Table of Contents for this Episode
Category: French History
[00:00:00]
Annie Sargent: This is Join Us in France, episode 604, six cent quatre.
Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.
Today on the podcast: Alexandre Dumas
Annie Sargent: Today, I bring you a conversation with my good friend Elyse Rivin about Alexandre Dumas Père, the larger than life author behind The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.
His story is every bit as dramatic as his novels, a general for a father, a slave for a grandmother, and a life of endless adventure, scandalous excess, and staggering output.
Podcast supporters
Annie Sargent: Before [00:01:00] we start, this show runs on listener support. If you want to work with me directly, I do itinerary consults. I have written eight VoiceMap tours of Paris, which are self-guided GPS tours of Paris, and I also do day trips around the southwest of France in my electric car.
And you can read up about all of this at joinusinfrance.com/boutique.
And if you shop on Amazon anyway, starting at joinusinfrance.com/amazon costs you nothing, but it helps the show.
Magazine segment
Annie Sargent: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elyse today, I’ll discuss La Canicule, or the great heat wave of June 2026 , and why it’s all anybody can talk about.
Meet Dumas
Annie Sargent: Bonjour, Elyse.
Elyse Rivin: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie Sargent: [00:02:00] What a fun topic we have today. I’m very excited. We’re going to talk about Alexandre Dumas.
Elyse Rivin: Yes.
Annie Sargent: The father.
Elyse Rivin: The father. Yes. We’ll leave the son by the side.
Annie Sargent: Yes, for today, we won’t talk about the son. And if there’s time, I’ll talk a little bit about The Three Musketeers that I have listened to for the third or fourth or fifth time possibly and just finished this morning, a fun novel.
Elyse Rivin: Oh, all for one and one for all.
Annie Sargent: Yeah. Un pour tous, tous pour un.
Elyse Rivin: Tous pour un. Voilà.
A Larger Than Life Figure
Annie Sargent: So tell us about Alexandre Dumas, what an interesting man and interesting life.
Elyse Rivin: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So interesting and fascinating that I’m surprised that they haven’t yet made a real biopic of his life, you know?
Annie Sargent: That would be interesting.
Elyse Rivin: It would be interesting. And it would be interesting to see the points of view that somebody would take in doing it because even though he was an extremely popular writer, an extremely [00:03:00] successful writer, and of course still is in terms of how many people read, continue to read his books, he was very controversial.
Annie Sargent: Sure, yes.
Elyse Rivin: And he was controversial both for his person, his persona, his way of doing things, and even the way he wrote.
Annie Sargent: Oh, okay.
Elyse Rivin: He had trouble a couple of times because he always had collaborators. I have this vision of this man. First of all, he was very tall. Well, before we even talk about his background, he was big. He was big. He was a big 6’2", big husky guy. Apparently as he got older, he got heavier, but at first he was just this very imposing figure with a lot of frizzy hair because he was the descendant, his grandmother, his maternal grandmother was in fact a slave. He never sat still. I have this vision of this man who doesn’t sit still even to write. I mean, he’s running around this room even at the beginning of the 1800s, sitting down, getting an idea, getting up, running again. So I have this, I’m ready to make the movie, okay? [00:04:00] Let’s do it. Let’s do it.
But let’s talk a little bit about his background because personally, I mean, I’m sure I’m not the only one, I think that his family background also had a lot to do with who he was and what he became as a person.
It doesn’t have anything to do particularly with the fact that he wrote all these wonderfully imaginative books, but he comes from a very, very unusual background compared to some other of the writers that we have talked about, you know?
His Father the General
Elyse Rivin: So he was the son of a general. He was the son of a man who was actually a hero of the French Revolution and then of some of the Napoleonic campaigns.
But his father… his father, now, so let’s make sure that we understand this. This is not Alexandre, who is one generation later. His father was in fact the illegitimate son of a marquis, a member of the aristocracy, who had gone [00:05:00] to Haiti, what is now Haiti, to try and make a fortune with sugarcane plantations, and a slave.
Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm.
Elyse Rivin: A woman that he met and that he freed as a slave. But it’s very ambiguous because apparently there were lots of people who thought that they had gotten married. They never did actually legally get married, but he had, so Alexandre Dumas’ grandfather, was this marquis from Normandy. He actually had four children. And the terrible part of the story is that when he decided, he wasn’t doing well in Haiti, he decided he was going to go back to France. He did not free the four children, even though the wife of the mother of these children was actually considered to be a freed slave.
Annie Sargent: Mm.
Elyse Rivin: It’s very complicated, and I think we need to do maybe an episode one day about, you know, stuff like that in the history of France.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah. The history of France is kind of murky.
Elyse Rivin: It is kind of murky about that. But what happened [00:06:00] was, the general, the man who became the general, was his oldest child and his oldest son, and he obviously favored him because what he did was, going back to France, decided that he was going to free this child and bring him to France and raise him as an aristocrat.
Annie Sargent: Well, you couldn’t have slaves in France anyway, so he didn’t have a bloody choice. If he wanted to bring him in France, he was going to be a free man.
Elyse Rivin: That’s very true.
Annie Sargent: Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: So Alexandre Dumas’ father was brought to France and raised in an aristocratic environment where he was given an excellent education, and he was taught all the military arts and had a gift apparently, was very gifted. They soon realized that he would make a wonderful soldier, so he went into the military and rose very quickly and became this apparently incredibly fearless, brilliant soldier who rose to the rank of general.
Annie Sargent: All right.
Elyse Rivin: So this is Alexandre Dumas’ dad, okay? Who was also the very [00:07:00] first non-white general ever in the French army.
Annie Sargent: Oh, nice.
Elyse Rivin: Followed soon after by several others who actually came from the colonies. And what happened was that he must have been a man of some character. Apparently, he also was apparently fabulous to look at, tall, 6’2", 6’3", very handsome. But he had definitely, you could tell he was mixed race. I mean, he had African features.
Annie Sargent: Yeah.
He married a woman, a woman from Normandy. And he proceeded to have two children. First a daughter, and then nine years later he had the son, and the son is of course Alexandre Dumas. Okay.
Napoleon and Injustice
Elyse Rivin: But what happened was, to the dad, is that at some point he disobeyed Napoleon.
Annie Sargent: Not a good idea.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. They were out on a campaign, I don’t remember if it was in Egypt or if it was still in Europe, but apparently he was high ranking and soldiers followed him, and Napoleon absolutely did not appreciate the fact that he disobeyed his [00:08:00] orders.
He absolutely apparently refused some particular order that Napoleon had given. And so Napoleon decided to punish him by sending him off to a campaign where he got taken prisoner in somewhere, I think it was in Northern Italy, I don’t remember exactly.
But he was taken prisoner, tortured so badly that he could no longer function as a soldier and was sent back to his wife and his two kids who were living in a small village in Normandy. And Napoleon further punished him by refusing to give him his military pension.
Annie Sargent: Mm.
Elyse Rivin: So the idea of punishment and vengeance that happened to his father apparently stayed in the mind of Alexandre.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, that’s not cool.
Elyse Rivin: And they say that that was the inspiration for The Count of Monte Cristo.
Annie Sargent: Interesting.
Elyse Rivin: The whole idea of being unjustly punished and then taking your revenge, they say it was one of the things that carried, he carried around with him all his life.
So [00:09:00] the general unfortunately died when Alexandre Dumas was only four. He was ruined by the torture and the prison, and so he was in his mid-40s when he died.
Racism and Early Schooling
Elyse Rivin: And at that point, Alexandre Dumas had to go with his mother to her parents’ house. And it was the beginning, unfortunately for him, of understanding what racism was.
Annie Sargent: Oh, okay.
Elyse Rivin: Because even though he was, let’s say the second generation, he still had some of the same features that his father had, and he was in a tiny little village in Normandy, and apparently the children made fun of him, and as he got older, he’s had the same physical presence that his father had had, but it was something that stayed with him and was a problem in some way, all the rest of his life. Because there were cartoons, there were things that made fun of him. Those people who couldn’t accept the fact that somebody was mixed race, always used that as an excuse to not allow him into some rich aristocrat’s [00:10:00] house or things like that.
So this is the background of Alexandre Dumas. He went to a small school, and then was sent to a small Catholic academy where the head of the academy befriended him and helped him.
But in fact, Dumas only had a formal education up until the age of 13.
Annie Sargent: Oh, wow.
Elyse Rivin: And he was gifted in calligraphy of all things, and in writing, and apparently he knew how to spell very well. So, with the help of some family friends, they got him his first job at the age of 14 as a clerk.
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: Copying. We’re talking the beginning of the 1800s. He was born in 1802. He was born under Napoleon, basically, you know.
Dreaming of Stories
Elyse Rivin: He did very well. I guess he was very assiduous, but apparently he was a dreamer, and one of the things that he had learned a lot about when he was having this sort of mixed bag education, was fables.
He was very interested in fables and stories about the past, [00:11:00] and stories about heroes from the past, and kings and queens.
It’s interesting, because of course politically he was really a republican in the sense of French notion of no kings and queens. But he loved the stories, and one of the stories that inspired him that they say is really one of the reasons he wanted to become a writer, is that he read Ivanhoe.
Annie Sargent: Oh, Ivanhoe.
Elyse Rivin: Ivanhoe, yeah.
Annie Sargent: Oh, I read it too as a kid, but I don’t remember anything about it.
Elyse Rivin: Well, do you know what? I’ve never read it. Now I want to go read it.
Annie Sargent: Yeah. Oh, I wish I could remember.
Elyse Rivin: So, it’s medieval Scotland, basic- I think. That’s-
Annie Sargent: I don’t remember that. I don’t even remember that much.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. So apparently he had this dream of reproducing stories that were in the same vein as something like Ivanhoe. Say it again in French, Annie.
Annie Sargent: Ivanhoe.
Elyse Rivin: Ivanhoe. Isn’t that cute?
Annie Sargent: I wouldn’t have known how to say it in English either- … so there you [00:12:00] go.
Elyse Rivin: He was really interested in stories. I mean, I think that that’s the difference, you know?
He was not someone who we could say was like the intellectual of high literature. He wanted to tell good stories.
Annie Sargent: That’s definitely what he does.
Elyse Rivin: That’s definitely what he did.
Annie Sargent: Yes. Lots of twists and turns.
Elyse Rivin: Lots of twists and turns.
Annie Sargent: I mean, excellent stories.
Elyse Rivin: And so what happened was at the age of 17, he met a man named Adolphe de Leuven. It’s a very sort of a Belgian name, who was the same age as he.
This man, Adolphe de Leuven, was a lifelong friend, and he introduced him to poetry, which apparently was something that he didn’t really know about, but also to what were at the time modern writers. So we’re talking about 1819. We have the romantics, the romantics in painting and the romantics in writing. So there’s this kind of new movement that’s going on that’s a lot freer than what was being done in the past, and the two of them had decided [00:13:00] they had dreams of doing some work together, and eventually decided that it would be fun for some reason to do historical theater pieces.
This became their first objective, and something that I learned doing all the research for this was how much of theater he actually did, Dumas.
I always think of him in terms of the books, but he actually did over 100 theater pieces. He wrote them.
Annie Sargent: He wrote plays.
Elyse Rivin: He wrote plays.
Annie Sargent: Wow.
Elyse Rivin: His first fame didn’t come from writing books. That came a bit later. His first fame came from actually producing plays. First they tried doing vaudeville, which is interesting because the term vaudeville for me as an American means stand-up comedy, but that’s apparently not what it was. Vaudeville was simply kind of, a bit lowbrow…
Annie Sargent: It’s situational comedy.
Elyse Rivin: … It’s situational comedy. It’s kind of, you know, silly stuff.
Annie Sargent: The regular people getting in fights and stealing from each other and stealing [00:14:00] boyfriends and love interests and things, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: And then, interestingly enough, they wrote a piece together. I mean, there’s no clear understanding of who did what, whatever, but they convinced one of the theaters, there were lots of small theaters in Paris at the time, to put this on, and it was a historical play, and it was called Henry III and His Court.
Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm.
And I’m not even sure if it was the French Henry III or it was the English Henry III, to be honest. Could be either one.
Elyse Rivin: It could be either one.
Paris and The Stage
Elyse Rivin: But by this time he had already gotten a different job as a clerk working for the Duc d’Orleans. He was a scribe, basically. He was writing his texts for him and doing things for him, and he was earning enough money that he could bring his mother and sister to live with him in Paris.
Annie Sargent: Nice.
