Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Man in the Iron Mask - An Essay (Celebrated Crimes Series)
    The Man in the Iron Mask - An Essay (Celebrated Crimes Series)
    The Man in the Iron Mask - An Essay (Celebrated Crimes Series)
    Ebook65 pages1 hour

    The Man in the Iron Mask - An Essay (Celebrated Crimes Series)

    By Alexandre Dumas

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This vintage book contains a fascinating reflective essay on the themes, facts, and fiction in Alexandre Dumas's historical novel "The Man in the Iron Mask". An interesting and accessible exploration of the famous story, this essay is highly recommended for those who have read and enjoyed the final episode in the d'Artagnan Romances, and will be of special utility to students. Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) was a famous French writer. He is best remembered for his exciting romantic sagas, including "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo". Despite making a great deal of money from his writing, Dumas was almost perpetually penniless thanks to his extravagant lifestyle. His novels have been translated into nearly a hundred different languages, and have inspired over 200 motion pictures. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are becoming extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing this antiquarian book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWhite Press
    Release dateJun 29, 2015
    ISBN9781473376212
    The Man in the Iron Mask - An Essay (Celebrated Crimes Series)
    Author

    Alexandre Dumas

    Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) was a prolific French writer who is best known for his ever-popular classic novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

    Read more from Alexandre Dumas

    Related to The Man in the Iron Mask - An Essay (Celebrated Crimes Series)

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

      Dec 9, 2017

      I tend to buy used books in bunches, which means the haul from some expeditions stays buried for weeks, months, years even. For this entry, I highlight three finds that, breaking custom, I bought and read almost immediately this year: Hugo Charteris’

      6 min read

    • Article

      Ovid’s Exilic Imagination

      May 25, 2022

      I suggest that Ovid was not simply exiled, but that he also exiled himself. The post Ovid’s Exilic Imagination appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Making Up history

      Mar 3, 2022

      Making Up history
      3 min read

    • Article

      The History Behind The Last Duel

      Oct 29, 2021

      The History Behind The Last Duel
      4 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Apr 23, 2020

      Reviews
      5 min read

    • Article

      'Tombland' Unearths Plots And Tudor-era Political Intrigue

      Jan 14, 2019

      C. J. Sansom's historical mystery series features lawyer Matthew Shardlake – one of the best-drawn leading characters in the entire genre.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Man Who Invented Scotland?

      Aug 5, 2021

      The Man Who Invented Scotland?
      8 min read

    • Article

      Paradise Dimmed

      Jun 29, 2023

      In 1868, the writer John William De Forest coined the term “The Great American Novel” to describe an epic in prose that would “paint the American soul”, capture national ideals and manners, and help unify the United States after the Civil War. He hop

      8 min read

    • Article

      The King Of Westminster

      May 24, 2023

      The King Of Westminster
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Postmedieval Dracula

      Sep 7, 2021

      The Postmedieval Dracula
      5 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Sep 9, 2021

      Reviews
      6 min read

    • Article

      Hilary Mantel Was A Glorious Original – We Have Lost One Of Our Greatest Writers

      Sep 30, 2022

      The death of Dame Hilary Mantel brings an end to one of the most remarkable literary careers of the past half century. Her great historical trilogy, Wolf Hall, earned her two Booker prizes, dominating the cultural landscape of the early 21st century

      2 min read

    • Article

      Francis Spufford Vividly Recreates an 18th-Century New York in ‘Golden Hill’

      Jul 26, 2018

      Dear Reader, envision that Village which grew upon the southern strand of that isle of Manhattoes: a Lenape settlement purchased for 60 guilders and named for Amsterdam, later to be acquired by gunships of King James, and her wooden-legged governor r

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Foul-mouthed Miller And The Prim Prioress

      Jan 3, 2024

      HAT Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘drasty rhyming is nat worth a toord’ (his ‘dirty rhyming isn’t worth a turd’), the Host’s pungent dismissal in Chaucer’s best-known, but incomplete poem The Canterbury Tales, is a verdict that, with good reason, posterity has

      4 min read

    • Article

      Family Drama

      Feb 18, 2021

      Family Drama
      4 min read

    • Article

      Happy 200th birthday, Flashy!

      Sep 21, 2022

      The 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Harry Flashman VC has been greeted with an outpouring of affection and admiration. You can imagine the old rogue laughing off the adulation, while inwardly relishing it all. And yes, I know, unlike those alle

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Woman Scorned?

      Feb 8, 2024

      A Woman Scorned?
      8 min read

    • Article

      When In Rome!

