La Dame de Monsoreau

Overview

La Dame de Monsoreau is a historical novel by Alexandre Dumas père, written with Auguste Maquet and serialised in Le Siècle in 1845-1846; it is one of the seven "Valois romances". It is set in France in 1578, under Henri III, at the court of the Duke of Anjou: the young nobleman Bussy d'Amboise loves Diane de Méridor, whom the sinister Grand Huntsman, the Count of Monsoreau, has forced into marriage, while the king's jester Chicot looks on (Wikipedia, "La Dame de Monsoreau"; Project Gutenberg catalogue).

The novel was turned into a five-act stage drama by Dumas and Maquet (preceded by a prologue, L'Étang de Beaugé), first performed at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique on 19 November 1860 (BnF, data.bnf.fr, "La Dame de Monsoreau, spectacle 1860"). The BnF also records a production at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin in 1868, with Mélingue as Chicot (data.bnf.fr, "spectacle 1868"). Gaston Salvayre's grand opera on Maquet's libretto reached the Paris Opéra only in 1888.

Marie and Monsoreau

She meets it first as a book and later as a play.

• 17 April 1875 (031.0253): she works "une heure et demie par cœur" on something she is learning, "tout en lisant La Dame de Monsoreau", proud of never doing one thing at a time.
• 17 May 1876 (060.0429): in a self-mocking aside she writes "Il n'y avait aucun torrent de larmes. Dame de Monsoreau ! Dumas !": she mocks her own purple prose by invoking the master of romantic excess.
• 8 April 1879 (084.0629): in Paris, "Nous allons voir 'La dame de Montsoreau' à la porte Saint-Martin."
• 27 May 1879 (085.0185): she goes with the Lacon family, and the play "m'a amusée encore plus que la première fois". She finishes with a comparison: "Bussy d'Amboise, Granier de Cassagnac, j'adore tout cela": the swashbuckling hero is for her the figure of Paul de Cassagnac.

Notes and doubts

• The 1879 performances at the Porte-Saint-Martin are known only from the diary. The BnF performance records located in this pass cover 1860 (Ambigu), 1868 (Porte-Saint-Martin) and 1911 (Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt); an 1879 revival there could not be confirmed from the sources available and should be checked against the Gallica press (theatre listings, April-May 1879).
• The 1875 and 1876 mentions refer to the novel; the 1879 ones to the stage drama.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "La Dame de Monsoreau": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dame_de_Monsoreau
• BnF data: https://data.bnf.fr/39684276/la_dame_de_monsoreau_spectacle_1860/ and https://data.bnf.fr/39458889/la_dame_de_monsoreau_spectacle_1868/
• French Wikisource and Project Gutenberg texts (see `full_text`).