Celebrated Crimes (Complete)

Chapter 2: NOTE:

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About This Book

This collection assembles dramatized retellings of notorious historical crimes and trials, pairing narrative reconstruction with documentary detail, moral reflection, and occasional authorial commentary. Each chapter focuses on a distinct scandal or violent episode, tracing its causes, public reaction, legal proceedings, and the personalities involved, while blending fact with vivid descriptive prose. The tone alternates between investigative chronicle and rhetorical flourish, offering portraits of power, passion, and corruption as well as reflections on justice and human nature. Readers may expect energetic storytelling that privileges dramatic effect even when historical accuracy is debated.

NOTE:

Dumas's 'Celebrated Crimes' was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language—has minced no words—to describe the violent scenes of a violent time.

"In some instances facts appear distorted out of their true perspective, and in others the author makes unwarranted charges. It is not within our province to edit the historical side of Dumas, any more than it would be to correct the obvious errors in Dickens's Child's History of England. The careful, mature reader, for whom the books are intended, will recognize, and allow for, this fact.