Afrique-Orient editions have just published "Stopover in Tangier 1846". This work includes the Tangier part of the Véloce or Tangier, Algiers and Tunis (written in 1847, published in 1848), by Alexandre Dumas Père.

In his preamble, J-P. Péroncel-Hugoz, senior reporter, member of the Society of World Editors, former director of the Nadir (Paris) and Bab (Casablanca) collections, author notably of Morocco through the small end of the opera glass (2010), under whose direction this book was published, recalls that for Alexandre Dumas Père (1802-1870), the mind certainly prepared by some good readings on the "Empire of Morocco", three days were enough to draw from it over a hundred pages an opulent waterfall portrait of Tangier.

The doyenne of Moroccan cities, founded by the giant Antaeus, whom Hercules killed, and later endowed, with Bombay, by a Portuguese infanta, soon to be Queen of England, Tangier, therefore, is in the middle of the 19th century the diplomatic showcase of the crowned sherifs of the Far Maghreb and a multiple and shimmering port; none of its aspects, trades, races, religions, and even the "biblical" hairstyles of the indigenous Tangier women, will escape the ultra-fast eye and intelligence of the first Dumas.

Is not brilliance one of the major attributes of geniuses, of master artists? They catch on the fly what the common man does not perceive and they restore it, magnified, because kneaded with their style, their emotions, their inclinations.

"Stopover in Tangier" illustrates wonderfully, literarily, this transmutation of reality by art, the true one, the one that owes nothing to fashions – even if the writer does not escape the received ideas of his time on Arabs, the Orient, Islam, etc. Nevertheless, even far from the Seine, as the academician Alain Decaux said in 2010, Alexandre Dumas Père continues everywhere to "symbolise the French spirit", with his acuity and curiosity but also his credulity and his blinkers…

What our traveller repairs beautifully with a sentence sometimes: "All this ragged race, in tatters, draping its nudity with a day-covered blanket, was superb to see. Never an emperor covered in purple, entering Rome on his triumphal chariot, and treading the Sacred Way to climb to the Capitol, has held his head with more dignity. It is that, with them, dignity is in man, this image of God, and not in the rank he occupies, and not in the garment that covers him. The Arab is a sultan at home like the emperor in his kingdom".