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Alexandre Dumas
in 1855

Today is the birthday of Alexandre Dumas (born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie; Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne; 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870 Puys (near Dieppe), Seine-Maritime), also known as Alexandre Dumas, père; writer.  One of the most widely read French authors, his works have been translated into nearly 100 languages.  Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later.  His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century for nearly 200 films.  Dumas’ last novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, unfinished at his death, was completed by a scholar and published in 2005, becoming a bestseller.  It was published in English in 2008 as The Last Cavalier.

On 1 February 1840, Dumas married actress Ida Ferrier (born Marguerite-Joséphine Ferrand) (1811–1859).  He had numerous liaisons with other women, in the tradition of Frenchmen of higher social class.  He was known to have several illegitimate children, including a boy named after him.  This son became a successful novelist and playwright and was known as Alexandre Dumas fils (son), while the elder Dumas became conventionally known in French as Alexandre Dumas père (father).  Among his affairs, in 1866 Dumas had one with Adah Isaacs Menken, an American actress then less than half his age and at the height of her career. 

Les Mohicans de Paris (The Mohicans of Paris) (1854 novel)

• Cherchez la femme, pardieu! cherchez la femme!»
  • Dumas, Alexandre (1871) (in French). Les Mohicans de Paris. I. Paris: Michel Lévy frères, éditeurs. p. 232. Retrieved on 2009-08-07. 

Les Mohicans de Paris (The Mohicans of Paris) (1864 play)

• Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires; aussitôt qu’on me fait un rapport, je dis: «Cherchez la femme!»
  • There is a woman in every case; as soon as they bring me a report, I say, ‘Look for the woman’.
    • Dumas, Alexandre (1889) (in French). Théâtre complet. XXIV. Paris: Michel Lévy frères, éditeurs. p. 103

Today is the birthday of Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta (Rome 24 July 1841 – 15 September 1920 Versailles); painter from the Madrazo family of artists who worked in the Realistic style, although his later work shows signs of Rococo and Japanese influence. He was known primarily for his genre paintings and portraits. His grandfather was José de Madrazo, his father was the portrait painter Federico de Madrazo and his brother was Ricardo de Madrazo.

He was a frequent exhibitor at the Paris Salon, won a major medal at the Exposition Universelle (1889) and was a regular at the salon of Madeleine Lemaire. The model for nearly all of the female figures in his genre paintings was Aline Masson, the daughter of the doorman at the Paris residence of the Marqués de Casa Riera [es].

After 1862, he lived in Paris for much of his life. In the late 1860s, he spent some time in Rome with his brother, working in the studios of Mariano Fortuny, who had married their sister Cecilia. During the Franco-Prussian War, he lived in Granada. His wife died during childbirth in 1874, the same year as his brother-in-law, Fortuny.

In 1894, he donated a collection of works by Francisco de Goya that he had acquired in 1869 to the Museo del Prado.  In 1914, he moved to Versailles, where he died six years later. His son, Federico de Madrazo y Ochoa (known as “Coco”) also became a notable painter.

Gallery

Today is the birthday of Alfons Maria Mucha (Ivančice, Margraviate of Moravia, Austrian Empire 24 July 1860 – 14 July 1939 Prague), often known in English and French as Alphonse Mucha; Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist, perhaps best known for his distinct style.  He produced many paintings, illustrations, advertisements, postcards, and designs.

Mucha married Maruška (Marie/Maria) Chytilová on 10 June 1906, in Prague.  The couple visited the U.S. from 1906 to 1910, during which time their daughter, Jaroslava, was born in New York City.

Gallery

in about 1906

• Decorative art
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  Biscuits LeFèvre-Utile

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  Bières de la Meuse

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  Byzantine Heads: Brunette

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  Job Cigarettes

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  Poetry

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  Zodiac

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  Summer

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  Spring, 1896

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  Summer, 1896

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  Autumn, 1896

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  Winter, 1896

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  The Arts, Painting

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  The Arts, Dance, 1898

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  Moët & Chandon Crémant Impérial, 1899

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  Joan of Arc, Maude Adams 1909

• Other
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  Study of a seated man, 1891

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  Illustration from Le Pater

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  Illustration from Le Pater

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  Madame Deschamps

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  Mucha’s The Slav Epic

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  Mucha’s The Slav Epic

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  Portrait of a woman

   

Zelda Fitzgerald
at age 17

Today is the birthday of Zelda Fitzgerald (née Sayre; Montgomery, Alabama; July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948 Asheville, North Carolina); socialite and novelist, and the wife and muse of American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose work she strongly influenced.

