PROLOGUE, PART 1 
IT was nearly midnight on the night of February 26, 1806, and Alexandre Dumas, the future author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, was asleep at his uncle’s house. He was not yet four years old. He was staying there because his father was gravely ill and his mother thought it best for him not to be at home. As the clock struck, he was awakened by a loud knock. By the light of a lamp that burned by the bedside, he saw his cousin sit up, visibly frightened. Alexandre got out of bed. He recalled in his memoirs, forty-some years later:
My cousin called to me, “Where are you going?”
“You’ll see,” I replied quietly. “I’m going to open the door for Daddy, who’s coming to say goodbye.”
The poor girl jumped out of bed, greatly alarmed, grabbed me as I put my hand on the doorknob, and forced me back to bed.
I struggled in her arms, shouting with all my strength:
“Goodbye, Daddy! Goodbye, Daddy!”
The next morning the adults came to wake the children, and one of them told Alexandre the news that his father had died during the night.
“My daddy is dead,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you won’t see him again.”
“What do you mean I won’t see Daddy again?… why won’t I see him?”
“Because God has taken him back from you.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
“And you say that I’ll never see him again?… never at all?”
“Never at all.”
“And where does God live?”
“He lives in heaven.”
I thought hard about this for a minute. Even as a young child, even deprived of reason, I understood that something irreversible had happened in my life. Then, taking advantage of the first moment when they stopped paying attention to me, I got away from my uncle’s and ran straight to my mother’s house.
All the doors were open, all the faces were frightened; one felt that Death was there.
I went in without anyone’s noticing or seeing me. I found a little room where the weapons were kept; I shouldered a gun that belonged to my father, and which he had often promised to give to me when I got older.
Then, armed with this gun, I climbed the stairs.
On the second floor, I met my mother on the landing.
She had just left the death chamber.… her face was wet with tears.
“Where are you going?” she asked me, surprised to see me there, when she thought I was at my uncle’s.
“I’m going to heaven!” I replied.
“What do you mean, you’re going to heaven?”
“Let me pass.”
“And what will you do in heaven, my poor child?”
“I’m going there to kill God, who killed Daddy.”
My mother seized me in her arms, squeezing me so tight I thought I would suffocate.
Alexandre Dumas wrote those lines when he had just turned forty-five and had decided it was time to reflect on his life. He never got past chronicling his thirty-first year—which was well before he had published a word as a novelist—yet he spent more than the first two hundred pages on a story that is as fantastic as any of his novels: the life of his father, General Alexandre—Alex—Dumas, a black man from the colonies who narrowly survived the French Revolution and rose to command fifty thousand men. The chapters about General Dumas are drawn from reminiscences of his mother and his father’s friends, and from official documents and letters he obtained from his mother and the French Ministry of War. It is a raw and poignant attempt at biography, full of gaps, omissions, and re-creations of scenes and dialogue. But it is sincere. The story of his father ends with this scene of his death, the point at which the novelist begins his own life story.
For anyone skeptical that a boy so young could recall such details, Dumas responded through the lips of the character Haydée, a white slave, in The Count of Monte Cristo. Haydée’s father died when she was four, betrayed and murdered by one of the main villains in the novel. After speaking movingly of her father, she tells the Count: “I was four years old, but as the events held a supreme importance for me, not one detail has left my mind, not one feature has escaped from my memory.”
To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget. The villains of The Count of Monte Cristo do not murder the hero, Edmond Dantès—they have him thrown into a dungeon where he is forgotten by the world. The heroes of Dumas never forget anything or anyone: Dantès has a perfect memory for the details of every field of human knowledge, for the history of the world and for everyone he has encountered in his life. When he confronts them one by one, he finds that the assassins of his identity have forgotten the very fact that he existed, and thus the fact of their crime.
I undertook the project of reconstructing the life of the forgotten hero General Alexandre Dumas because of that passage in his son’s memoirs, which I read when I was a boy and have always remembered.