      Nov 17, 2022

      When In Rome!
      7 min read

    • Article

      History Comes Home

      Mar 11, 2020

      THE appearance of a new book by Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and now The Mirror and the Light, has become a literary event. To a nation possibly about to self-isolate against corona-virus, a third novel about the Tudors com

      2 min read

    • Article

      The medieval Mills & Boon

      May 13, 2021

      The medieval Mills & Boon
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Grueling, Painful, Beautiful Fiction of László Krasznahorkai

      Aug 8, 2017

      To misread Krasznahorkai as merely, or primarily, a political writer is to risk squandering the profoundly personal nature of his stories. More tragically, it is to foist a kind of sloppy activist, and determinately secular métier onto one of contemp

      9 min read

    • Article

      Life Before The Fall

      Mar 19, 2020

      Life Before The Fall
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Man in the Iron Mask - An Essay (Celebrated Crimes Series)

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Man in the Iron Mask - An Essay (Celebrated Crimes Series) - Alexandre Dumas

      THE MAN IN THE

      IRON MASK

      [An Essay]

      (This is the essay entitled

      The Man in the Iron Mask, not the novel

      The Man in the Iron Mask)

      by

      Alexandre Dumas

      Copyright © 2012 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Alexandre Dumas

      Alexandre Dumas was born in Villers-Cotterêts, France in 1802. His parents were poor, but their heritage and good reputation – Alexandre’s father had been a general in Napoleon’s army – provided Alexandre with opportunities for good employment. In 1822, Dumas moved to Paris to work for future king Louis Philippe I in the Palais Royal. It was here that he began to write for magazines and the theatre.

      In 1829 and 1830 respectively, Dumas produced the plays Henry III and His Court and Christine, both of which met with critical acclaim and financial success. As a result, he was able to commit himself full-time to writing. Despite the turbulent economic times which followed the Revolution of 1830, Dumas turned out to have something of an entrepreneurial streak, and did well for himself in this decade. He founded a production studio that turned out hundreds of stories under his creative direction, and began to produce serialised novels for newspapers which were widely read by the French public. It was over the next two decades, as a now famous and much loved author of romantic and adventuring sagas, that Dumas produced his best-known works – the D’Artagnan romances, including The Three Musketeers, in 1844, and The Count of Monte Cristo, in 1846.

      Dumas made a lot of money from his writing, but he was almost constantly penniless as a result of his extravagant lifestyle and love of women. In 1851 he fled his creditors to Belgium, and then Russia, and then Italy, not returning to Paris until 1864. Dumas died in Puys, France, in 1870, at the age of 68. He is now enshrined in the Panthéon of Paris alongside fellow authors Victor Hugo and Emile Zola. Since his death, his fiction has been translated into almost a hundred languages, and has formed the basis for more than 200 motion pictures.

      THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK

      [An Essay]

      For nearly one hundred years this curious problem has exercised the imagination of writers of fiction—and of drama, and the patience of the learned in history. No subject is more obscure and elusive, and none more attractive to the general mind. It is a legend to the meaning of which none can find the key and yet in which everyone believes. Involuntarily we feel pity at the thought of that long captivity surrounded by so many extraordinary precautions, and when we dwell on the mystery which enveloped the captive, that pity is not only deepened but a kind of terror takes possession of us. It is very likely that if the name of the hero of this gloomy tale had been known at the time, he would now be forgotten. To give him a name would be to relegate him at once to the ranks of those commonplace offenders who quickly exhaust our interest and our tears. But this being, cut off from the world without leaving any discoverable trace, and whose disappearance apparently caused no void—this captive, distinguished among captives by the unexampled nature of his punishment, a prison within a prison, as if the walls of a mere cell were not narrow enough, has come to typify for us the sum of all the human misery and suffering ever inflicted by unjust tyranny.

      Who was the Man in the Mask? Was he rapt away into this silent seclusion from the luxury of a court, from the intrigues of diplomacy, from the scaffold of a traitor, from the clash of battle? What did he leave behind? Love, glory, or a throne? What did he regret when hope had fled? Did he pour forth imprecations and curses on his tortures and blaspheme against high Heaven, or did he with a sigh possess his soul in patience?

      The blows of fortune are differently received according to the different characters of those on whom they fall; and each one of us who in imagination threads the subterranean passages leading to the cells of Pignerol and Exilles, and incarcerates himself in the Iles Sainte-Marguerite and in the Bastille, the successive scenes of that long-protracted agony will give the prisoner a form shaped by his own fancy and a grief proportioned to his own power of suffering. How we long to pierce the thoughts and feel the heart-beats and watch the trickling tears behind that machine-like exterior, that impassible mask! Our imagination is powerfully excited by the dumbness of that fate borne by one whose words never reached the outward air, whose thoughts could never be read on the hidden features; by the isolation of forty years secured by two-fold barriers of stone and iron, and she clothes the object of her contemplation in majestic splendour, connects the mystery which enveloped his existence with mighty interests, and persists in regarding the prisoner as sacrificed for the preservation of some dynastic secret involving the peace of the world and the stability of a throne.

      And when we calmly reflect on the whole case, do we feel that our first impulsively adopted opinion was

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1