Elyse Rivin: So by the age of 20, 21, he was getting a good taste of Parisian life.
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: And his friend Adolphe apparently had connections, and so they started [00:15:00] going to salons and they started meeting these nice ladies and they started hanging out in theater, and it was in Paris that he discovered the existence of the Comédie-Française.
Annie Sargent: Whoa.
Elyse Rivin: And his dream, which came true eventually, was to be one of the writers for the Comédie-Française, the Grande Comédie-Française. So he liked life in Paris.
Annie Sargent: Sure. What’s not to like?
Elyse Rivin: He was a bon vivant, and apparently, starting very, very young, he liked to seduce women. He liked women.
Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm.
Elyse Rivin: That’s about, I think they could put that on his tombstone probably if it isn’t already on it, you know. He liked women. We’re not talking about liking a little. We’re talking about really liking a lot, you know?
Annie Sargent: And by that you mean many of them.
Elyse Rivin: Many, many, many, many, many, many, Annie. So, many, so many that before his mother actually came to live with him, at the age of 22, in 1824, he had his first son.
Annie Sargent: Oh, okay.[00:16:00]
Elyse Rivin: With a seamstress who was a neighbor in the same building he was living in.
Annie Sargent: Handy dandy.
Elyse Rivin: Handy dandy. She was a certain number of years older than him. She lived with him off and on, if you want to call it that, for a certain number of years, but it was just the first of a whole series. A whole series of mistresses and a series of children. Everything I read everywhere says, well, we know that there are four official that he recognized, two sons and two daughters, but there’s an assumption that there are probably others out there, who don’t even know that their ancestor was Alexandre Dumas, so.
Annie Sargent: So if you wake up with a strong desire to write a wild story, maybe that’s why.
Maybe. Maybe that’s why. It’s funny, but of course at the time it was totally scandalous. But he couldn’t have cared less. He traveled in the circles of artists and writers, and really, [00:17:00] it is true that for the entire 19th century, there was a code that was different for those who were bohemian, who were artists and writers, and they … He couldn’t have cared less, honestly, what anybody thought, really, for his entire life. That’s usually a good idea. I mean, if you want to live a, your own life, just do what you want. I mean, don’t be a horrible person either, you know?
Elyse Rivin: Well, no, he wasn’t. That’s what’s so strange about all this and a little bit tragic.
Fame Money and Excess
Elyse Rivin: He made his first big historical play, this Henry III and His Court, made so much money that he became famous immediately. He was the…
Annie Sargent: Oh, see.
Elyse Rivin: … The big thing in Paris, and from that point on, we’re talking from 1825 till 1840, that’s in 15 years, he produced a play a year.
Annie Sargent: Wow, that’s cool.
Elyse Rivin: When I say produced, I mean he wrote a play a year, and sometimes he had two going on in Paris at the same time. The list, if you go onto one of the sites on Internet and you [00:18:00] see the names of all these plays, well, most of them we’ve never heard of and probably will never ever, you know? But it is absolutely phenomenal the amount that he wrote. He turned it out all the time. He wrote every single day.
And one of the things that happened was that he started making a lot of money. And with this money, he did, this is why you can’t even in some way fault him, he spent the money on everybody around him.
Annie Sargent: He didn’t keep the money for himself. He apparently gave money to friends, he gave money to his mistresses. If anybody came, needed money, he gave it to them. He apparently, it went through his fingers as fast as it came in, and he made investments that were not always the most wise, because everybody was saying, "Put money in this, put money in that." He was someone who lived to the fullest at every single moment of his life. And all this is before he began writing any novels.
Hmm. Interesting.
Elyse Rivin: So he was already one of [00:19:00] the most famous people in Paris in terms of the arts, the theater and everything. He started writing some poetry. He actually started writing some short stories.
Translations and Travels
Elyse Rivin: He began some of his travels in the 1830s. First thing he did was go to Switzerland, and then he went to Italy, which becomes something very important in his life a little bit later on. And he apparently was very good at languages because he learned English and Italian enough to translate literature from those two languages into French.
Annie Sargent: Hmm.
Elyse Rivin: And then put those plays on. So he translated some plays by Shakespeare. You have to think about that for a minute, you know, and put them on in French in France. He translated plays by some Germans, he translated plays by some Italians. I mean, this was rather a remarkable person.
Annie Sargent: But in France, for the longest time, it was normal for authors to also be translators.
Elyse Rivin: Was it?
Annie Sargent: Oh, yeah, for the longest time. And as a matter of fact, I mean, I [00:20:00] worked in technical translation, my early career was in technical translation. To even be considered as a literature translator, you had to have some novels that you had written yourself.
So you had to be an acknowledged author before you could put yourself out there as a novel translator. I don’t think it’s the same anymore. I think that evolved quickly during my lifetime, but that’s how things started.
Elyse Rivin: Interesting. So probably this was not so unusual then for him.
Annie Sargent: No, and people, I mean, a translation is to restate everything but differently.
Elyse Rivin: Differently, right.
Annie Sargent: And so you have to be a good writer yourself or you can’t do it.
Elyse Rivin: That’s true.
Annie Sargent: Now, it’s possible that he lost some of the meaning along the way, especially with Shakespeare, which is kind of, like, really difficult. But that was okay so long as it was written in a nice way in French, so long as it worked in French, that was good enough.
Elyse Rivin: That was good enough, right? So here he is, a huge success. [00:21:00] He manages to build a chateau that he calls the Chateau, eventually he names it the Chateau de Monte Cristo. This is before he actually has written the book of Monte Cristo.
Annie Sargent: He just liked the name.
Elyse Rivin: He just liked the name. And he was known for making a lot of money and spending a lot of money. And somewhere along the way in the 1830s, he had a second child, a daughter. I’m not even going to give you the names because once he started doing a lot of theater, he had a tendency to like actresses.
Annie Sargent: Oh, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: So, you know, I mean, there’s just this list, you know, that goes on as long as the number of plays that he did, I think. You know, basically, he went from one to the other.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Serialized Novels Begin
Elyse Rivin: And it wasn’t until the end of the 1830s, that he decided that he was going to write a novel.
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: Now, what gave him this idea? I have no idea. But of course, at the time, they were what was called a roman feuilleton, which of course means that they were written in episodes, and each episode was published every week.
Annie Sargent: Right, it was [00:22:00] serialized.
