The nobility of France was cut up by three men: Louis the Eleventh, Richelieu, and Robespierre. Louis the Eleventh overthrew the great vassals; Richelieu decimated the great lords; and Robespierre annihilated the aristocracy.The first prepared the way for sole monarchy, the second for absolute monarchy and the third for constitutional monarchy.But the events that Dumas is about to relate occurred between the years 1708 and 1716. Dumas leaves to the historian the appreciation, under their social relations, of the acts of the butcher king, and the deeds and crimes of a guillotining tribunal, to take a rapid survey of the condition of Paris and the provinces twenty years after the death of Richelieu -at the commencement of the eighteenth century.Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), also known as Dumas pere, was one of the most prolific and most popular French authors of the 19th century. Without ever attaining indisputable literary merit, Dumas succeeded in gaining a great reputation first as a dramatist and then as a historical novelist, especially for such works as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. His memoirs, which, with a mixture of candour, mendacity, and boastfulness, recount the events of his extraordinary life, also provide a unique insight into French literary life during the Romantic period. He was the father of the dramatist and novelist Alexandre Dumas, called Dumas fils.Dumas takes us through the halls and corridors of the Louvre, at the time of Catherine of Medici, Charles IX, or Henry III, to some treasure cave under the waters of the Mediterranean, to the Palais Royal, with Richelieu, or to the walls of Janina, with the terrible Ali-Pasha, he always holds us, wistfully listening to his wonderful story-telling, even with the look of the child carried away to fairy-land by the old tales of the nursery.