Pre-existing slop

I've been mucking about with TikTok for a while. I like exploring new media things. I've been using Things That Have Happened In History as inspiration for some of them. Like George Eliot's to do list and Virginia Woolf not making New Year resolutions.

Today's (Jan 5th) is about a little thing you see on all the On This Day websites, the story that in 1825 Alexandre Dumas (of Three Musketeers fame) lost his trousers and was amusingly humiliated during his first duel. I made a video about it.

BUT, it seemed slightly too good to be true so I thought I'd go back to the source and see what 'the facts' might be. Turns out there aren't any. None of the sites that report the story link or refer to anything. There's nothing in Dumas' Memoirs. And if it had happened it seems like exactly the sort of story he'd have told.

The first reference (in English, in print) I can find to the story is in Herbert S. Gorman’s The Incredible Marquis, Alexandre Dumas from 1929. And he cites no source for it. It seems like he just made it.

Every other telling of the story seems to derive from that.

Literature is dead! Humans are poisoning the well with their hallucinations and lies!

NB: my French isn't good enough for me to be sure that there's no pre-1929 telling of the story in French. So, I might be wrong and Gorman might have got it from somewhere...