21 
DUMAS lay doubled up on the damp stones, the sounds of the sea and the guards’ shouting on the towers coming in through the high window. The wooden doors to the courtyard were not locked, but they were heavy, and he was in too much pain and too weak to reach them or to cry out. His servant eventually discovered him lying there in darkness, half delirious with pain and lying in a puddle of vomit. His white military breeches were soiled and a sheen of sweat covered his skin. The servant ran to find General Manscourt, who was soon at Dumas’s side. Manscourt then went to the governor of the fortress and begged him to bring a doctor urgently, saying he feared for Dumas’s life.
While they waited for the doctor, Manscourt and the servant struggled to help Dumas. On his whispered instructions, the servant gave him some milk from a little goat that Dumas had brought with him from Egypt. At first he seemed to tolerate it fairly well, but he soon doubled over in even fiercer pain.
When he recovered enough to sit up, the servant fed Dumas spoonfuls of olive oil mixed with lemon juice and gave him “over forty enemas in three hours,” both widely used remedies for parasitic worms in the eighteenth century that Dumas would later credit with saving his life.*
All the while, they waited for the doctor who had supposedly been summoned. Hours passed. The governor eventually informed them “with indifference” that the doctor was in the countryside and would not be back for some time.
The doctor finally arrived, accompanied by an entourage of Holy Faith officials and escorted by twelve armed soldiers. General Manscourt “could not help but declare his indignation” and demanded that everyone leave the room. Some of the soldiers did leave, and the physician approached. Dumas recognized the man who had been treating him over the past week for the paralysis in his cheeks.
“Upon seeing me the doctor became as pale as death,” Dumas recalled. He noticed a look of embarrassment on the man’s face, as if he hadn’t expected to be confronting this particular patient alive again. Dumas then became convinced that the doctor “was the instrument of the crime, if not the author.”
The doctor told Dumas to remain lying down and to drink icy cold water, and hastily left. The servant prepared a glass, but “the little that I took of the iced drink made me feel like I would die if I went on, so I abandoned it to take up my previous treatments once again.” More lemon juice, olive oil, and enemas. The doctor returned some time later and prescribed a series of regimens that included blistering and “ear injections that [for a time] caused complete deafness” (again, standard practices of the era, though medical research had already shown by the 1770s that ear injections caused deafness).
His medical treatment over the following two weeks, Dumas would reflect, “left me in no doubt that they intended to poison me to death.” General Manscourt, too, experienced a sudden and frightening ailment—in his case in the form of rapidly escalating violent headaches that “reached the point of attacking his brain,” as General Dumas later put it—and “he could be brought out of that state only by means of a quick bloodletting and a great number of enemas and drinks that I made him myself before our own eyes” (a precaution to make sure they would not be poisoned).
DUMAS had no doubt the doctor was trying to kill them both by every means at his disposal, except the obvious one of slitting their throats. But it is not so easy to determine whether the doctor’s “perverse regimens” should be attributed to evil intentions or simply standard medical practice of the time. After all, Dumas attributed his own salvation to the “forty enemas in three hours.” Though the scientific revolution of the eighteenth century had created great interest in the natural sciences and in medicine, this had not yet translated into an understanding of disease. (Some doctors even argued that the very qualities of the Enlightenment itself—urbanity, refined manners, too much reading and introspection—caused disease.) Instead an individual’s constitutional idiosyncrasies were minutely scrutinized, so a doctor could develop a highly personalized cure to treat the patient more than the disease. It was the ultimate in “personal attention” from a primary care provider—though not perhaps with the benefits we now assume come from that relationship. Molière’s observation from the previous century still applied: “Nearly all men die of their remedies and not of their illnesses.”
Two of the doctors who visited Dumas believed that his symptoms—the loss of hearing and vision, the paralysis in his face, the excruciating stomach pain—were signs of melancholia (i.e., depression). Reading this diagnosis in their reports, I thought, “How modern!” But in fact there was a well-established belief in the eighteenth century that depression was the cause of everything from infections to heart disease and cancer.
Although the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century had officially repudiated it, the age-old theory of humors still formed the basis of medical common sense in the late eighteenth century. In the humoral paradigm, there was a continuum between health and illness on which each individual found him- or herself at any given time. At the bottom of every person’s condition lay the balance among his or her humors—mysterious bodily substances that determined well-being: too much of one or too little of another caused either disease or the “putrefaction” of the entire organism. Many treatments of the age—sweating, purging, bleeding, emesis—were designed around this basic premise.