The Fitzgeralds were icons of the 1920s; she was dubbed by her husband “the first American Flapper”.  After the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the Fitzgeralds became celebrities and were seen as embodiments of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties: young, seemingly wealthy, beautiful, and energetic.  They were the center of attention at parties, where their drunken exploits became the stuff of legend.  The couple has been the subject of popular books, movies and scholarly attention.  Their love ended not well.  The marriage was plagued by wild drinking, infidelity and bitter recriminations.  After being diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was increasingly confined to specialist clinics, and the couple were living apart when Scott died suddenly in 1940.  Zelda died later in a fire at her hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.

Travis McGee series

The Deep Blue Good-By (1964)

• I am wary of a lot of things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

• These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worthy of the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways.

• They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance — with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart.

A Purple Place For Dying (1964)

• …it is like what we have done to chickens. Forced growth under optimum conditions, so that in eight weeks they are ready for the mechanical picker. The most forlorn and comical statements are the ones made by the grateful young who say Now I can be ready in two years and nine months to go out in and earn a living rather than wasting 4 years in college. Education is something that should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefore. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man’s reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? Today the good ones, the ones who want to ask why, find no one around with any interest in answering the question, so they drop out, because theirs is the type of mind which becomes monstrously bored at the trade-school concept. A devoted technician is seldom an educated man. He can be a useful man, a contented man, a busy man. But he has no more sense of the mystery and wonder and paradox of existence than does one of those chickens fattening itself for the mechanical plucking, freezing and packaging.

Nightmare In Pink (1964)

• …it isn’t foolish or wicked to enjoy. Wickedness is hurting people on purpose. I love what you are and who you are and how you are. You give me great joy. And you make horrible coffee.

• By feeling insecure about our making love, Nina, you make the inference that we are a pair of cheap people involved in some cheap pleasant friction. Pull on the pants and walk away, adding up the score. I think we’re interested in each other, involved with each other, curious about each other. This was a part of exploring and learning. When it’s good you learn something about yourself too. If the spirit is involved, if there is tenderness and respect and awareness of need, that’s all the morality I care about.

A Deadly Shade of Gold (1965)

• The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

• I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism — all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the very concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them.

• I think there is some kind of divine order in the universe. Every leaf on every tree in the world is unique. As far as we can see, there are other galaxies, all slowly spinning, numerous as the leaves in the forest. In an infinite number of planets, there has to be an infinite number with life forms on them. Maybe this planet is one of the discarded mistakes. Maybe it’s one of the victories. We’ll never know.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1965)

• It’s no good telling somebody they’re trying too hard. It’s very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants.

• I am not suited to the role of going around selling the life-can-be-beautiful idea. It can be, indeed. But you don’t buy the concept from your friendly door-to-door lecture salesman.

Dress Her in Indigo (1969)

• Any man who outgrows the myths of childhood is ninety-nine percent aware and convinced of his own mortality. But then comes the chilly breath on the nape of the neck, a stirring of the air by the wings of the bleak angel. When a man becomes one hundred percent certain of his inevitable death, he gets The Look.

• And that, of course, is the tragic flaw in the narcotics laws — that possession of marijuana is a felony. Regardless of whether it is as harmless as some believe, or as evil and vicious as others believe, savage and uncompromising law is bad law, and the good and humane judge will jump at any technicality that will keep him from imposing a penalty so barbaric and so cruel. The self-righteous pillars of church and society demand that “the drug traffic be stamped out” and think that making possession a felony will do the trick. Their ignorance of the roots of the drug traffic is as extensive as their ignorance of the law.

The Long Lavender Look (1970)

• The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

A Tan and Sandy Silence (1972)

• Up with life. Stamp out all small and large indignities. Leave everyone alone to make it without pressure. Down with hurting. Lower the standard of living. Do without plastics. Smash the servo-mechanisms. Stop grabbing. Snuff the breeze and hug the kids. Love all love. Hate all hate.

• We’re all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We’re all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won’t catch on. Each of us takes up the shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I’d gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling Rocinante from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the the flaw…The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of life style could get him killed — on the Daytona track, in the bull ring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head.Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, and when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, “Mommy, mommy, mommy, it’s so dark out there, so dark and so forever.”

The Scarlet Ruse (1973)

• Way over half the murders committed in this country are by close friends or relatives of the deceased. A gun makes a loud and satisfying noise in a moment of passion and requires no agility and very little strength. How many murders wouldn’t happen, if they all had to use hammers and knives?

The Turquoise Lament (1973)

• Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset.

The Green Ripper (1979)

• When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.