In Dumas: The King of Romance, David Coward gives an account of Alexandre Dumas’s equally amazing father:
Dumas said he was born without even bootstraps to pull himself up with, but he chose his parents well. His mother was an innkeeper’s daughter who gave him unstinting love and his father was a stupendous role model. Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was born in Santo Domingo in 1760, the illegitimate son of a French-born Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was said that ‘the Black Devil’ could hold four rifles at the end of his outstretched arm, one finger in each barrel. In Egypt in 1799 he quarrelled with Napoleon, accusing him of putting personal ambition before Revolutionary principles; he was sent home. On the way, his ship was detained in Southern Italy by Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, then at war with France. For two years he was left to rot in Brindisi castle. In a neighbouring cell, the geologist Dolomieu, another prisoner of war, applied himself, using soot, a stick and the margins of Bibles, to the composition of The Philosophy of Mineralogy. It was a bit like Edmond Dantés and the abbé Faria in the Chateau d’If, except that the general, his health and career broken, returned to France in 1801 and died of stomach cancer in 1806. Alexandre was four.