Aside from his declining physical condition, Dumas found what he thought was more evidence that his doctor was trying to do him in: it came to light one afternoon when he was taking a bath and the physician visited him for a chat while he sat naked in the tub. The doctor said he wanted to speak to General Dumas while they had absolute privacy, “to tell me that he was sure that we were going to have everything stolen, like our compatriots [e.g., Dolomieu before his departure for Messina], and he wanted us to entrust him with our most valuable remaining things to be returned to us on our departure. I noted from my bath that this man was not avoiding being seen or heard by an artilleryman named Samarrou.” The doctor made no real effort at secrecy, Dumas wrote, “despite his air of trying to establish conspiracy between us.” (Dumas’s description of his captivity feels almost hallucinatory at this point, and it is unclear what he thought the conspiracy was about, except keeping him in a state of weakness and dependency that he was determined to avoid.)
Though he did not pinpoint any sort of poison in his own food or medicine, Dumas believed he’d found the source of Manscourt’s brain malady one day when he examined his snuffbox: someone appeared to have mixed a kind of metallic powder into the snuff which was “so corrosive that it had eaten several holes in the box.”
The final event that made Dumas suspect the doctor was, ironically, that a few days later the doctor himself suddenly dropped dead. From this Dumas concluded that the doctor had been poisoned by the “very same authors of my poisoning” and that it had been “without doubt a precaution to avoid it going public.”
Dumas’s persistent fretting over his failing health and the treatment he received—he devotes dozens of pages in his report to the tragicomedy of the long gaps between doctors’ visits and the bloody and ineffective “cures” when they did show up—compounded his paranoia that he was being assassinated by degrees by unknown authors for unknown reasons. Adding to his grim mood, the day after the doctor’s sudden death Dumas woke to find his goat strangled—an accident, said the guards, though Dumas was certain “the animal was killed in the fear that it could still be useful to me.”
OVER the next two months, whether or not he was being poisoned, the conditions in the damp fortress took a further toll on Dumas’s health. He wrote letters to the French government, to the king of Naples, and home to Marie-Louise and his little Louise Alexandrine. The prison governor evidently took the letters, but there is no evidence that they were ever delivered (he mentioned these lost letters in a later missive). Dumas became blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and continued to suffer from facial paralysis.
Finally Dumas had no choice but to ask for medical attention once again, as hazardous as that must have seemed. But this time he was sent a doctor who spoke French fluently and who told him frankly how harmful his previous treatments had been; he prescribed entirely new ones. Every doctor measured an individual’s humoral imbalance differently, after all. This doctor diagnosed Dumas’s illness as being caused chiefly by melancholia and prescribed “injections into my ears,” a powder blown into his eyes, and half an ounce of cream of tartar, “a regimen that far from relieving me only aggravated the terrible state of my stomach.”
But this doctor was very friendly, and “visited me regularly enough for a month and took all opportunities to lead into political conversation by affecting a lot of patriotism and friendship for the French in order to win my trust.” The chance to hear news and opinions in his native language was a precious thing for a man in captivity far from home. Along the way, his deafness was alleviated. But suddenly one day the governor ordered that the doctor no longer come because he might inadvertently disclose secrets, and because the jailers could not monitor their conversations since they did not speak French. Dumas suspected a new trick, one in which the doctor had been a willing participant: to make him drop his guard and develop an attachment—then to remove it and further break his will.
The governor later relented, but on two conditions: the doctor must not communicate with Dumas in his native tongue, and the governor himself must be present during examinations. When the doctor arrived, Dumas heard him admonished icily by the governor before the cell door was unbolted: “ ‘You are going to see your General Dumas. If you say one sole French word you are lost. You see this cell door? It will open and close on you for the last time.’ ” A French surgeon who accompanied them got the same warning.
“Everyone entered the room and crowded around me,” Dumas wrote. “I tried to make eye contact with the surgeon,” but he looked away. “I spoke to the doctor, but he remained silent.” After a brief discussion in which the French surgeon was both intimidated by the governor’s threats and hobbled by his difficulty understanding the Italian language, he
recommended that I return to my original course of treatment, adding new blistering on the arms and the nape of the neck and behind both ears—this violent regimen, more than all the other pernicious drugs made up in pills, made such ravages upon me that over the month I followed it I endured perpetual insomnia and an abundant and continuous loss of sperm, resulting in the total slackening of all parts of my body and an affliction like that of a man not far from death.†
AT this point, Dumas received a message from the world outside the dungeon that probably saved his life. The Friends of the French at Taranto—the local republican patriot underground—“knowing the traumas I’d suffered secretly passed me two volumes ofThe Country Doctor by Tissot.” (In fact, Tissot never published a book with this title; the book was most likely Tissot’s Health Advice for the Common People, published in two volumes, with eleven editions between 1761 and 1792.)
