Dumas, A: Countess Dubarry - Alexandre Dumas

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Résumé :
Excerpt from The Countess Dubarry: Introd, by R. Brimley Johnson, Illustrated by R. W. Matthews It was the ambition of Dumas, and his achievement, to popularise the story of France, in his own phrase, by elevating history to the dignity of romance. The ideal obviously permits of considerable freedom in the treatment of facts, but its foundation remains the truth, clothed in the splendour of an artist's enthusiastic imagination. Dumas believed in France and painted her glory for her sons; as Shakespeare and Scott taught us the English faith. Romance lives, while records are forgotten. The great novels of Dumas, though not written in historical sequence, almost cover the ground from the Massacre of St. Bartholomew to the Revolution, falling into three periods approximately coincident with the centuries: the sixteenth, of Charles IX. and Henri III., the Medici, Chicot, and the League; the seventeenth, of Louis XIII., Louis XIV., and the redoubtable musketeers; the eighteenth, of Louis XV., Louis XVI., Cagliostro, Marie Antoinette, and the Guillotine. Of these, Joseph Balsamo, or The Memoirs of a Physician, opens the last period of romantic France, appropriately enough, with the coming of the Austrian. Though, as always in Dumas, the national picture is dramatised in the clash of strong individuals, the shadow of change and calamity is here; rather dimly felt to be ominously murmuring beneath the surface than as yet openly expressed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.