Prodigious Belcher

KING OF PARIS (504 pp.)--Guy Endore --Simon & Schuster ($4).

Three roaring literary lions bestrode the narrow Paris of the mid-19th century. All three wrote enormously, loved widely, spent wildly. Honore de Balzac was the greatest novelist. Victor Hugo was the greatest poet. Alexandre Dumas pere ate the most.

The brothers Goncourt described Dumas once: "a kind of a giant with the hair of a Negro, the salt beginning to mix with the pepper, and with little blue eyes buried in his flesh like those of a hippopotamus, clear and mischievous; and an enormous moon face, exactly the way the cartoonists loved to draw him . . . You at once the showman of freaks and prodigies, the vendor of wonders; the traveling salesman for the Arabian nights." At all hours of the day and night, Dumas shoveled food into himself as into a coke furnace. Groaning from violent stomach cramps and unable to sleep, Dumas had no option but to go to work "with both hands, one hand writing as fast as it could, while the other was massaging his belly and coaxing from deep within him one lugubrious belch after another." His doctor put him on a diet (cold beef, olive oil, milk, cucumber salad, thrice daily, with hot chocolate between meals), but Dumas' eructations were so little lessened that he returned to his favorite, bouillabaisse. Dumas cooked this dish himself and liked to down six helpings of it at a sitting. A doctor who partook of it once spooned some of the juice into his pocket flask, explaining he could use it to scorch off warts.

The reality of the great Dumas' life was so fantastic that Dumas' friends and enemies caught its contagion and piled reams of further fantasy upon it. Dumas' chest really was covered with medals (of what orders, he never cared), so up sprang the legend that if Dumas were spun round, further rows were revealed dangling from his back. He wrote with such rapidity that people refused to believe that he wrote at all--Dumas, they said, was just the pen name of a five-man syndicate. Dumas (who loved to out-legend his own legends) denied this. "My valet," he said, "used to write [my books] for me, but he now pretends that he is also capable of signing them with his own name, so of course I had to dismiss him."

As a result it is almost impossible to know what is true or false about most of Dumas' life. His autobiography is no help: over 1,000,000 words in length, it covers only the early years of his career. Now Scriptwriter Guy Endore (who, according to his blurb, "reminded his classmates of the young Shelley") solves the problem by arguing that the legends help to reveal the man. He has collected them all into a gigantic bouillabaisse of a book which gives the impression of being organized by an excited jackdaw. It is called a novel, presumably to allow the author to use any colorful incident he chose without the hampering need for accuracy. The fact that Dumas survives Author Endore's treatment is decisive proof that even a bad biography cannot destroy a really great man.

Dumas was the son of a gallant mulatto general,* a gigantic man who measured more round the calf than his wife did round her waist. Napoleon admired him. But when the general criticized him to his face, Napoleon flew into a rage and uttered the fateful words: "I never want to see or hear that man's name!" Son Alexandre inherited his disappointed father's huge frame, his Creole hair and skin, and a roistering penchant for dueling. But his career began humbly enough, with a job as a royal copyist under the Duke of Orleans. According to legend, he paid his way to Paris by winning 600 glasses of absinthe from an innkeeper at billiards, then exchanging his prize for cash.

The Paris in which Copyist Dumas soon became an author was an astonishing city of high living, wild revelry and the cancan. Its morals could be summed up in a cartoon of the times that showed a husband drawing a pistol on his wife's lover, while the lady screamed: "Have mercy on the father of your children!"

Authors Hugo, Balzac and Dumas did their best to set the tone, worked prodigiously to keep abreast of the time's fickle fancy. Balzac wrote so much that after his death his manuscripts were reportedly used for wrapping marmalade. Dumas' output was so enormous that when he lost a full-length play, he had no recollection of what it had been about. Nor did he care. He could (and did) write a novel in three days, a one-act comedy during a break in an afternoon's partridge shooting. He was not a fussy man, and he wrote on order a bestselling guide to Egypt, packed with breathless descriptions of his climbing of the pyramids and swimming in the Nile, without ever bothering to set foot in Egypt. His first grand success, the romantic drama Henri III--in which the bruises of passion on the heroine's milky shoulders cleverly turned black and blue before the audience's popping eyes--created such consternation that mother Dumas suffered a near-fatal stroke before the curtain had even gone up. Wrote one British critic: "From Dumas dates the inundation of the French theater with a bloody spate of slaughterings, incests, adulteries, violations, secret accouchements . . ."

Dumas' plays are rarely seen today. The shorter dramas are eight hours long; the longer ones, three nights. Scores of actors have to be kept running up and down the aisles and fighting duels in the boxes. Moreover, Dumas (as his enemies said) probably did write large parts of his works with a pair of scissors, cutting sections from the works of Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega and Hugo. To the critic who first pointed this out, Dumas graciously sent a huge pair of shears, along with a note urging the critic to try his hand with them.

Dumas' masterpieces, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo, were pen-written as newspaper serials, and over the period of the same year. At one time, Dumas was writing installments alternately on Count and Musketeers. In his old age, according to Endore, Dumas regretted that he had never found time to read them: everyone else seemed to have done so. Throughout France people clustered to await the mail coaches bringing the latest serial installments--and "Woe to the postman who had forgotten to bring [them]!" said Dumas. Prime Minister Guizot himself subscribed to the Opposition newspaper that ran The Three Musketeers, sending in his subscription with the note: "Please cancel . . . the moment the Dumas serial is concluded." King Louis Philippe was soon to hurl his daily paper to the ground, shouting: "Why, there's more in this paper about Dumas than about me!" Two anecdotes of this period must, however, be regarded as especially dubious, since they come from Dumas himself: 1) that a police rookie, taking the oath to arrest malefactors without fear or favor, was allowed to add the words "except Alexandre Dumas," 2) that Dumas' novels were used as an anesthetic by a famous surgeon: "I wait until the reader is well immersed, and then I operate freely, and never hear a murmur."

At the height of his fame, "the uncrowned King of Paris" was paid more per line than any other writer in France. His love affairs were numerous and scandalous, but his marriage was singularly shocking. His bride, plump, blonde Actress Ida Ferrier, became so fat that her skeleton was described as "the best-kept secret in Paris," so promiscuous that when Husband Dumas decided to make friends with a man he hated by shaking hands with him in a "public place" (the old Roman form of reconciliation), Ida's bed was the chosen site.

Dumas died in 1870 of apoplexy. His last major work was a cookery book of 1,179 pages, eleven of which were devoted to mustard alone. But by then he had outlived his popularity. His son emptied the old man's pockets one day, wept to find only a handful of coins. But the dying Dumas was delighted. "That's precisely the sum with which I [first] landed in Paris," he said. "Imagine: a half century of high living, and it hasn't cost me a cent!"

-Dumas grandpere, the first of the three Alexandre Dumas. Dumas pere added to the confusion by naming his illegitimate son Alexandre (Dumas fits); he became in turn a writer, is best remembered for that durable tearjerker, La Dame aux Camillas (Camilla).

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