Just as it is hard to overstate the power of communication from the outside world on a prisoner, it is hard to convey the power of a volume of Tissot for a sick man in 1799. Samuel-Auguste Tissot was a lion of eighteenth-century medicine—the Louis Pasteur of humoral imbalance. Published over a thirty-year period from the 1750s to the 1780s, Tissot’s works were used by doctors, surgeons, midwives, healers of all sorts, and patients.‡ In a world in which a printed book was a valuable object, Dumas was suddenly holding the full force of contemporary medical knowledge in his hand. Someone on the outside wanted him to live!
Paging feverishly through his Tissot, Dumas came across something even more remarkable: the article on poison was marked and underlined. It was a message, and it confirmed all his suspicions. From then on, Dumas continued to accept all the pills the doctor gave him, but he only pretended to take them. Instead, he put them aside, carefully wrapped, planning to have them analyzed in the future. “I was quite pleased to have some material evidence of the villainy of the agents of the king of Naples,” Dumas wrote. He now had a new will to live, to leave the fortress of Taranto alive, hoping the pills would “one day demonstrate to the French government all the darkness of my murderers.”
A few nights later another package came from the underground Friends of the French—this one arriving through the window of Dumas’s cell on a string that lowered it to the floor. It was a large chunk of chocolate, wrapped in plain paper, along with some kind of medicinal herb. Chocolate was not a mere treat in those days—like sugar, it was one of the wonder drugs in the eighteenth-century arsenal. The herb turned out to be cinchona, the bark of a tropical tree containing quinine, considered to have great healing properties for fevers and nervous conditions.
“I owe a marked improvement,” Dumas wrote, “to the cinchona and the chocolate that the humane patriots clandestinely passed me by means of a string and a hook during the night.” He added, however, that these “courteous acts” could not prevent his becoming deaf in the left ear, paralyzed in the right cheek, from having his right eye practically lost, and from suffering terrible headaches and permanent buzzing in the ears.
The year 1800 brought new, pragmatic reasons to show leniency toward French prisoners, for by that summer everyone in Taranto—prisoners, guards, Holy Faith Army, and secret republicans alike—must have known something of the great events then going on in the north, where the French had launched a second invasion of Italy. Napoleon had left the government in Paris to personally lead the campaign. As if atoning for the tawdriness of his coup d’état and his assumption of dictatorial powers, the first consul had mounted his horse and led his armies through the Saint Bernard Pass, the scene of one of Dumas’s greatest military triumphs, and down again into the Italian plain. (Actually, Napoleon crossed the Alps on a mule, though his propaganda experts carefully disguised the fact.)
The second Italian campaign, capped by a magnificent victory over the Austrians at Marengo on June 14, utterly reversed the French rout of 1799. By the fall, Italy seemed once again on its way to becoming the laboratory of revolutionary nation-building, the main outpost for “French ideas” beyond France’s borders. Once more the Italians were raising all their various tricolor flags and planting trees of liberty. It is impossible to know for sure how much of this news was reaching the prisoners. But Dumas’s captors no doubt sensed that the balance of power was shifting beneath their feet and that tricolor flags might soon be the order of the day in Taranto as well.
Dumas learned that he and Manscourt and some other prisoners were to be moved from Taranto to another fortress—at Brindisi, on the Adriatic. He was informed that the move concealed an assassination plot: “only on the day of the transfer did some people come by our window, and from their gestures we understood that we were to be torn from Taranto and killed en route.” That night, around 11 p.m., the bolts on his door were drawn and the Marquis de la Schiava (president of the province of Lecce) “burst into our rooms” followed by men armed with swords and daggers. They told the prisoners that they were leaving for Brindisi and that Dumas was to pack his things immediately. The manner of the marquis’s entry—in the dead of night, with so many armed men—left Dumas in no doubt about his real intentions. “I expressed my strong disapproval of such an indecent manner to the marquis at the top of my voice,” Dumas wrote. “The marquis responded by drawing his sword.”
