Friday, December 27, 2024
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Literary Tourism: Château de Monte-Cristo

July 25, 1847. Le Port-Marly, just outside Paris.

Alexandre Dumas had sent out a mere 50 invitations to his party—but naturally, some 600 people show up.

It’s a testament to his larger-than-life character … and a development the author likely takes in stride (with great pride). Tables dot the lawn. A gratuitous feast is prepared. Dumas’ pet monkeys frolic about. As André Maurois would detail in a biography a century later, “Radiant, Dumas circulates among his guests. His coat glitters with crosses and badges; his brilliant waistcoat is festooned with a heavy chain of massive gold; he kisses the beautiful ladies and tells marvelous stories the whole night. Never has he been happier …”

“Sometimes, life reflects art. But in the greatest literary destinations and writer homes, the line between the two all but disappears. Here, Dumas has quite literally become the Count of Monte Cristo.” —Zachary Petit

Writer’s Digest

All the while, the incredible castle he now calls home looms over the proceedings. And rightly so—for this is a housewarming party.

Sometimes, life reflects art. But in the greatest literary destinations and writer homes, the line between the two all but disappears. Here, Dumas has quite literally become the Count of Monte Cristo.

*****

Château de Monte-Cristo

F.Lurol/Monte-Cristo

Dumas first came to Paris in 1823, when he was 21. He had no money, but he had a penchant for words—and before becoming the novelist he is remembered as today, he achieved notoriety as a playwright. By the mid-1830s, newspaper serials had taken off, and The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo soon sprang forth from Dumas’ pen, alongside hordes of other characters. By the end of his life, The Guardian estimates he had banked more than 4,000 primary characters, 9,000 secondary ones, and 25,000 walk-ons across hundreds of books.

Money and fame followed, Dumas excelling at both: being famous, and spending recklessly. Though he reveled in the Parisian social scene, the brilliant, bloviating author yearned for a place to hunker down and write—and one day when he was walking between Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Versailles, he found it on a hill overlooking the Seine. He tasked the famous French architect Hippolyte Durand with building his dream house atop it.

As The Washington Post detailed in 1986, “Upon hearing Dumas describe the elaborate house he envisioned … Durand supposedly exclaimed, ‘But all that will cost you a fortune!’ ‘I certainly hope so,’ a beaming Dumas was said to reply.”

When it came to the design of the house, Maurois notes, “he wanted all the styles that had ever struck him. He mixed Gothic with Renaissance, Mozarabic with Scandinavian. An Arabian minaret emerged from a Henri II façade. The Troubadour nudged the Oriental. The white and gold drawing-room must be as ‘large as the drawing rooms at Versailles.’”

Château de Monte-Cristo

V.Felloni/Monte-Cristo

Dumas handed over the cash—said to be hundreds of thousands of francs, or millions today—and soon enough, he had his castle.

In it, he paid homage to the world’s great writers, arranging friezes of Shakespeare, Homer, and others around the ground floor. Not to be left out, Dumas’ personal motto—“I love those who love me”—is carved above the entrance to the home. (The eagle-eyed visitor may also notice his monogram in the Château’s turrets, as well.)

While the home is an unabashed celebration of its creator and financier, it wasn’t his idea to name it “Château de Monte-Cristo.” Rather, the home’s director, Frédérique Lurol, says an actress once came to visit Dumas from Paris, and her carriage driver had no idea who the author was. She told him he had written The Count of Monte Cristo—“And the driver said, ‘OK, you’re going to see the Count of Monte Cristo,’” and brought her to her destination, thinking the count was in fact a real person. Dumas found the story hilarious, and the castle had a name.

Within the walls of his newly dubbed Château, Dumas excelled at bankrolling a coterie of hangers-on. He was said to have an open-door policy for fellow creatives in dire straits, and cumulatively, they racked up several hundred thousand francs a year. Included in that bankroll: the wants of his many mistresses (by some accounts, around 40). Dumas was known to woo them in the home’s extravagant Moorish Salon, with stucco sculptures and arabesques handcrafted by Tunisian artists he had coaxed home from his travels abroad.

