away from his mother. Her agony inspired Dumas fils to write about tragic female characters. In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired. Not being old enough to invent, I content myself with narrating, and I beg the reader to assure himself of the truth of a story in which all the characters, with the exception of the heroine, are still alive. Eyewitnesses of the greater part of the facts which I have collected are to be found in Paris, and I might call upon them to confirm me if my testimony is not enough. And, thanks to a particular circumstance, I alone can write these things, for I alone am able to give the final details, without which it would have been impossible to make the story at once interesting and complete. . . .