Dumas at that point grabbed his old walking stick, the closest thing to a weapon in the cell, and brandished it against the marquis’s sword and all the other steel in the room. He did not think much of his chances for success, but he was prepared to make a stand, no matter how futile. Dumas must have retained something of his old talent for intimidating opponents. Judging from a subsequent written complaint from “the Ministry of State and War” about Dumas’s “recklessness” and “threatening behavior” when the guards came to get him, his militant defense was apparently effective. After a brief standoff, the guards retreated from the cell.
At this point Dumas’s hallucinatory fury clearly made him suspect only the worst from his captors. But in fact when he and Manscourt were transferred to a fortress in Brindisi, in September 1800—about a day’s ride away—far from being killed en route, their situation actually improved dramatically. In this fortress overlooking the Adriatic, Dumas fell into regular conversations with a priest. The man’s name was Bonaventura Certezza, and apparently he and Dumas developed a real friendship. The only record that survives is a poignant letter the priest wrote to Dumas after he’d gotten out of prison: “Let it be known to you, my dearest General, that I have always kept and always will keep my feelings [of esteem for you] alive in my soul and [they] obligate me to pay my respect to you forever. In fact, I have left no stone unturned to try and obtain news of you. I know that hearing praise annoys you, but, knowing your warm heart, I dare to speak this way. I wish I could embrace you, damned distance, I speak with my heart on my sleeve.” The priest promises not to talk so much if Dumas comes to visit him at his house, where he is always welcome.
There is far more evidence of Dumas’s amusing if testy relationship with a prison officer named Giovanni Bianchi, who was a kind of regional commander of all the southern Neapolitan prison fortresses. They corresponded constantly starting in September 1800, even though Bianchi appears to have been based in the Brindisi fortress itself, at least much of the time. (Manscourt was presumably accorded similarly courteous treatment, but he largely drops out of Dumas’s account until after they were liberated.) Bianchi’s letters, elegantly addressed to “Gentlemen, French Generals, Prisoners in the Fort by the sea,” relay the news that Dumas’s requests for food, clothing, and basic supplies—an iron cooking pot, for example, which was the subject of a tortuously minute exchange—were now being passed up the chain of command, all the way to King Ferdinand himself. Good news, Bianchi informs him: the king has approved! That a request for a cooking pot could be passed up the chain of command to the king tells one everything one needs to know about the Kingdom of Naples … except perhaps for the important detail that, as Bianchi regrets to inform Dumas, it would be “some time” before the king’s approval could be acted on “at the local level.” Hence, still no cooking pot.
Thus began a picayune exchange of letters in which Bianchi asks the general for things like sketches of his shoes and precise quantities of kindling to be used per day. (This is the first mention that the prisoners were allowed to make fires.) I imagine prisoner and jailer, at opposite corners of this medieval fortress, each at a wooden table—one huge and polished, the other small and rough—dipping his quill into ink and preparing his requests or excuses in equally elaborate swirls.
On October 31, 1800, Bianchi asks Dumas to verify “the number of jackets, shoes, shirts and other items you need, with the corresponding prices. I ask that you send [the list] to me immediately so that it can be verified by the Kingdom’s Ministry of Finance.” Bianchi arranged for shoemakers and tailors to come to the prison, as well as carpenters, though Dumas had to continue to find things to trade or sell to pay for these services. He also had to pay for food and for wood to burn in his stove.
Gradually, Bianchi began offering to provide basic services to Dumas without receiving payment, and even offering to reimburse Dumas for previous outlays. In a letter dated January 8, 1801, in which Bianchi announces that he has decided to reimburse Dumas “7 ducats and 90 grani” for “the room and board of yourself and your officials,” Bianchi asks for a forwarding address to send the payment to: a sign that at this point the jailer knew, at least in principle, that his prisoner’s release was imminent.
On January 22, 1801, Bianchi sent an extraordinary letter to Dumas. In it, he explains that the general’s attack on the Marquis de la Schiava has caused a scandal in court—that the king himself is outraged enough that he has written a memo about it “by his own Royal hand” to the kingdom’s highest-ranking army officer. Bianchi describes King Ferdinand’s condemning Dumas’s “uncooperative and threatening behavior” in choosing to attack the marquis with a cane. The king has demanded that Dumas and Manscourt be placed in solitary confinement, and has complained that the authorities have been too lenient with the French generals. But what made Bianchi’s letter remarkable was that he states all this—and quotes extensively from King Ferdinand’s memo—before revealing that he will ignore the order to place the generals in solitary. He will go “against the Orders of My King,” he says, because he has come to see Dumas and his companion as good men.
