Written in 1847, while Dumas was at the height of his powers, this play recounts the events leading up to the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of the French Huguenots–and the subsequent death of King Charles IX. The playwright focuses on the people inadvertently caught up in the slaughter–which, once started, cannot be repressed. By following the fate of two nobles, the Catholic Count Coconnas and the Huguenot Count de la Mole, and linking their stories to Queen Marguerite (called Margot),...
In 1844-45, while Alexandre Dumas was working on his two classic novels, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, he found time to write a play called Sylvandire. A young provincial, Roger Tancred d'Anguilem, arrives in Paris to fight a legal battle for a huge inheritance. His opponent is an Indian called Afghano, who has bribed the judges. The case appears lost until Roger's approached by a sleazy lawyer who promises him success–but only if he marries a woman sight unseen....
Tour de Nesle (The Tower of Death) is one of Alexandre Dumas's greatest and most powerful plays, a tale of power and conviction, although its historical accuracy is far from certain.<P> Queen Marguerite and her sisters entertain themselves by luring unsuspecting men to the Tower, which located across the Seine from the Louvre. There they entice their victims to join them for wild sexual escapades–all expressly forbidden, of course, by both Church and State. Once satiated, the ladies...
The lost final novel by the master of the epic swashbuckling adventure stories: The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.The last cavalier is Count de Sainte-Hermine, Hector, whose elder brothers and father have fought and died for the Royalist cause during the French Revolution. For three years Hector has been languishing in prison when, in 1804, on the eve of Napoleon's coronation as emperor of France he learns what is to be his due. Stripped of his title, denied the honour of his...
