Dumas 'makes his way' at last to the Pantheon

Paul Michaud, Contributor, Paris

Alexandre Dumas -- one of France's most renowned authors whose works include The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo -- has finally had his remains removed to the Pantheon, the famous repository where Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Andre Malraux already rest.

The remains were scheduled to be moved to the Pantheon -- the former church that had a great role during the 1791 French revolution and was designed as a final resting place for French great men -- last July 24 to commemorate Dumas' birthday.

President Jacques Chirac had been scheduled to transfer Dumas' ashes -- as he did on Nov. 23, 1996, when transferring novelist Andre Malraux's ashes to the Pantheon. But the plan had to be postponed since Chirac was not available on that date. Luckily, the plan pushed through on Oct. 3.

However, one question remains unanswered. Why did it take two centuries to remove Dumas out of Villers-Cotteret in eastern France and transfer his ashes to the Pantheon perched on the heights of Mont Sainte-Genevieve in the fifth arrondissement of Paris?

It also remains unclear why a thoroughly-prepared exhibition of Dumas' manuscripts and several dozen translations of his books at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France -- the country's principal library, one of the largest in the world -- last month was suddenly replaced with an exhibition of Zola's corresponding works.

The observance of the centennial of Zola -- author of Germinal and Therese Raquin and Les Rougon-Macquart, a socio-historical portrait of a French family in the 19th century -- will also take place this year.

Chirac had found time to participate in celebrations of Zola and Hugo, whose centennial also falls this year. But when it came to Dumas, it is interesting to note that Chirac hesitated before deciding to pay homage to the author of The Three Musketeers at the Pantheon.

Historian Alain Decaux -- who urged the president to honor Dumas by transferring his ashes to the Pantheon -- will speak on the importance of Dumas' works.

Decaux admitted that Dumas' popularity as a novelist may be a factor why that he has never received the Imprimatur of the French intelligents.

"Dumas was for a long time the victim of his own success. He was so eminently popular that during a good century it was not possible to consider him to be a good writer."

Some even charged that Dumas was a plagiarist. One of his former collaborators Eugene de Mirecourt wrote Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie, Fabrique de Romans in 1845 revealing how Dumas hardly authored his own works.

Few knew that Dumas was a mulatto, as he was a grandson of a woman slave. The slave received the name Dumas when she was in charge of running the mansion of general Alexandre Davy de la Pailetterie to whom she gave a son. De la Pailetterie became one of Napoleon Bonaparte's most reliable officers due to his heroism during the French Army's Italian campaign.

If Dumas was very successful in his days, if his works continued to be the most adapted classics of the modern movie screen, it is not because he was a kind of man who knew how to describe the world.

Dumas specialist Jean Hournon pointed out in a recent lecture how in 1866 Dumas noted that "caricatures are the only portraits of myself that come close to giving an idea of what I really am."

Couldn't the same be said of his works, of the 300-plus books -- whether they were truly penned by Dumas, or by his entourage -- that appear under his name.

Is France afraid that by placing the remains of Dumas in the Pantheon, he may very well become a spectacular indictment of the French nascent century?

Has perhaps at last Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo, forever bent on revenge, gotten the chance to have the final word against the very same kind of society that so unfairly sentenced him to 20 years hard labor at the Chateau d'If almost 200 years ago, at about the very same time Dumas was making his way into our world?