Château de Monte-Cristo

V.Felloni/Monte-Cristo

Still, he came here to work, and work he did. But he didn’t just sit down inside the home to do so. Rather, he commissioned the building of a miniature Gothic castle (yes, it even has a moat), and dubbed it Château d’If—the name of the gloomy island prison where the titular Count of Monte Cristo is detained. Contrasting the opulence of the main home, Lurol says it contained just a desk, chair, fireplace, and bed.

“It’s like a jail, but a very beautiful jail,” she says with a laugh.

Dumas would work from morning to night, but it’s not known what he wrote here. Lurol says the list might include the Three Musketeers sequel Twenty Years After and La Dame de Monsoreau. Regardless, Dumas’ works are writ large on the façade of the structure, where carvings include Edmond Dantès of The Count of Monte Cristo discovering his treasure; Henry III; and the titles of 88 of Dumas’ works.

“He printed his soul on this façade,” Lurol says.

His favorite dog, Pritchard, also makes an appearance, carved directly into a doghouse. And speaking of animals: The grounds’ rolling British-style gardens played home to a stocked aviary, as well as a cavalcade of other dogs, a cat, three monkeys, parrots, a golden pheasant (named Lucullus), a rooster (Caesar), as well as a vulture named Jugurtha initially, and later Diogenes; Maurois writes that Dumas claimed to have brought the latter back from Tunis at an expense of 40,000 francs, or around $253,000 today.

He continues: “Pleasantly entertained by the squeaks and squeals of this menagerie; encircled by sheaves of paper—blue (on which he scrawled his novels, rose (on which he dashed off his articles), and yellow (on which he tenderly traced poems dedicated to his odalisques)—Monte-Cristo had everything with which to be divinely happy.”

… For two years, anyway.

Château de Monte-Cristo

V.Felloni/Monte-Cristo

Of all those taking advantage of the count, unfortunately none seem to have been an accountant. In the end Dumas was bankrupted by his own largess—and the Revolution of 1848, which killed business at the theater he had opened not long before, staging a nine-hour version of one of his novels, among other performances.

Château de Monte-Cristo—described by Dumas’ friend Honoré de Balzac as “one of the most delicious follies ever built … the most royal chocolate box in existence”—began to fade, piece by piece, in 1848.

First, creditors took the furniture, the art.

They took poor Jugurtha/Diogenes, now valued at a mere 15 francs.

Eventually, they came for the castle itself.

While Dumas’ output remained unphased and he continued to produce the work that would further cement his legacy, the Château fell into disrepair. By 1969, the property’s owner planned to raze it to make way for 400 homes on the site—until The Syndicat Intercommunal de Monte-Cristo and the Société des amis d’Alexandre Dumas formed and joined forces to save it. (As The Washington Post reported, it was “an 11th-hour campaign—in true cliffhanger style that would have delighted the author.”) The property was completely restored (King Hassan II of Morocco even financed the Moorish Salon refurbishment), and by 1994 it fully opened to visitors.

Last year, 29,000 visitors took in its flamboyant majesty. Today the home serves as a period museum with rooms dedicated to Dumas’ family, his mastery of cooking, his travels, and all manner of literary output.

Château de Monte-Cristo

V.Felloni/Monte-Cristo

Still, in the end, one wonders: How did he react to his dream home being ripped from him after a mere two years?

Lurol says he didn’t mourn it.

“We know that he was very happy to have created what he wanted,” she says. “And then life goes on.”

Like Dumas’ best works, Château de Monte-Cristo burned with intensity—and then he was off to the next thing. The next serial. The next chapter. The next adventure carved into that Gothic chateau.

Ultimately, as Dumas writes in The Count of Monte Cristo: “On what slender threads do life and fortune hang …!”

Château de Monte-Cristo is open year-round, and is located at 78560 le Port-Marly, France. For more, visit Chateau-Monte-Cristo.com.

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