Ange Pitou

Ange Pitou is the third part of the four-volume series of novels Memoirs of a Doctor by the successful French author Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), which also includes Joseph Balsamo , The Queen's Collar and The Countess of Charny , the Dumas, beginning with Joseph Balsamo , between 1846 and published in the features of the Paris newspaper La Presse in 1855 .

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At the beginning of the novel, Dumas takes the reader to his native Villers-Cotterêts , where he meets a proletarian young man named Ange Pitou , who in his love for the great outdoors, forbidden trapping and his difficulties with the Latin language told young Dumas is not dissimilar. In a delicious argument with the ultra-royalist Abbé Fortier , who distinguishes the author as a playwright, expelled from the school and rejected by his aunt Angélique , a stingy old maid, chance helps the young Ange time and again. With the help of young Catherine , whose friend and confidante he becomes, he comes as bookkeeper to the farmer Billot , Katherine's father. This is where Dumas' ability to network his storylines comes in: Billot is the tenant of a certain Dr. Honoré Gilbert , honorary citizen of Philadelphia. However, the reader of the “Memoirs of a Doctor” only knows “little Gilbert”, Andrée's milk brother and student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau , who was shot by Philippe in the Azores at the end of the novel “Joseph Balsamo”. What was to be speculated in "the queen's collar" has now been confirmed. Gilbert is not dead, but saved in a mysterious way and has become an apprentice to Giuseppe Balsamos and now a serious, somewhat hypothermic doctor, known to George Washington and other respected personalities. Gilbert was arrested by one of the notorious Lettre de Chatet of the king and imprisoned in the Bastille : in the Bastille, the man-eating monster, the seal of feudalism on the forehead of the Parisians, the prison par excellence. When Billot found out, he moved to Paris. Ange accompanies him. You arrive in the capital on July 13, 1789 and, along with the historical figures Gouchon, Maillard and Marat, are the ones who storm the Bastille in the front row ( Storming the Bastille ) to get the Dr. Free Gilbert. And while the revolution is raging in France, which Balsamo, alias Cagliostro - Dumas even succeeds in plausibly demonstrating why he is not, as historically handed down, in custody in Rome at this time - is still headed as the leader of the Freemasons, Ange returns Back to Villers-Cotterêts with a swollen chest to form a national guard based on the Parisian model, which, however, lacks weapons.

“The fifth one gets the pike,” Ange explains to his men with a quick decision. “It's the same in Paris, for every four people with a shotgun there is always one with a pike. Pikes are very practical, you use them to put heads on them. "

He finds recognition with everyone, except with the virgin Catherine, to whom he feels more and more naive love. But Catherine has already given her heart to the Chevalier Isidore von Charny , who is indeed much more gallant and elegant than the kind-hearted but somewhat clumsy Pitou. In a dramatic scene, Isidore tells his Catherine that he has been called to Paris by his brother, Olivier de Charny, who is well known to the reader of the previous volumes ... then the novel suddenly breaks off and the reader is prompted by “FINIS “ Communicated that the novel trilogy is herewith ended.

Nevertheless, The Memoirs of a Doctor found its continuation in The Countess of Charny .