Reading this flowery document from the dawn of the nineteenth century, I was reminded of countless World War II movies I saw growing up, where the “good” Luftwaffe commandant decides to behave decently toward his American or British prisoners despite orders from Nazi superiors to mistreat them. Was Bianchi partly motivated by a kind of southern Italian enjoyment of defying authority—of thumbing his nose at his fancy-pants boss from here in his drafty provincial fortress, where he lacked the resources to authorize a batch of kindling without receiving money from divisional headquarters? But why did Bianchi feel free to write the whole thing down—to express his defiance of the king in writing? Was it a deliberate act taken in the hope that it would be read—because Bianchi, knowing of the French invasion, assumed that in a matter of weeks he might well have a French superior officer and a French government to report to, rather than a royal highness in Palermo? Reading his letters, I began to suspect that Giovanni Bianchi was not only anticipating the French conquest of his kingdom but positively hoping for it. Perhaps Dumas’s jailer was a secret Giacobino, who liked the French prisoners because he liked France and the ideals of the Revolution.
IN March 1801, Dumas learned of plans to repatriate him and Manscourt by boat via Ancona, a city on the Adriatic coast, north of Rome. But they remained wary. “We understood,” Dumas wrote, “that they wanted to deliver us to the English or the Barbary pirates.” He asked Bianchi to inform his superiors of the high “imprudence of exposing us on an ocean covered with enemy ships.”
Bianchi attempted to reassure Dumas, in a string of letters that had an almost slapstick obsequiousness, closing with phrases like “I’m always at your disposal for your commands” and “I remain always eager to serve you.” This made Dumas even more suspicious. There was really nothing for the dear general to worry about, Bianchi replied—the boats sail along the coast and, in case of any untoward event, they would easily find mooring. Now he wanted to take the opportunity to send Dumas, for his approval, some “fabric samples” for his new post-prison uniform—would a nice, medium-weight blue wool “suffice for the needs of your officials?” Bianchi inquires. “Please pray let me know what would be to your liking.”
Bianchi wrote his prisoner on the subject of his confiscated property, specifically the general’s weapons and equipment that had been taken in the first months of his imprisonment. But Dumas dismissed all these bureaucratic overtures as the machinations of a cowardly enemy, now squirming in fear at the approach of French justice. Bianchi particularly infuriated Dumas when he wrote to apologize that the general’s “double-barreled rifle … was thrown into the sea.… Nevertheless, I shall do my utmost and, should I succeed in finding it, it shall be my pleasure to have it sent to you.”
In his relentless campaign of flattery, Giovanni Bianchi always returned to his favorite subject—clothes. He regrets deeply that it has been impossible to procure the sort of hat the general prefers, but he can produce another that is both “safer and more comfortable” for sea travel. He assures Dumas that he will send men to show him the alternate hat style “immediately”—for surely Dumas, after surviving eighteen months of mistreatment and poisoning in a dungeon cell, would not want to go another day worrying about his choice of hat styles. Bianchi “begs” the general to “get some air” and to “do it without fear.” In response to Dumas’s one serious sartorial query, Bianchi reassured the republican general that of course he should also feel free “to wear the cockade of your nation” within the fortress walls—“the same way,” Bianchi adds, “that our people wear our cockade.” (Cardinal Ruffo had created a cockade especially for the Holy Faith Army: pure white set in a crucifix.)
At the end of December 1800, with everyone from the Austrian emperor to the pope making peace deals with Napoleon, King Ferdinand of Naples suddenly found himself the lone defender against the resurgent French colossus in Italy. Napoleon sent Dumas’s fellow cavalry general, the flamboyant Murat, to lead an army south against Naples. It did not take Ferdinand long to begin negotiating his surrender in the face of the approaching French forces: his subjects did not call him Il re Gambalesta—loosely, “King Walkaway”—for nothing.
In February 1801, General Murat took pleasure in informing Ferdinand’s emissary that, as part of the terms of surrender, all French prisoners of war held anywhere in the kingdom must be freed immediately. From the letters he had received from Marie-Louise, as well as orders from the minister of war, Murat knew that this last stipulation would deliver his old comrade-in-arms Alex Dumas.
