Alexandre Dumas and Company's Journey to Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria

Mr. Dumas travels in exactly the same way he writes—meaning with a company. On his trip through Spain and Africa, his son, Alexandre Dumas the younger, traveled with him—incidentally, he had nearly as much talent as his father, though the son wrote a thousand times less than the father; then came Maquet, the most active and gifted of their companions, who, under the firm of their literary-and-trading house, wrote many novels, the best of which is “Twenty Years Later” (the continuation of “The Three Musketeers”). Finally, there also traveled with Dumas the painter Boulanger and the Arab—or Pierre ad libitum—servant of Dumas. In Spain, this group was joined by the painter Giro and the writer Debarole, who had left for the country earlier. Thus Dumas traveled with a company of six people. They spent six weeks in Spain—a country already well known and so often described that there’s no need to dwell on it—and then they went to Africa by steamship, which the government made available entirely at Alexandre Dumas’s disposal. We’ll follow him from this city even more willingly because very little information about Dumas’s journey through Africa had been reported in our journals.