Jean-Christophe Rufin recounts his Alexandre Dumas

You talk about the fraternal relationship you have with Alexandre Dumas. How does it translate?

Child, I devoured The black tulipa story on a horticulturalist who seeks to create a unique plant in the 17th century Holland, and also Joseph Balsamowho follows the leader of a conspiracy against Louis XV. Each time, I identified myself with the protagonists described simply and found myself in another era, a daily life imbued with wonderful. During my medical studies, these books offered me escape bubbles. Having become a neurologist, I did not dare get into writing, because I compose to authors from the literary environment. Dumas, who had to win his crust as secretary, gave me confidence to tell stories in my own way.

Dumas lost his father at 4 years old. For you, this event was an engine. What?

Son of a Norman nobleman and a black slave from Santo Domingo, soldier of the Republic then companion of Bonaparte, Thomas Alexandre Dumas had a very strong personality. If he had lived more, perhaps he would have been overwhelming. But he had time to tell his very young son the French Revolution and the Napoleonic countryside, to bequeath to him images of epic. His physical absence has given way to a symbolic presence. From this adored figure, Dumas will imagine the character of Porthos, an invincible giant who is the nicest of the musketeers. He will shed a tear, by making him die in The Viscount of Bragelonne .

At the start of his author’s career, he opted for the theater. For what ?

Dumas believed that he was born too late. He was 13 years old at the fall of Napoleon in 1815. In his eyes, the end of the Empire is also that of the ideals of glory, and he sees in the restoration the return of a bourgeois society. He will therefore seek in the theater what he did not find in life. He walks alongside romantic playwrights, which seize historical subjects conducive to intense feelings, especially of the 16th century with his condottieres and his court intrigues.

However, he constantly tried to be an actor of his time …

Yes, he rubs into the world through his travels to Europe and Russia, but also by his commitment to the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and for Italian unification in 1860. For him, history is oriented towards a goal: freedom. While being a republican, he thinks that all the social classes walk in this direction. And he tries to reconcile them in his productions.

So you classify it in the family of “” Writers of life »»like Colette, Romain Gary…

There are authors, like André Gide, who have entered literature through academic studies. Dumas is one of those who were first immersed in misery, war … and who injected their experience into their creation. For example, in his room Antonyhe is inspired by his affair with the poet Mélanie Waldor to stage the tragic love of an unknowing orphan and a military wife.

His romantic triumph comes with The three musketeerspublished in the press in 1844, in the form of a soap opera, the ancestor of our television series. What are the springs?

Dumas first designed what series scriptwriters call a “bible”. He defined the political context, the monarchies of the 17th century, and the main characters that form a magic square: d’Artagnan, intelligence; Athos, the nobility; Porthos, the strength; Aramis, duplicity. Then he propelled these heroes to successive intrigues: the case of the ferrets of Queen Anne of Austria in the first episode, the sling Twenty years later and the mystery of the iron mask in The Viscount of Bragelonne. This mechanics encouraged readers to buy the next day’s newspaper.

Why qualify Count of Monte-Cristo œwork apart?

This other soap opera is distinguished by the unity of history: the revenge of a man. Monte-Cristo, it was Dumas who wanted to take revenge on fate. On the lean cows he experienced, as a child, with his mother. On the humiliations proven in the job scrapes of its beginnings. Finally, on the long list of troubles that pursued her, adult: jealous husbands, press directors demanding her pages, creditors …

During a breakaway far from these worries, in 1835, Dumas met Pope Grégoire XVI. What is its relation to faith?

He had the faith of the charcoal burner, that of his mother and his country priest, who had instilled the catechism and had the Bible read. He wanted to meet Pope Grégoire XVI and received a rosary of olive nuclei which he kept superstitiously. He was attracted by what was mystical, secret societies, communication with the afterlife … He believed in this idea, in my opinion the founding sense of the work of writers: bringing the dead or, in any case, beings who are not us. In 1852, he even sketched a novel which he wanted “total”: Isaac Lacquerdem, Around the character of an wandering Jew condemned to cross the centuries for having insulted Christ. But he has never finished this fresco in the history of humanity.

It was only after his death that he obtained recognition of his peers. How to explain this injustice?

The great critic of the 19th century, Sainte-Beuve, “murdered” Dumas in a formula: “He kisses but does not hug. Despite this disdain that was perpetuated in the cultural spheres, he remained in the memories of the general public thanks to the many adaptations of his texts to the theater, cinema or television. But it was not until 1980 that a researcher, Claude Schopp, began to rehabilitate him, by exhuming manuscripts like The Knight of Saint-Hermine and by reissuing his work. The great man ended up entering the Pantheon in 2002.