Alexandre Dumas, working for the past several years at the Palais Royal in the office of the powerful duc d'Orléans, had begun to write articles for magazines as well as plays for the theater.

Strongly influenced, like most of the romantics of the 1820’s, by the historical evocation and theatrically of Shakespeare’s plays and Walter Scott’s novels, he writes “Henri III et sa cour” (“Henry III and His Court”), the first genuinely romantic melodrama produced by the Comedie Francaise.

Mounted in 1829, when Dumas is twenty-seven, it meets with great public acclaim.