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By Lor Oldmann (jamwad@hotmail.com)


Dumas they come! Hugo I've just bin there!

There is absolutely no doubt about it: the two greatest novelists of all time were Victor Marie Hugo (1802-85) and Alexandre Dumas (1802-70). There is nothing in English literature to compare with the stark reality of 'Les Miserables' or the bold swashbuckling romanticism of 'The Three Musketeers'. The nearest approach is made by Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens.

Unfortunately Scott was incapable of putting pen to paper without going on an ego trip, and every Dickens character is a caricature. As one famous Hollywood producer declared, "Films of stuff by Hugo and Dumas make themselves." Another found Scott "Too boring for the box office!" Yet another claimed that the most difficult task in adapting Dickens for the screen was in giving his characters flesh and blood and in making them believable.

"Porn oozes from every pore of Dumas and Hugo," declared an American screen writer, "whereas sex is an embarrassment to Walter Scott and an implied aside for Charles Dickens."

The most exciting thing, meanwhile, to come from the German language is the bowdlerised version of Mein Kampf. And one critic suggested 'Il nome della rosa' by Umberto Eco as the greatest Italian novel ever! Enough said. The fact is: it is a two horse race; the novel is a French art form! And Hugo and Dumas are the masters.

Behind every great master there are several mistresses. It would appear so very pronouncedly in this case. Victor Hugo led an immaculate life as a nice clean little French non-Jewish schoolboy who obeyed his father (when that great man opted to put in an appearance at home, for he was anything but a good, well-behaved, non-fornicating Frenchman) and followed his dear mama and her apron strings everywhere. He was a virgin, as pure as the undriven snow, when, at the age of twenty, he married Sweet Adele Foucher.

She was not a virgin and had not been since her fourteenth birthday party. Nor was Victor's brother, Eugene, who was as daft as a toilet brush. Eugene had already slept with Adele (many times). There is a strong possibility that he made use of her body oftener, out of wedlock, than Victor did in it. On the day Victor and Adele were married, Eugene flipped the lid altogether and had to be put into a lunatic asylum from which he never emerged. Victor could well have followed him there when his dear wife, in one of her many bouts of almost insane petulance in the early days of married life, explained why!

Victor Hugo, despite this, was a model husband until Adele started having headaches, almost every night. And almost every other night she was having a sordid little rough and tumble with near relatives and friends, neighbours and acquaintances, servants and trades people. The most nearly permanent of these sexual wrestling matches was with a very close friend of her husband, the very much respected Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. The cuckold husband was shocked and surprised. Sainte-Beuve was a notoriously lazy and incompetent bastard; the wonder was that he knew how and took the trouble to lift a lady's skirt. The husband forgave the pair.

Victor Hugo, however, retaliated by laying women left, right and centre, high and low, rich and poor, here, there and everywhere. When he sought refuge in Belgium after the coup d'etat by Louis Napoleon his sexual prowess became legendary until certain husbands and fathers expressed regrets and he was forced to flee the country. Later legend has it that the quick exit was for political reasons that he was harbouring refugees in the way that a common cur harbours fleas!

He sought asylum in Jersey in the Channel Islands and was politely asked to leave because of his outrageous sexual behaviour there. It is said that following these incidents his sexual activity always followed a clearly definable pattern: if they wore a skirt, he'd have them.

The two affairs of his love life that gave him deepest satisfaction were those involving the extremely popular young actress Juliette Drouet and the famous society hostess Leonie d'Annet both of whom provided him with his most powerful inspiration. And who could ask more than that?

It was this Juliette who declared, "I never imagined there were so many ways of making love, until I tried them all with Victor Hugo!" And Leonie decided, "Never would I have believed a man capable of doing anything so often and so thoroughly."

The one really enduring love affair, however, was with his maid, Blanche Lavin. It was after a particularly passionate session with Blanche that Victor Hugo died of a stroke in his 83rd. year! And a nation, quite rightly, mourned. Over two million people attended his funeral, four fifths of whom, it is said, were women.

After his death, hundreds of women in Paris claimed to have been seduced by him, some claimed to have been made pregnant by him, a few even claimed that he had bigamously married them. All agreed that he was one helluva lover. One male friend demanded, after a violently passionate affair with the ugliest woman in Paris, how he could make love to such a grotesque face.

"Quite easily," replied Victor avec aplomb, "and to her other parts with equal ease!"

Victor Hugo had always been interested in fairy lore, spiritism and the occult. He himself claimed that he obtained the title for 'Les Miserables' from a crude form of Ouija board, and that the character of Quasimodo came to him in a s‚ance. 'Les Miserables' was placed on the Papal Index of Proscribed Books, ostensibly because of this, but in reality because in it he dared suggest that there could be such a thing as an evil priest and that a priest could be capable of such an enormous sin as female child abuse.

Victor Hugo was one of the greatest literary figures in history. He was also one of the most thoroughly honest men who ever lived. He made no excuses for his enormous sexual appetite, and did not pretend that his many affairs with married women were mere urban myths. He made enemies because he exposed their hypocrisy and corruption in politics and religion. He did not skulk into a sleazy down-town brothel for his kicks, or find sexual satisfaction up the backside of a choirboy like many of his critics. His sexual philosophy is plain and is clearly stated in his poetry:

You want to fuck? Let's fuck! You don't want to fuck? Then fuck off!