Elyse Rivin: Serialized.
Annie Sargent: A lot of authors were at the time.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. And there was a newspaper that he worked with called La Presse, where apparently this format already existed for a certain amount of time in England since the end of the 1700s, but it was new in France. It was new in Paris to produce books in this way.
Collaborators and Style
Elyse Rivin: And this is the beginning of what winds up being a little bit of a complication for him a little bit later because he’s doing so many things that he takes on a collaborator, someone he himself calls an assistant, and he has ideas. He has all these ideas, and his tendency is to want to do historical works, like in the plays and everything. He likes talking about the past, the kings and queens and the princesses and all this stuff from the past, but he can’t do it all, all by himself.
And so what he does is he hires first one person, and then this other man named Alfred Maquet, to be his assistant, and he’s running around doing all these things at the same time, and he [00:23:00] says, basically, "Give me the structure. I’ll give you the ideas. You give me an outline, and I will fill in the details, the dialogue and all those things, but I can’t do it all at the same time." And so the first one that he does is called, hold onto your seat here, okay, The Reigns of Philippe Valois of France and Edward III of England.
Annie Sargent: Oof, that doesn’t sound like a bestseller.
Elyse Rivin: Doesn’t sound like a bestseller. It’s a little dumpling heavy, right?
Seven chapters in seven weeks. He’s 34 years old, which means it’s 1836, and this is the beginning of his writing in prose, okay?
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: It was okay. It sold a little bit. It was not the big splash that you… I think just remembering the title is one thing.
Annie Sargent: Uh-huh, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: But he said… he said himself actually, that he did not want to do work that [00:24:00] had heavy social or political overtones. By this time, he had met and became friends with Hugo, Victor Hugo, whom he admired enormously, and he understood that what he was interested in was stories that had action, romance, histories. There’s always a lesson of some kind, of course. There’s always a question of somebody being mistreated and then getting their revenge, but he didn’t go into deep intellectual theory.
Annie Sargent: Right. So the deep intellectual theory was more like Victor Hugo.
Elyse Rivin: Right.
Annie Sargent: And the political… how would you say that? The political writings, analysis, right, was Emile Zola. So we had different, you know, different people who were doing… Honoré de Balzac was more on the lyrical side of things. So they all, they each had their specialty, I guess.
Elyse Rivin: Yes. They certainly did.
Annie Sargent: And Dumas was adventure and just incredible stories really [00:25:00] is what he did. Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: Right. Exactly.
Breakout Novels
Elyse Rivin: So, beginning was this one that I’m not going to repeat the name of, and then we get to 1844. He’s 42 years old, and he publishes The Three Musketeers.
Annie Sargent: Right. That was a huge success from the beginning.
Elyse Rivin: From the beginning.
Annie Sargent: Which of course it was. Like, it’s a great book.
Elyse Rivin: It’s a great book, right. And he followed it immediately, with not only the other two parts, because it’s, of course, the whole story of the Three Musketeers is in actually in three volumes.
Annie Sargent: Right. Later, he wrote 20 Years Later, I think he called it. Yeah. Vingt Ans Après is what it’s called in French, and it’s more on the Three Musketeers.
Elyse Rivin: There were actually three altogether, but he followed a year later, with La Reine Margot.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: Which is fabulous, and of course it’s made into a really wonderful movie in the last 20 years, here in France. And then The Count of Monte Cristo.
Annie Sargent: Oh, yes. Another great one.
Elyse Rivin: And so we, we have him on a roll, basically. I mean, this [00:26:00] guy is going, and this is in the 1840s, he is publishing and turning out all of these novels, and all of them are a huge, huge, huge success, okay?
Annie Sargent: Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: And it’s this guy Mackaye, who has worked with him from the end of the 1830s on, who is really giving him the skeletal structure and a lot of the, you know, basic format for this writing while he… I can just, you know, I just saw a thing on television, right, maybe that’s because it’s in my mind, so this guy Mackaye is sitting there, and he’s up and around and running around going, "This is who," says, you know, "She says this, he says this, this," et cetera, et cetera. And he is incredibly rich, and he’s incredibly successful. So successful, remember that he had a son when he was 20 years old.
Annie Sargent: Right.
Travel Writing Begins
Elyse Rivin: In 1847, he takes his son, who is now in his early 20s-
Annie Sargent: Yeah…
Elyse Rivin: … and he goes with him to Spain and Algeria, and he [00:27:00] begins travel writing.
Annie Sargent: Oh.
Elyse Rivin: So he’s still turning out plays. He’s turning out these novels in episodes, one after the other. He’s cranking them out, and he decides that it’s time to do books of his impressions of travel.
Annie Sargent: Interesting.
Elyse Rivin: So he has, goes to all these different places, and it’s interesting because, of course, his son winds up having a very different character and different attitude towards things, but he takes care of this son. He actually, in spite of the fact that he goes through mistresses and he apparently has had a whole bunch of children, he clearly wants to make sure that at least his oldest son, and then later on a couple of the other children, are taken care of.
And he really does keep up his relationship with them, even though he never really lives with any of them. I mean, he’s just off doing whatever he wants to do.
Debt and Coauthor Fight
Elyse Rivin: But one of the problems is that because even though he earns so much money, he also distributes so much money, he’s constantly getting into debt. And he’s [00:28:00] constantly having trouble. And then what happens is that this Mr. Mackaye decides that he is not getting enough credit for what he has been doing.
Annie Sargent: It’s possibly true.
Elyse Rivin: So, after a whole bunch of years of working with him, he starts to resent the fact that the only person who’s getting his name on any of these works is Dumas. And by the 1850s, he stayed with him for 20-something years, actually, which is quite incredible.
He actually takes him to court, He wants to be considered to be co-author of a bunch of these works, particularly the fiction works, not the plays. And the court, after doing a lot of whatever it is that they look at, decides that, that is not the case, that Dumas is genuinely the author of all of these pieces, but that Mackaye has the right to 25% of the earnings of these works, and that he can’t have his name on it. So Mackaye [00:29:00] leaves.
Annie Sargent: Ah.
And so did that kind of slow him down?
Elyse Rivin: No.
Annie Sargent: Okay. That means that… Yeah, no.
He found someone else.
Elyse Rivin: He found somebody else.
Annie Sargent: Yeah.
