Amaury

Dumas's only epistolary novel is a strange, almost experimental detour from the swashbuckling adventures he's famous for. Set among French aristocrats in 1838, it unfolds through diary entries and letters exchanged among a small household: Amaury de Leoville, the young diplomat raised by Dr. d'Avrigny alongside the doctor's fragile daughter Madeleine and another orphan, Antoinette. The central question posed in a Parisian salon that opens the novel haunts everything that follows: does one die of love? The answer, when it comes, is tragic and quietly devastating. What makes Amaury remarkable is its willingness to examine jealousy not as a dramatic vice but as a corrosive, almost pathetic weakness that warps even those who recognize it in themselves. The doctor knows his jealousy of his own daughter's beloved is irrational and cannot stop it. Madeleine, dying of consumption, turns petty and cruel toward the healthy Antoinette. Dumas, who found jealousy an unworthy emotion, watches his characters struggle and mostly fail to transcend it. The epistolary form, which Dumas himself found uncongenial, gives the novel an intimate, slightly claustrophobic quality that suits its examination of love curdling into something darker.