The Man in the Iron Mask: Celebrated Crimes, book 11

Alexandre Dumas

jan 2015 · Celebrated Crimes Libri 11 · Freshwater Seas · Treguar nga Robert Bethune

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To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language—has minced no words—to describe violent scenes of violent times.

In this, the eleventh of the series, Dumas switches away from his usual narrative style and gives us, instead, a detailed review--almost a bibliographic essay--on the various ideas and theories advanced by historians, speculative writers and critics on one of the enduring fascinations of French royal history: the case of The Man in the Iron Mask.

Ever since the time of Louis XIV, the story has been told of a man mysteriously snatched out of the world and buried for life, not merely in a prison cell, but also in an mask of iron: an imprisonment designed to ensure that no one would ever know his name or even see his face. Dumas asks, who was the man in the iron mask? Why was he imprisoned? Why were such strange precautions taken, and why was he treated with such respect and care, given everything he asked for--except his freedom and his name?

Dumas is very scrupulous about his sources, carefully citing the full bibliographic details, while also indulging his novelist's flair for the dramatic. This recording preserves all that, to give the listener the full air of authenticity Dumas so carefully manufactures.

Enjoy!

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After an idle youth, Alexandre Dumas went to Paris and spent some years writing. A volume of short stories and some farces were his only productions until 1927, when his play Henri III (1829) became a success and made him famous. It was as a storyteller rather than a playwright, however, that Dumas gained enduring success. Perhaps the most broadly popular of French romantic novelists, Dumas published some 1,200 volumes during his lifetime. These were not all written by him, however, but were the works of a body of collaborators known as "Dumas & Co." Some of his best works were plagiarized. For example, The Three Musketeers (1844) was taken from the Memoirs of Artagnan by an eighteenth-century writer, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) from Penchet's A Diamond and a Vengeance. At the end of his life, drained of money and sapped by his work, Dumas left Paris and went to live at his son's villa, where he remained until his death.