Theater Gamble and Backlash
Elyse Rivin: In 1850, he made, he bought the land, and built a theater in 1846 on the Boulevard du Temple, which is, if I remember correctly, in the Marais.
He produced plays, and he did works by Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller, and others. And four years later, he went bankrupt because as much as he was bringing money in, he was spending more.
There was somebody who quoted… It was quoted as saying, "The great Dumas earns, spends, earns, spends, goes broke, earns more, and spends more."
And of course, people were making fun of him, and at the same time, you have all of these, interestingly, these racist caricatures that are being put in the newspapers. I mean, there, he created a lot of jealousy as well.
Annie Sargent: I [00:30:00] bet. I bet. I mean, he makes a lot of money, and he flings it around a bit, so yeah, people are going to be… People who are not in his favor is are going to be upset about that.
Elyse Rivin: Upset. Really upset about it, right? He married once legally to some woman, divorced four years later. She divorced him four years later.
Annie Sargent: Uh-huh.
Elyse Rivin: She had to be out of her mind to have married him to begin with.
Annie Sargent: Well, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: But who knows, you know? And then interestingly enough, the Revolution of 1848 didn’t work well for him. The theaters closed down because of all the political upheaval. It was a moment when apparently some of his plays were not being as successful as they had been before. He himself was probably doing too many different things, and all of a sudden, his theater went broke, and he had his chateau which he had built, he had to sell it, but he managed to sell it in such a way that he could stay and live in it.
He got somebody who he knew to buy it so that it was [00:31:00] no longer… It was a pret nom, yeah, so that it was bought by somebody else, but actually, he stayed and lived in it. And actually stayed in it for the rest of his life, more or less. But because of all of his shenanigans, because of all of his strange things, he had so many debts that he was forced to surrender 45% of his earnings, present and future, to all of his creditors.
Annie Sargent: Oh, wow.
Elyse Rivin: That’s a lot.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah.
Exile Trips and Hugo Visit
Elyse Rivin: 45%.
So, in order to escape some of this, he started doing more traveling. He went to Brussels. He visited Hugo in Guernsey when he was in exile in Guernsey.
Annie Sargent: I’m sure it’s a very nice place.
Elyse Rivin: I’m sure it’s a very nice place, yeah. That was in 1857. He went to visit him. He wrote some plays while hanging out with Hugo on the island.
And then, in 1860, this is why I find, I’m so absolutely enthralled by this person, you know?
Garibaldi Adventure in Italy
Elyse Rivin: He had met, [00:32:00] how, I have no idea, probably among his first travels to Italy, whatever, he had met and became friends with Garibaldi, Giuseppe Garibaldi…
Annie Sargent: Oh, wow.
Elyse Rivin: … Who was the head of the movement to unite Italy.
Annie Sargent: Right, right.
Elyse Rivin: So, why? Probably because he was bored with what he was doing. Who knows why? In 1860, he decided that he was going to help Garibaldi in his movement, and he went to Italy. He took all the money he had, and he sold a whole bunch of things that he had so that he could give the money to Garibaldi so that Garibaldi could buy arms.
Annie Sargent: Oh, wow. Interesting.
Elyse Rivin: This is, like, out of one of his books.
Annie Sargent: Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: You know? I mean, this is straight out of one of his books. He said that he needed new experiences and that he believed in Garibaldi’s cause, but somehow, that doesn’t ring as true as the only reason. I think he had to get out of France. It sounds like he was just, he needed [00:33:00] something different, and he needed an adventure. It’s almost like he needed to live one of the things from one of his books. Believe it or not, Dumas stayed in Italy for four years.
Annie Sargent: Nice. Okay.
Elyse Rivin: He worked with Garibaldi. He didn’t fight with him. By 1860, he was 58 years old, but he backed him up. He gave him as much financial help as he could, and he was with him, with Garibaldi, when Garibaldi entered Naples, which apparently was the moment when he had arrived and succeeded.
And to thank him, Garibaldi made Dumas the head of all the museums and the archaeological sites in Naples, including Pompeii.
Annie Sargent: Oh.
Elyse Rivin: And for three years, Dumas, on top of keeping up with his writing, which he was sending back to France, was basically the minister of culture of Naples, with its archaeological digs in Pompeii. And then what happened was by the end of that time period, by the way, in 1860, in [00:34:00] the midst of all this, he had his last recognized child with an actress.
Annie Sargent: Hmm.
Elyse Rivin: There you go.
Annie Sargent: Hmm.
Elyse Rivin: An Italian actress?
I don’t even know.
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: Mm-hmm. He decided that it was time to go back to France. Apparently, the people in Naples were beginning to resent the fact that the minister of culture was a Frenchman.
Annie Sargent: Oh, oh. Hmm.
Elyse Rivin: He spoke perfect Italian.
Annie Sargent: Uh-huh.
I mean, I don’t know. Still, still a Frenchman.
Elyse Rivin: I guess that just didn’t work, huh?
Return and Late Career Shift
Elyse Rivin: So in 1864, he went back to France.
By this time, he’d written the fifth of his volumes of travel impressions. He was still writing plays, but he saw that his plays were not as popular as they had been. They were getting to be a bit out of fashion. His novels, some of them were still successful, some of them were not. He was still turning out work in profusion, but it wasn’t the top of the top anymore.
Annie Sargent: Didn’t matter.
Elyse Rivin: Didn’t matter. He kept on writing. And in 1870, at the age [00:35:00] of 68, in the midst of finishing up what became an enormous cookbook on top of everything else.
Annie Sargent: A cookbook?
Elyse Rivin: A cookbook. He was a gourmet on top of it, and a gourmand on top of everything else.
Annie Sargent: But did he cook for himself?
Elyse Rivin: Who knows? If he didn’t cook for himself, he just probably got together a bunch of recipes between Italy, Belgium, Algeria, Spain, and who knows. It would be fun to be able to find it.
Annie Sargent: Well, that’s… that’s true. Like he had exposure to a lot of exotic foods.
Exotic foods. And he liked to eat. Sure.
Elyse Rivin: There are photos of him at the end of his life, his last mistress, there’s a photo of him with his last mistress. He’s 64 years old. She’s in her late 20s. She’s an American actress who came to Paris to do theater. She’s of a great photo done by Nadar, the great photographer of the 19th century, of her sitting on his lap, and he’s this big, relatively fat guy, you know?