It may not rhyme, but who cares?

There was definitely something in the air in France at the beginning of the 19th. century. Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was born in the same year as Victor Hugo. Within two years either side of 1802, no fewer than twenty famous Frenchmen took their first breath of life; among them was a mathematician, physicians and surgeons, a world renowned chemist, a theoretical physicist, an encyclopaedist, a famous artist, a theologian and an educationist. And the remarkable thing is that they were, every one of them, utterly randy bastards who each produced on average fifteen illegitimate children.

Dumas was the son of a general in Napoleon's 'Great Army' and grandson of a minor nobleman who held an official post in the French colony of Santo Domingo. Both men were hyperactive when it came to matters of sex. His mother was a rather loose-living daughter of an innkeeper and his grandmother was a black slave of Afro-Caribbean origin who bordered on nymphomania. Both women were insatiable in their sexual relationships. The mixture of race and social class and the fusion of inflamed libidos was to prove explosive.

All these main roots showed in the life and work of the novelist. Indeed, his life was every bit as thoroughly exciting and as full of adventure as anything in his novels.

Unlike Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas was no schoolboy virgin. He had his first serious sex at the age of eleven with a girl of sixteen. He had his first illegitimate child while still in his teens. By his late teens he was known popularly as 'Le Stud'.

Popular legend accredits him with about fifty illegitimate children; twenty three positive hits can be identified while he admitted to only three, the most famous being Alexandre Dumas Fils whose mother was a seamstress and who was conceived while the father was twenty and completely pissed out of his mind. This son grew into a pious little prick who became a writer and dramatist like his more famous father, but who disowned his father's life style and bored people sick moralising about it.

One story about this pallid little bastard should suffice. He was attending a scholarly and charitable function in the house of a filthy rich patroness of the arts when she offered him brandy. He held up his hands in horror.

"Strong drink. Madame!" he exclaimed in his prissiest voice. "I would sooner commit adultery!"

"Fair enough," replied the famous hostess, and ripped off her clothes.

And Dumas fils fled for his life, and for the preservation of his virtue, from the house.

Not so with Dumas, the father. He discovered his wife in bed with his very close friend Roger de Beauvoir. The offending pair were upset and obviously embarrassed at being 'uncovered' until Dumas stripped and said, "Move over! Make room! It's a cold night. Is there anything left for me?" The irony is that Dumas had just left the bed of another close friend's wife. That's the kind of people they were at that time. Thank goodness we are much more well-behaved and civilised.

Dumas married the actress Ida Ferrier in 1840, had an intense sex session with her, spent her entire fortune, then left her shortly afterwards. He made lots of money from his own work but spent it twice as fast as he earned it. He built the pretentious chateau de Monte Cristo outside Paris, he bought fabulous works of art, gave liberally to many charities, squandered lots of cash on friends and mistresses and prostitutes. Once asked to contribute 25 francs to help pay for the burial of a bailiff, he gave 50 francs in the hope that it would help bury two bailiffs.

He took a leading part in the Revolution of 1830, supported Garibaldi in his struggle for Italian independence, went to Russia and advocated the abolition of serfdom. He added his considerable weight in support of black rights in America. Mindful of his own roots and aware of his own colour he was always regarded as a black man and had to overcome racial prejudice in France and elsewhere he was active in any struggle against racism, religious discrimination or political sectarianism.

He was one of the first men in the modern world to see basic human rights for the individual as a political issue. Long before UNESCO and WHO, he argued the case for free and universal education of all children and for social health care for the young, the sick and the elderly, irrespective of their socio-economic status.

On the debit side, he quite literally had no idea of the value of money. Like the prostitutes who wandered the streets of Paris, money was a convenience that was there to be used only when he could not get what he wanted for free. He ran away from creditors wherever he went. He left families destitute by his failure or refusal to pay his debts. Never once did he hesitate and think about the harm he could be doing by taking goods and services without paying for them. Once approached by a poor cobbler for payment, a year late, for shoes he had made, Dumas exclaimed, "Christ, man! I owe a hundred times more to more better people than you."

Like Victor Hugo he had an enormous appetite and could eat at a single sitting what an entire Parisian family would consume in a week. Correspondingly, he drank vast quantities of wine and brandy and, later in his life, acquired a taste for vodka, gin and Irish whiskey. Like Victor Hugo also, Alexandre Dumas had a profound interest in the supernatural: voodoo, spirit writing, tarot and scriving. He attempted serious studies into various branches of scientific parapsychology, like telekinesis and telepathy. The modern far-fetched superhero of television and comic strip, characters like Batman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, even James Bond, for the most part, were preconceived by Dumas.

There is one joint contribution by Dumas and Hugo to the character of one of the greatest nations on earth: they restored the reputation and the self-confidence of the French male. Until the Revolution of 1789, there is little doubt that the average Frenchman was regarded by the rest of the world as a pussy-footing effeminate who was far more interested in powdering his nose and popping real, over-ripe cherries past his painted lips than in popping metaphorical hymenal cherries and providing the Marquise de Pompadours with what they yearned for.

Until the days of Hugo and Dumas, the great lovers were foreign visitors to France, Italian refugees and English clergymen and their like. By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Dumas and Hugo had become the rule of thumb, rather than the exception. So-called French kissing, and the reign of the Frenchman as the world's classiest lover, dates from these two literary geniuses.

Vive Dumas et Hugo!