King Ferdinand quickly agreed to this condition, but before Murat could celebrate a successful armistice, Napoleon ordered Murat to renege on those terms. He added a new condition, requiring Ferdinand to accept French occupation of the Gulf of Taranto. Napoleon hoped to use that area as a base from which to launch a new campaign to retake Egypt, then in the midst of falling to the British and the Turks. Ferdinand again quickly agreed, and Murat’s army marched right into Naples without firing a shot. If Dumas had only known this news—that his old comrade was riding into the land of his oppressors!
He must have learned it soon enough. By the end of March, Dumas was on a ship bound for the French base at Ancona, wearing a freshly made light wool waistcoat, new shirt, socks and shoes, and a sharp-looking new hat. Still, at thirty-nine, he must also have been barely recognizable. In his first weeks out of prison, Dumas was partially blind and deaf, and weakened by malnourishment; he walked with a limp from yet another of his medical treatments—blood-letting that had severed a tendon. He was determined to heal himself, but he swore never to forget any detail of his captivity or of “the most barbaric oppression under heaven, driven by unremitting hatred for all those who call themselves Frenchmen.”
THE French commanding officer at Ancona greeted General Dumas warmly and, since there was no formal policy in place for dealing with POWs, gave his battered fellow officer some money out of his own pocket to buy food and basic supplies. On April 13, Dumas wrote to the government: “I have the honor of informing you that we [Manscourt and I] arrived yesterday in this city, with ninety-four [former] prisoners … for the most part blind and maimed.” When he arrived in Florence, Dumas would compose his remarkable account of his captivity relating all the misadventures that occurred from the moment he left Egypt on the Belle Maltaise, the account his son would later draw on for the iconic scenes of human suffering in The Count of Monte Cristo.§ In his letter to the government, Alex Dumas limited his reflections to a brief mention of “the treatment we have endured from the government of Naples [that] dishonors them in the eyes of humanity and all nations.”
That same day, he also wrote Marie-Louise for the first time as a free man. The letter includes a message for Alexandrine Aimée, “if by luck she is still of this world,” that he is “bringing various little things for her from Egypt.”
Curiously, even after a near shipwreck and two years in captivity he’d somehow managed to hang on to souvenirs for his daughter from the Expédition d’Égypte.
In another letter to Marie-Louise from Florence, written two weeks later, he tells of his joy at having received her letters and one from their now eight-year-old daughter, both of which he “has kissed a thousand times”:
It is with deep gratitude and emotion that I realize with what devotion and care you have overseen her education. Such conduct, conduct so worthy of you, makes you dearer and dearer to me, and I am impatient to give you proof of my feelings.
In none of the letters he writes her on his journey homeward—a journey to revolutionary France, the land of opportunity and fraternity in which he once found success, and which he will find no longer exists—does he choose to tell her the details of his ordeal, because, as he writes, “I don’t want to bring pain to your heart that is wounded enough by its long privations. I hope to bring your rare, precious spirit the healing balm of my consolation within the month.” He closes:
Adieu, my beloved, you will now and forever be so dear to my heart because misfortunes cannot but draw tighter the bonds that hold us fast to one another. Embrace for me my child, our dear parents, and also all our friends.
Yours without reserve,
Alex Dumas, General of Division
* Enemas are one of the most common remedies in history, going back to ancient Egypt. In the seventeenth century Louis XIV, who was known to have received thousands of them, made the procedure an everyday ritual of civilized hygiene. Enema syringes featured prominently in Molière’s comedies, and by the eve of the nineteenth century “every household had an enema stool by the fireside, where it was used with complete openness by everyone in turn.”
† The sperm escaping Dumas’s body at an “abundant and continuous” rate was a classic symptom of fatal disease in the eighteenth century. In the world of humoral medicine, sperm was much more than what we think it to be today, though it was also that. Sperm was believed to be a “nervous fluid” that flowed from head to toe.
‡ Tissot professed that the most surefire way to lose your life force was the obvious one. His 1758 book on sperm conservation—Onanism: A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Masturbation—argued that semen loss via masturbation led to disease and death. Tissot’s revelations about masturbation and illness—especially his “proof” that the act caused blindness—formed mainstream medical opinion on the subject until Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male overturned him in 1948.
§ The novelist would also reproduce a version of the account in his memoir, but he would soften many of the details of his father’s suffering that appear in the original, which I found in the safe, perhaps because they were too difficult or depressing for him to write about. This book is the first to base its recounting of General Dumas’s prison experiences on his original statement, rather than on his son’s bowdlerized version of it.