Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/26

 Before this Alexander entered the world he was about to conquer, much was already his own by inheritance. He was born into the atmosphere of fiery light and fierce heat which the Revolution had left behind it. He was destined to possess a good share of blue and of black blood, for his grandfather was no other than the Marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, self-exiled to San Domingo, and his grandmother was a negro-woman, Louise-Cessette Dumas. It was a romantically ill-assorted match, full of interesting possibilities. The son of this marriage threw over parentage and aristocracy, enlisted in the French army as a private under his mother's name, and at thirty-one years of age had risen to the rank of general. Times and circumstances were both fruitful and portentous—for they were leading up to the birth of our hero.

In 1790 the swarthy young Republican Hercules, being stationed at Villers-Cotterets, a little town on the high road from Paris to Laon, fell in love with an innkeeper's daughter there, and duly married her on the 28th of November, 1792. Thus when Alexandre was born, ten years later (on the 24th July, 1802, to be exact), he was a quadroon, and dowered at birth with many of the characteristics, good and bad, of the African race—the ardent,