Annie Sargent: Santa-looking.
Elyse Rivin: [00:36:00] Santa-looking, you know. Apparently, there’s nothing lascivious about the photo except that she’s sitting on his lap, but apparently it caused a huge scandal. She unfortunately died very, very young, very soon after that. I don’t know of what. He still had mistresses. He was still doing everything he’d been doing for the last, basically almost 50 years of his life.
Stroke Death and Legacy
Elyse Rivin: And then at the age of 68, he had a stroke.
Annie Sargent: Aw.
Elyse Rivin: And he was living at this point with his son, Alexandre Dumas Jr. He died three months later at the age of 68, which is not really, even at that time, not that old.
Annie Sargent: No.
Elyse Rivin: But because it was in December of 1870, and it was just at the beginning of the war with the Prussians, there was no public burial. There was no celebration.
There was no public anything. It was, the war was basically dominating everything. So he was quietly buried near where his son lived, and it was in April of 1872, after the war was [00:37:00] over, that his body was taken to the village where he had been born in Normandy, and there was this big, huge public ceremony.
And there were hundreds and hundreds of people who came to pay homage to him at that time. But interestingly enough, considering how famous he had been all of his life, he didn’t have the crowd that Hugo had, you know? He didn’t have the crowds. He didn’t have that. And there were still people, there were still literary critics and people in the government who basically, it was almost like good riddance. It’s very interesting that he really had that effect on people. But his work was absolutely monumental.
Annie Sargent: And in 2002, under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, Alexandre Dumas was taken to the Panthéon, where he now lies in a sarcophage next to his friend Victor Hugo. Wow.
Elyse Rivin: … It’s really quite amazing when you think about it.
Monumental Output
Elyse Rivin: And just [00:38:00] because, I mean, very briefly, because this is what overwhelmed me and it just made me like sit there with my mouth open, they estimate that he wrote over 100,000 pages of whatever. He wrote over 100 novels. He wrote over 100 plays and librettos for opera, basically one a year. He did adaptations for theater. He wrote 10 collections of poetry. He wrote over 100 short stories or fables. Some of them were translations from other languages.
Oh, and by the way, he went to Russia and the Caucuses and loved Russian culture and society, and learned Russian. I mean, this man was totally unbelievable. He wrote one of his travel books about Russia and the Caucuses. He wrote biographies about royalty, even though he was basically a Republican.
He wrote political pamphlets, but I don’t think his heart was in them. He wrote memoirs and the book that was published [00:39:00] posthumously was a huge cookbook.
Annie Sargent: That’s really crazy that he wrote a cookbook. I’m going to see if I… I’m curious about the cookbook and the travel stories.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. I will see if I can find them. I think that they would probably be fun to read.
Why Films Love Dumas
Elyse Rivin: And for those people who would rather see than read, there are 29 versions that we know of of The Count of Monte Cristo. The first one was one of the first silent films to be produced in 1913.
Annie Sargent: Right, because you have the whole story of the Iron Mask and all of that.
Elyse Rivin: There are at least 11 that I could find, versions of The Three Musketeers, but that, we’re not even talking about television film versions, but just cinema, cinema versions of it. There’s also The Red Margot, there’s The Black Tulip, which, I mean, there are all these things. One of the things about his writing that some people said, but more now when people talk about the style of his writing and everything else, is that one of the things that made them popular, of course, was how much it was action, and how much [00:40:00] was these, was very romantic with, you know, these love interests and this. And it’s perfectly adaptable to visuals.
So, even his style of doing mostly dialogue and not going into too long depth in terms of the description, it’s so suited to visuals, that’s why it’s perfect for the cinema.
Annie Sargent: Right, because I mean, he started out writing plays, which are nothing but dialogue really. So obviously his novels are light on descriptions.
I mean, he brings it in because he tells you the name of the place where he is. He puts his characters in famous places. In The Three Musketeers they often go to the Louvre, because that’s where the king lived, and people can imagine the Louvre.
I mean, his readers were a lot of them were Parisians, they knew what it looked like. It’s really interesting that he really spent very little time in descriptions. It’s mostly dialogue and…
Elyse Rivin: It’s mostly dialogue and not very [00:41:00] deep, you know, it’s not profound thinking. It’s the action of what people do in a given situation, basically.
Romance Action Style
Annie Sargent: Right, and his works are, I would say they’re never moralizing.
Elyse Rivin: Mm.
Annie Sargent: It’s more about the young man seeking his fortune, like The Three Musketeers, you know, he goes…
And there were, I mean, this happened a lot. We had an episode of the podcast about, I can’t remember the name of the guy, the guy who founded Detroit. He was from the southwest of France, just like D’Artagnan.
They went and sought their fortune somewhere else, and they, it’s very funny because they fall in love instantly.
Elyse Rivin: Yes.
Annie Sargent: Like, they see a woman and they are completely awed, and forever, you know, in the service of this lady. It’s kind of silly.
Elyse Rivin: It’s silly, but it sounds like that’s the way he functioned, to be honest, you know? I mean, he was totally in love, and then a month later he was totally in love with somebody else, you know?
I mean, [00:42:00] really. It’s really, it’s almost like he lived out all of his fantasies. He did do a lot of things that other people… I mean, look at how much he traveled. Look, he went… he went to war with Garibaldi to unify Italy. What did he have to do with Italy?
He translated all these things. Apparently this was one of the things that people used to make fun of him about, was that it was so well known how many mistresses he had, that it was like nobody could keep up with it. You know? It was like, "Get your daughters out of the room if he comes in," you know? I mean, it’s one of those, you know?I have a little quote that he said, apparently, I would be interested in reading his memoirs. He says, in his memoirs, he said it was the shock of reading Ivanhoe, which set him on the course of writing historical works. And something that is one of those little ironies of history is that he did an initial translation from English to French of Ivanhoe, that was only rediscovered in the 20th century and published almost in the [00:43:00] end of the 20th century. And it was one of the first things that inspired him to do.
Annie Sargent: So was that written by Walter Scott?
Elyse Rivin: Yeah.
Annie Sargent: Okay, because I, yeah, because Walter Scott was one of his obvious inspirations. He wrote historical novels.
History Names Not Facts
Annie Sargent: And he preceded Dumas, so… And Dumas often wrote novels using the names like Richelieu, Louis XIII, people like that who were famous, but he put them in, he completely invented the situation. Like…
Elyse Rivin: Milady didn’t exist.
