One of the Major African Influences On European Literature - Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo by Matthieu Delaporte, Alexandre De La Patellière

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“My daddy is dead,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you won’t see him again.”
“What do you mean I won’t see Daddy again?… why won’t I see him?”
“Because God has taken him back from you.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
“And you say that I’ll never see him again?… never at all?”
“Never at all.”
“And where does God live?”
“He lives in heaven.”
I thought hard about this for a minute. Even as a young child, even deprived of reason, I understood that something irreversible had happened in my life. Then, taking advantage of the first moment when they stopped paying attention to me, I got away from my uncle’s and ran straight to my mother’s house.
All the doors were open, all the faces were frightened; one felt that Death was there.
I went in without anyone’s noticing or seeing me. I found a little room where the weapons were kept; I shouldered a gun that belonged to my father, and which he had often promised to give to me when I got older.
Then, armed with this gun, I climbed the stairs.
On the second floor, I met my mother on the landing.
She had just left the death chamber.… her face was wet with tears.
“Where are you going?” she asked me, surprised to see me there, when she thought I was at my uncle’s.
“I’m going to heaven!” I replied.
“What do you mean, you’re going to heaven?”
“Let me pass.”
“And what will you do in heaven, my poor child?”
“I’m going there to kill God, who killed Daddy.”
My mother seized me in her arms, squeezing me so tight I thought I would suffocate.

Alexandre Dumas wrote those lines when he had just turned forty-five and had decided it was time to reflect on his life. …