PART ONE ⋆ VILLERS - COTTERETS Take my advice; marry a West Indian negress. They make excellent wives. BERNARD SHAW MY purpose is to study, through three generations, the successive manifestations of a temperament so fantastic as to have become legendary, originating in the union of a Frenchman of gentle birth and a black slave-girl of San-Domingo. The men whose lives I am about to narrate had, in different degrees and diverse forms, the same qualities of physical strength, courage, chivalrous devotion and a lively horror of ill-natured persons -- and one fault, the longing to astonish, bred of a desire for vengeance. But temperament alone is not enough to account for a man's destiny: it is never more than the basic material on which is woven a pattern made by events and a determined will. Here, then, is my monument to the three Dumas. -15- |