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48 free Alexandre Dumas trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Alexandre Dumas wrote 100,000 pages, kept 40 mistresses, built a château named after his own novel and died broke as the Franco-Prussian War drowned out the news. His father, the son of a French marquis and an enslaved African woman, was a general at 31 and Napoleon's Black Devil; his son was a playwright too, so the world calls him Dumas père. These 48 questions cover the life and the books: The Three Musketeers and its real-life inspirations, The Count of Monte Cristo and the shoemaker Pierre Picaud, the ghostwriter Auguste Maquet and his lawsuit, the Fencing Master banned by the Tsar, the hashish club he shared with Hugo and Baudelaire, exile in Brussels, Garibaldi and L'Indépendant, the cookbook published after his death and the 2002 procession that carried him to the Panthéon behind four mounted musketeers. Easy questions stick to the famous titles and characters; the expert tier asks about Adah Isaacs Menken, Frank Wild Reed and Claude Schopp. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who is the hero of The Count of Monte Cristo?
Edmond Dantès
Edmond Dantès, a young Marseille sailor, is betrayed on the eve of his wedding to Mercédès, imprisoned for fourteen years, and returns as the Count to take revenge.
Q 02In which prison is the hero of Monte Cristo locked up?
Château d'If
Dantès is held for fourteen years in the Château d'If, a real sixteenth-century fortress on a small island in the bay of Marseille.
Q 03Which fellow prisoner educates Dantès and reveals the treasure?
Abbé Faria
Abbé Faria, the 'mad priest' in the next cell, tunnels through to Dantès, teaches him languages and science, and bequeaths him the Spada treasure hidden on Monte Cristo.
Q 04What were the names of the three musketeers who befriend d'Artagnan?
Athos, Porthos and Aramis
Athos, Porthos and Aramis, known as 'the three inseparables', each challenge d'Artagnan to a duel on the same afternoon before becoming his closest friends.
Q 05From which region of France does d'Artagnan set out for Paris?
Gascony
d'Artagnan leaves Gascony in April 1625 on an old yellow nag, carrying his father's letter to Monsieur de Tréville, captain of the musketeers and a fellow Gascon.
Q 06Who is the villainous spy working for Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers?
Milady de Winter
Milady de Winter, Richelieu's agent, is branded with a fleur-de-lis and turns out to be Athos's former wife; she poisons Constance Bonacieux and is executed at the novel's end.
Q 07In which newspaper was The Three Musketeers first serialised in 1844?
Le Siècle
The Three Musketeers ran as a serial in Le Siècle from March to July 1844 and was published in book form the same year.
Q 08Which 1700 work by Courtilz de Sandras inspired The Three Musketeers?
Mémoires de Monsieur d'Artagnan
Courtilz de Sandras's Mémoires de Monsieur d'Artagnan (1700) gave Dumas the names Athos, Porthos and Aramis; Dumas claimed he had found the story in a recovered manuscript.
Q 09Which siege do d'Artagnan and his friends fight at in The Three Musketeers?
La Rochelle
At the siege of La Rochelle (1627–28) the four friends breakfast in the Saint-Gervais bastion under enemy fire to win a bet and talk in private.
Q 10Which English duke does Milady have assassinated?
Buckingham
Milady, held prisoner at Portsmouth, seduces her Puritan jailer John Felton into stabbing the Duke of Buckingham, echoing Felton's real assassination of the duke in 1628.
Q 11What is the final part of The Vicomte de Bragelonne usually called in English?
The Man in the Iron Mask
English editions split the huge novel into three or four volumes; the last, The Man in the Iron Mask, follows the twin-brother plot around Louis XIV and the prisoner Philippe.
Q 12Which novel is the direct sequel to The Three Musketeers?
Twenty Years After
Twenty Years After (1845) reunites the four friends during the Fronde; the trilogy then closes with The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later.
Q 13Who was Dumas's best-known ghostwriting collaborator?
