Memoirs of a Doctor
Memoirs of a Doctor (French: Mémoires d'un médecin ) is a cycle of novels by Alexandre Dumas the Elder from the years 1846 to 1853 . It consists of the four novels Joseph Balsamo , The Queen's Collar , Ange Pitou and The Countess of Charny .
Emergence
At the age of 44, in the prime of his life and intellectual creativity, Alexandre Dumas was king of the Parisian feature pages in 1846. Working on the assembly line, he and his staff produced one successful novel after the other. Most of them, including the memoirs of a doctor , first appeared in the feature sections of the high-circulation newspapers La Presse , Journal des Débats or Le Globe . Dumas wrote the series of novels Mémoires d'un médecin until 1853.
Summary
At the center of the story is the influential black artist and Freemason Giuseppe Balsamo , who throws himself full of energy into the turmoil of the beginning French Revolution , which is ready to destroy a 1200-year-old deluded dynasty. Around this central figure, Dumas tells the decline and fall of the Ancien Régime in France in a period from 1769 to 1793 in an abundance of dramatically interwoven fates .
The novel gets its rousing effect above all from Dumas' handling of the story, for him "a nail on which I hang my stories". The numerous characters and episodes he designed are so closely linked to well-known personalities of the time in their real historical context that the reader can hardly doubt the historicity of the events. He meets the aging, paranoid Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as Louis XV. with his Madame Dubarry , the somewhat simple-minded Louis XVI. , Marie Antoinette and later the eloquent revolutionary leaders Mirabeau , Danton , as well as Robespierre , Marat and Desmoulins .
Although the series of novels ends with the execution of Louis Capet, one could see their historical progress in the novels "The Chevalier of Maison Rouge" or "Marat's Son" , which can no longer keep up with the complexity and historical claim of the "Memoirs of a Doctor" capital.
When and where did Dumas write about the historical Count Alessandro Cagliostro , whom Dumas depicts as the hero of his story much more charismatically than the historical sources of Goethe or Schiller do ? the novelist Dominique Fernandez :
“Balsamo alias Acharat, alias Graf Phönix, alias Marquis d'Annas, alias Marchese Pellegrini travels through Europe and exercises a kind of spiritual hegemony, a mysterious, diabolical omnipotence. Thanks to his knowledge of the occult sciences he takes control of the spirits, and thanks to his skills as an alchemist he makes gold. He is a true Superman and the one who secretly lived at the court of Louis XV. like the XVI. governs. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ a bon mot ascribed to Dumas, without a precise indication of the source cf. z. B. Eduard Engel: History of French literature . 1927, p. 429 ( limited preview in Google Book search).