Even among the literary giants of the 19th century, Alexandre Dumas père stands out as a writer of astonishing fecundity. His collected works, as published in the Collection Michel Levy Frères et Calmann-Levy, occupy 303 volumes. Nor is this collection complete. Among the works missing from it is the very last which Dumas wrote, Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. The omission is poignant, for it was precisely this book on which the dying author, beset by doubts about the future standing of his plays and novels, thought that his reputation would ultimately rest.

Dumas died in 1870. Now, more than a century later, one may well ask why he should have doubted the permanence of his literary fame; how he could have supposed that such works as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo might fall into oblivion; and what prompted him to think that his dictionary of cookery would prove to be the immortal among his works?

The explanation emerges from the pattern of his life. This began in relative obscurity. Alexandre was the son of a French General, a mulatto with roots in Santo Domingo, who performed brilliantly under the Emperor Napoleon but then incurred the imperial displeasure and died in disgrace and penury. The young Alexandre had to make his own way in the world, aided only by his own remarkable vigor and ambition and by the favor of some few people whose esteem for his late father survived. He moved in his late teens from his native town of Villers-Cotterêts to Paris and quickly achieved a reputation as a dramatist, which was enlarged and consolidated by a series of novels, historical works, and travel books. At the