Auguste Maquet
Q 21What was Dumas's first play, produced to acclaim in 1829?
Henry III and His Court
It was the first great Romantic historical drama on the Paris stage, a year before Hugo's Hernani.
Q 22Which English actor's life inspired an 1836 Dumas play that bears his name?
Edmund Kean
Kean, ou Désordre et génie (1836) dramatises the life of the English tragedian Edmund Kean; Frédérick Lemaître created the title role at the Théâtre des Variétés.
Q 23What was Dumas's first serial novel, published in 1836?
La Comtesse de Salisbury
Auguste Maquet drafted outlines and chapters for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo; Dumas rewrote them in his own voice and signed the books alone.
Q 14What did Maquet win when he took Dumas to court?
More money but no by-line
Maquet won more money but no by-line: the court upheld Dumas as sole author while ordering him to share proceeds. Maquet's full role surfaced only in the late twentieth century.
Q 15In which French colony was Dumas's father born?
Saint-Domingue
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762 at Jérémie in Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti, to a French marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved African woman.
Q 16What nickname did Austrian troops give General Dumas in 1797?
The Black Devil
Napoleon called him the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol for holding a bridge alone.
Q 17Where was General Dumas imprisoned for two years after leaving Egypt in 1799?
The Kingdom of Naples
His leaking ship put in at Taranto, in the Kingdom of Naples, then at war with France; he was held in a fortress dungeon from 1799 until 1801.
Q 18What does the surname Dumas probably mean?
Of the farm
It may simply have signified that Marie-Cessette belonged to the farm property.
Q 19In which town was Dumas born and first buried?
Villers-Cotterêts
Dumas was born at Villers-Cotterêts in the Aisne on 24 July 1802 and buried there in 1872; locals objected when the state later moved his remains to the Panthéon.
Q 20For which future king did the young Dumas work before becoming a writer?
Louis-Philippe of Orléans
From 1823 Dumas worked as a clerk in the Palais-Royal secretariat of the Duke of Orléans, who became King Louis-Philippe, the 'Citizen King', after the July Revolution of 1830.
Le Capitaine Paul, partly based on John Paul Jones, followed in 1838.
Q 24Which naval officer inspired a Dumas serial novel of 1838?
John Paul Jones
Le Capitaine Paul (1838), Dumas's reworking of his own play Paul Jones, fictionalises the Scottish-born American naval hero John Paul Jones as a continuation of Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot.
Q 25Dumas's 1840 novel about the Decembrist revolt was banned in which country?
Russia
Russia banned the novel: Tsar Nicholas I objected to its portrait of the Decembrist exile Annenkov and his devoted wife, and Dumas could only visit Russia in 1858, after the tsar's death.
Q 26Augustin Grisier, who co-wrote an 1840 novel with Dumas, was Dumas's what?
Fencing master
Augustin Grisier was Dumas's fencing master and lent his name to Le Maître d'armes (1840); Dumas mentions him respectfully in The Count of Monte Cristo and The Corsican Brothers.
Q 27Roughly how many pages did Dumas publish in his lifetime?
100,000
Dumas's output is usually put at about 100,000 pages of novels, plays, travel books and journalism, helped by a studio of collaborators working under his direction.
Q 28What was the name of the country house Dumas built outside Paris in 1846?
Château de Monte-Cristo
Dumas built the Château de Monte-Cristo at Port-Marly, west of Paris, in 1846–47 and lost it to his creditors within three years; the estate later became a museum.
Q 29About how many mistresses have scholars attributed to Dumas?
40
Biographers count about 40 mistresses; by them Dumas fathered at least four children, including Alexandre Dumas fils, author of La Dame aux camélias.
Q 30To which country did Dumas flee at the end of 1851?
Belgium
Dumas settled in Brussels, Belgium, in December 1851 after Louis-Napoléon's coup d'état, which also put distance between him and his Paris creditors; he returned in 1853.