Seriously, talking about how a book is devoid of value is not really all that fun. It can maybe generate a modicum of discussion, but that's it.

Here, I can sum up the entire discussion quickly:

Dumas was popular in France at the time and wrote fast-paced (for the time), fun stories about French history, feeding into notions of the French national psyche. He wrote in the Nineteenth Century, the era of the great novel, and so his name gets thrown in with other Nineteenth-Century authors and elevated to a level that he himself would probably not have aspired to.

The End. It was the best summer ever.