Annie Sargent: … No, Milady did not exist. The diamond stud didn’t exist. He made a lot of situations, but with the names of characters people knew. And so that’s another reason why he didn’t do a lot of description, because his heroes were all famous people.
You know, Buckingham, Milady, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, he made them up.
But they fit into a mold of [00:44:00] the character, you know? You had the pious one, you had the one who fell in love and that’s one of the plot twists, but he was actually married to Milady at one point.
He just twists and turns all these stories in his head that you’re like, "What just happened?"
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. And since part of it is based on real… I mean, it’s funny, I think of my husband, who loves watching these, loves The Count of Monte Cristo, he loves The Three Musketeers. I don’t think he’s missed any version of them in the last 25, 30 years, you know? In the last five years there’ve been two hugely successful new movies that have come out in France. One is a new, young version of The Three Musketeers in two parts, with young stars of French cinema now these days, and the other is The Count of Monte Cristo, which just came out last year, and it will go on, and on, and on.
Annie Sargent: And I really wish French cinema would do the same thing with Jules Verne. Jules Verne’s. Because he [00:45:00] had beautiful stories as well. But I don’t think Jules Verne was, he didn’t use famous people in his stories, right? He made the characters up.
Elyse Rivin: Right.
Annie Sargent: Whereas Alexandre Dumas just used famous people and just threw different stories at them, completely.
So if you read Alexandre Dumas, you might think this is historical.
Elyse Rivin: It’s not accurate, most of it.
None of these things happened in reality. Like, Richelieu was not a villain who was conniving on a personal level. He didn’t do intrigue the way Alexandre Dumas portrays him. What he did is rob the country blind and get very, very wealthy… Which makes him a villain. Yeah.
Annie Sargent: He was a villain, but he was a villain of another sort, okay?
And so when you read the novels, you might think, "Oh, this is history." No, it’s not really history. It’s just based on the names of real people.
Elyse Rivin: And there really were musketeers.
Annie Sargent: And there really were musketeers, and if you…
Elyse Rivin: and d’Artagnan really existed.
Annie Sargent: [00:46:00] D’Artagnan really existed, although he was not really like…
Elyse Rivin: No.
Annie Sargent: … the guy, you know. But he took the… like the costumes. That was his talent. He just took people, real people in real costumes and real places, and he invented a different kind of parallel history around these people.
Elyse Rivin: Exactly.
Annie Sargent: And he made it really, really entertaining.
Elyse Rivin: He made it very entertaining.
Panthéon Farewell
Elyse Rivin: And I was just thinking, when I go back to Paris, and I want to go to the Panthéon for a bunch of reasons. I’ve been, but I want to go back, I think this time I’m going to say hi to both him and Victor Hugo, realizing that they’re like two sides of the same coin, you know? Like, the political, think about it, social conditions, and stuff like that.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, Victor Hugo was more…also did very long descriptions, very long historical background. You get none of that with The Three Musketeers [00:47:00] or any writings by Alexandre Dumas.
Elyse Rivin: No.
Annie Sargent: It’s really, he just assumes that you know what the Louvre is and you know who Richelieu was and Louis XIII, and all these people, they’re real people, just psst, go.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah, just go. Just go.
Annie Sargent: Yes. Oh, thank you so much, Elyse. That was a lot of fun.
Elyse Rivin: Oh, thank you. That was a lot of fun.
Annie Sargent: Au revoir.
Elyse Rivin: Au revoir.
(mid-roll ad spot)
Patreon Thanks and Perks
Annie Sargent: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patrons get several exclusive rewards for doing that. You can see them at patreon.com/joinus.
And a special shout-out this week to my new Join Us in French Champion, Katherine Bannon. Would you join them, too? You can do it for as little as $3 a month, but if you can afford it, I’d love for you to pledge more so you can have access to more [00:48:00] of the rewards, and Patreon is truly the one way that I know I have a steady income coming, so it’s really important.
And to support Elyse, who you just heard is a essential part of this whole podcast adventure, go to patreon.com/elysart.
France Heatwave Update
Annie Sargent: France is in the middle of its second heat wave in less than a month. That’s, and I’m recording this late June 2026, and this one is serious. As of this week, forecasters are comparing it to August 2003, and if you know anything about that summer, you know that’s not a comparison they make lightly.
That heatwave killed around 15,000 people in France alone.
This time, Météo-France is talking about peaks of 40 degrees Celsius, that’s 104 Fahrenheit, in Western and Central France, with [00:49:00] most departments under red alert to the highest levels.
Two-thirds of the French population are affected. Just this morning I had to drive into Toulouse and it was 42 degrees, so it’s 106 or something.
Paris is keeping its 550 parks open all night, and providing air conditioning to at least some rooms in all schools. Some cities canceled the Fête de la Musique, the big outdoor music festival that happens every year on June 21st, and all of this is happening during the Baccalauréat exams, which is a lot to ask of teenagers.
I can’t imagine taking those exams under those conditions, because French schools are mostly not air-conditioned.
Air Quality and Ozone Alerts
Annie Sargent: Down here in the Southwest where I live, we’ve also been dealing with air quality alerts on top of the heat. That is something people don’t always think about, but extreme heat and intense sunshine [00:50:00] cause ground-level ozone to spike.
That’s different from the ozone layer up in the atmosphere. Ground-level ozone irritates your lungs and weakens your immune defenses.
Ariège, Hautes-Pyrénées, and Haute-Garonne, that’s my department, were placed under a red pollution alert this week. We’ve all had to reduce our speeds when driving even EVs, although we don’t emit anything, but I mean, it’s only fair.
There’s a hot air mass sitting over France right now, and it’s coming up from North Africa, bringing fine particles with it, and that’s just not great timing.
France Air Conditioning Debate
Annie Sargent: Now, I want to talk about something that’s been all over French social media this week because it’s directly relevant to anyone visiting France this summer, and that’s the great air conditioning debate.
France has a complicated relationship with ‘la clim’. There’s a cultural resistance to it that [00:51:00] has no equivalent in North America, and it’s starting to crack under the pressure of back-to-back heat waves. On the French Reddit community, they asked this week whether AC is actually bad for the environment.
