AUTHOR’S NOTE ON NAMES    

I have written a biography of a French historical figure, based mostly on French sources, but I’ve written it for a general English-speaking audience. In this sort of situation it is always tricky to decide on rules of spelling and punctuation. I decided to avoid an obsessive scholarly style in favor of an accessible approach that is most common in popular biographies (and least distracting to an American reader) while offering the kind of extensive sourcing that some readers and critics will be looking for in the back matter.

Among the choices affected by this approach include the following points:

I opt to refer to Napoleon as “Napoleon” throughout the narrative, even though the practice among historians (and French speakers) is to refer to him as “General Bonaparte” or “Bonaparte” until about 1799, when he seized political power in France, and then to switch to “Napoleon” around 1802 or even in 1804, when he officially takes the title Emperor Napoleon I. I hope purists will forgive me. (Of course, when I quote from letters by Dumas or other contemporaries, they usually refer to him as “General Bonaparte.”)

I don’t want to translate names, so Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie keeps his hyphen and his “de”—the common article that is a part of French noble names. But I do give the English equivalents of an aristocrat’s title, which is more familiar to most people. Hence, readers will meet “the Count de Maulde,” not “le comte de Maulde”—but also not “the Count of Maulde.” All these are possible, but I have chosen the form that I think best preserves the essence of the French name without littering the text with italics and foreign words.

The French also love to hyphenate place-names, and generally I include the hyphen as a matter of respecting the accuracy of names. So the action of this story will take place in Saint-Domingue and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

By the same token, when a name—or title—is familiarly translated in English, I will follow that form, even when it creates a slight inconsistency. Hence, you read about “the Count of Monte Cristo” in this book, not “the Count de Monte-Cristo.”