PARIS: The French city of Villers-Cotterets has decided to withdraw its lawsuit before the country’s highest administrative court seeking to block the transfer to Paris of the ashes of one of France’s greatest novelists, Alexandre Dumas, author of “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”.

According to a decree signed by President Jacques Chirac on March 26, the ashes were to be transferred to Paris on Oct 3 to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the author’s birth.

The ashes will be enshrined at the Pantheon, where Dumas will join the ranks of a bevy of other great French writers, among them Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, and more recently Andre Malraux.

But, having gotten wind of the plan, the city of Villers-Cotterets, which is the final resting place of Dumas, decided to let it be known that the whole affair had been organized behind its back and that it would insist on maintaining Dumas’s ashes on its soil for the simple reason that the author himself had chosen the town as his final resting place.

However, according to a compromise reached with French authorities, Villers-Cotteret’s city fathers have decided to honour the wishes of Chirac after getting a promise from the president that the federal government will construct at Villers-Cotterets a statue in memory of Dumas — similar to the one melted down by German forces during World War II.

Sources at the Elysee Palace noted that President Chirac was adamant about having Dumas’s ashes transferred to the Pantheon for he sees in the author a role model for French youth.

Dumas was born of a white woman and a father who was of mixed blood, but who went on to become a celebrated military hero of the French Revolution.

General Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie died at Villers-Cotterets in 1806, where his son Alexandre was born in 1802.

For the moment, the only other non-white person to be have his ashes at the Pantheon is Felix Eboue, a former administrator of French Equatorial Africa. And there are only two women at the Pantheon: physicist Marie Curie and Madame Marcellin Berthelot, who was buried there in 1907 for the sole reason that she died the same day as her husband, the celebrated chemist.