The answer, at least in France, is not particularly. Air conditioning does not generate heat the way a heater does. It moves heat from inside to outside. That’s how heat pumps work. The heat pump uses electricity, but in France, where about 70% of electricity comes from nuclear power and renewables, the carbon footprint is low.
And you know, this article said 70%. I think we’re higher than that. Anyway, several people pointed out the obvious. We heat our homes all winter without anyone questioning it, and heating uses roughly 10 times more energy than cooling. So the moral panic around AC, but not heating, is kind of hard [00:52:00] to justify.
Heat Pumps and Home Comfort
Annie Sargent: When we arrived in my house near Toulouse in 2005, there were really basic electric heaters in every room, and we were very cold that first winter. They didn’t work well at all. We replaced the heaters with ones that use ceramic to diffuse the heat better. That was better, but then came a heat wave, and I immediately went looking for a cooling system.
And having lived in the US for almost two decades, I thought we’d need a forced air system with a big old Carrier unit or something outside. Only one company offered that, and the bid was extremely expensive. Besides, you had to run ducts all over the house that we don’t have, you know? So, someone in Spain mentioned that heat pumps and split systems were great, and we went with it, first in Spain and then in France.
It was immediately so much more comfortable. It was an investment, to be sure, but we [00:53:00] had just bought the house in France. It made sense. At the end of that year, we looked at our electrical bill from the previous year when we just had the regular heaters, and we realized that the heat pump saved us about 20% in electricity, despite the fact that we both heated and cooled the house, and we were a lot more comfortable.
So do you understand why I love heat pumps? They’re comfortable, and they’re cheaper. Now, they’re not cheap to install really. I mean, no heating system is cheap to install really.
Environmental Concerns and Reality
Annie Sargent: But there are real concerns. The urban heat island effect, where hundreds of units blow out hot air into city streets makes it worse for everyone outside, especially those who can’t afford air conditioning. And old units use refrigerants that were very polluting. Though those have been banned.
But the bottom line is that in France today, AC is a hot topic, but not the climate [00:54:00] villain that it’s sometimes made out to be. And you might have heard a ding. That was my husband who can h- overhear me. He says that actually I was wrong. It wasn’t 20% that it saved us, it was 30%. So there you go.
There was another thread on Reddit that said, you know, "If air conditioning didn’t exist, climate change would be taken more seriously." The idea being that if our ability to cool ourselves indoors buffers us from the full consequences of warming, and that, there’s something to that, of course. Climate summits are held in air-conditioned rooms, but someone pushed back in this group and said, you know, "If sewage systems didn’t exist, disease would be taken more seriously as well."
That doesn’t mean that we should get rid of sewage systems, so you know, solving problems requires good tools.
Travel Tips for Staying Cool
Annie Sargent: Now, for those of you visiting France this summer, here’s practical advice.
First, if you’re booking a hotel, make sure [00:55:00] it has air conditioning, and I mean confirmed working air conditioning, not "we have a fan."
If you’re renting an apartment that advertises air conditioning, ask specifically where the units are. I’ve been in a situation, and I’ve heard from listeners that, you know, the AC unit was in the hallway or in the kitchen, which essentially does nothing for sleeping. You want it in the bedroom.
Confirm that before you book. Big thick stone walls do keep the heat out better than regular brick construction, but once the canicule has been baking the stone walls for days, that stone will radiate the heat indoors no matter how you slice it. During the day, France gives you some excellent options for escaping the heat, that you might not think of.
Churches are free, open, and built in stone with very, very tall ceilings. They stay remarkably cool even in extreme [00:56:00] heat. The same goes for museums, which are usually air-conditioned, mostly because they want to preserve the art.
Caves are another option. The Dordogne region alone has dozens, and the temperature inside stays around 12 to 15 degrees Celsius year-round, which feels absolutely wonderful when it’s 40 degrees outside. Lakes are all over France and perfectly legal to swim in, most of them anyway, unless there are signs indicating otherwise.
Do take the signs seriously, because sometimes there’s deadly algae in them lakes, and you don’t want to be near that. And yes, Paris reopened the Seine for swimming last year for the first time in a century, so that’s now an option in the capital, too.
Hydration and Best Travel Timing
Annie Sargent: Drink lots of water. I know the rosé is tempting, but for every glass of rosé you drink, you should also have three or four of water.
Do not underestimate what the heat can do to [00:57:00] you. I told you last year how I got dehydrated on July 14th. It’s awful. You think you’re going to die. It was hot that day, but it wasn’t even a heatwave. So you don’t want to get dehydrated.
Truthfully, if you can help coming to France in June, July, or August, your chances of running into one of these heatwaves is much lower.
Although we had a heatwave in late May for the first time ever, so there’s that. We’ve never had one in September, but who knows?
Cutting Emissions and Going Electric
Annie Sargent: And because we cannot air condition every house, every factory, every barn, every restaurant, we need to stop adding more CO2 and methane to the atmosphere.
Next time you need to replace a major appliance or car, please consider going electric because electricity can be made from clean sources that do not burn anything.
Perhaps they’re not entirely made of clean sources today, but they will someday. Even in the US where, you know, talk, talk, [00:58:00] talk against clean energy, but if you look at the numbers, Texas is full of solar panels. So, yeah, it’s… you know, electricity generated from renewable sources is getting very, very cheap, and that’s why it’s getting installed everywhere.
So something to consider. Maybe it would be smart for you to do anywhere you live.
Newsletter and Next Episode Tease
Annie Sargent: If you want a short recap of what came out this week in France Travel, the news episode, and what I’m paying attention to, sign up for my free weekly newsletter at joinusinfrance.com/newsletter.
And my thanks to podcast editors Anne and Christian Cotovan who produced the transcripts.
Next week on the podcast
Annie Sargent: Next week on the podcast, an episode with Larry Rosenblum about spending five weeks solo in Paris. He shares favorite discoveries from swimming in the Seine, told you, and European Heritage Days, to virtual reality at the Louvre, and seeing a play at the Comédie-Française with translation glasses.[00:59:00]
How interesting. If you love Paris and are looking for fresh ideas, don’t miss it.
Final Thanks and Goodbye
Annie Sargent: Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together. Au revoir.
Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.[01:00:00] [01:01:00]
Subscribe to the Podcast
Apple YouTube Spotify RSSSupport the Show
Tip Your Guides Extras Patreon Audio ToursRead more about this transcript
Episode PageCategory: French History