Alexandre Dumas died on December 5, 1870, at 68, penniless and partially paralyzed from a stroke, in his son's house at Puys, near Dieppe. The man who had earned millions from The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo spent it all. A chateau with a monkey theater. A private newspaper. Mistresses across Europe. Five hundred meals a week for anyone who showed up at his door. Born on July 24, 1802, in Villers-Cotterets, northeast of Paris, Dumas was the grandson of a Haitian slave and a French nobleman. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was a French general born Marie-Thomas-Davy de la Pailleterie in Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), the son of a white marquis and an enslaved Black woman. Thomas-Alexandre rose to the rank of general of the armies of the Republic, the highest rank in the French military, making him the highest-ranking person of African descent in a European army. Alexandre Dumas the novelist used his father's extraordinary life as raw material for The Count of Monte Cristo. He wrote over 300 books, many dictated to collaborators he called his "factory." The most famous collaborator, Auguste Maquet, plotted and drafted substantial portions of several major works. The arrangement was openly discussed in literary Paris but didn't diminish Dumas's fame; his talent was in transforming raw material into prose that moved at the speed of a galloping horse. The Three Musketeers, serialized in 1844, became the most popular adventure novel in Europe. It spawned sequels, adaptations, and an industry. The Count of Monte Cristo, also serialized in 1844-1846, was equally successful. Together, the two books made Dumas the most widely read novelist of the nineteenth century. His ancestry made his success a quiet revolution. Europe's most popular novelist was of Black descent in an era that denied Black people basic citizenship. He never denied his heritage, though biographers have debated how openly he discussed it. He was buried at Villers-Cotterets. In 2002, his remains were moved to the Pantheon in Paris, joining Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola.