Alexandre Dumas was born in the village of Villers-Cotterêts in the department of Aisne, northeast of Paris, France, Europe. Dumas' paternal grandparents were Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Général commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint Domingue - now Haiti - and Marie-Cesette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean Creole of mixed French/African ancestry. Their son, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, married Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret, the daughter of an innkeeper. Thomas-Alexandre, when a general in Napoleon's army, fell out of favor, thus rendering his family impoverished. By the time young Dumas was born, his family had lost all pretensions to wealth, and his widowed mother struggled to give him a decent education. General Dumas died in 1806, when Alexandre was three and a half years old. Although Marie-Louise was unable to provide her son with much in the way of education, this did not hinder young Alexandre's love of books, and he read everything he could get his hands on. While Dumas was growing up, his mother's stories of his father's brave military acts during the glory years of Napoleon I of France spawned Alexandre's vivid imagination for adventure and heroes. Although poor, the family still had the father's distinguished reputation and aristocratic connections; and in 1822, after the restoration of the monarchy, twenty-year-old Alexandre Dumas moved to Paris, where he obtained employment at the Palais Royal in the office of the powerful duc d'Orléans (Louis Philippe).