Dumas Alexandre – An Unknown Country: A “Travel Print” by Alexandre Dumas? Yes and no … because, for the summer, here is his dream of an eldorado, an almost ethnological science-fiction, an imaginary voyage of connection to a vanished civilization – but preserved in a remote corner of Matto Grosso.

Two explorers, Middleton Payne and Edouard Laury-Gray, set off in search of a group of Aztecs and Incas who would be settled in a lost valley in northern Brazil. This civilized people with elaborate social organization greets them with suspicion at first and then bonds of sympathy are created …

Written during the wave of Americanism in France in the mid-19th century, this novel marks the interest of Dumas for Amerindian civilizations. We read this fantastic journey “as if we were there” taken by the narrative change that Dumas knows how to create. Certainly, you will find in the story some didactic lengths, a hint of the ethnological naivety of the civilized among the good savages (as in the passage where our explorers reform the Aztec calendar) but it remains an excellent novel for the summer …