La Dame aux Camelias and 50 similar items

Sent by Ruslania.com promptly from Helsinki, Finland.Description:Alexandre Dumas fils was born in Paris, France, the illegitimate child of Marie-Catherine Labay, a dressmaker, and novelist Alexandre Dumas. In 1831 his father legally recognized him and ensured the young Dumas received the best education possible at the Institution Goubaux and the College 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 almost all of his writings, he emphasized the moral purpose of literature and in his 1858 play, Le fils naturel (The Illegitimate Son), he espoused the belief that if a man fathers an illegitimate child, then he has an obligation to legitimize the child and marry the woman. Dumas' paternal great-grandparents were a white French nobleman and a young black Haitian woman. In the boarding schools, Dumas fils was constantly taunted by his classmates. These issues all profoundly influenced his thoughts, behaviour, and writing. In 1844 Dumas fils moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to live with his father. There, he met Marie Duplessis, a young courtesan who would be the inspiration for his romantic novel, La dame aux camelias (The Lady of the Camellias). Adapted into a play, it was titled in English (especially in the United States) as Camille and is the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, La Traviata. Although he admitted that he had done the adaptation because he needed the money, he had a huge success with the play. Thus began the playwriting career of Dumas fils which not only eclipsed that of his father during his lifetime but also dominated the serious French stage for most of the second half of the nineteenth century. After this, he virtually abandoned the novel (though his semi-autobiographical L'Affaire Clemenceau (1867) achieved some success). In 1864, Alexandre Dumas fils married Nadejda Naryschkine, with whom he had a daughter. After Naryschkine's death, he married Henriette Regnier. In 1874, he was admitted to the Academie francaise and in 1894 he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur. Alexandre Dumas fils died at Marly-le-Roi, Yvelines, on November 27, 1895 and was interred in the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris. It was, perhaps coincidentally, only some 100 metres away from Marie Duplessis. Alexandre Dumas, born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie; (24 July 1802 - 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas, pere, was a French writer. His works have been translated into nearly 100 languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century for nearly 200 films. Dumas' last novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, unfinished at his death, was completed by a scholar and published in 2005, becoming a bestseller. It was published in English in 2008 as The Last Cavalier