The Club Dumas

I suppressed my impatience. “You’re blowing things out of all proportion.... Enrique and I were friends for some time. We shared a fascination for this kind of fiction, although his taste in literature wasn’t on a level with his enthusiasm. The fact is, his success as a publisher of bestselling cookbooks meant he could spend time and money on his hobby. And to be fair, if anybody deserved to be a member of the club, it was Enrique. That’s why I recommended his admission. As I said, we shared, if not in our tastes, at least in our enthusiasm.”

“You shared more than that, I seem to remember.”

Corso’s sarcastic smile had returned, and I found it highly irritating. “I could tell you that that’s none of your business,” I retorted. “But I want to explain. Liana has always been very special, as well as very beautiful. She was a precocious reader. Do you know that at sixteen she had a fleur-de-lis tattooed on her hip? Not on the shoulder, like her idol, Milady de Winter, so that her family and the nuns at her boarding school wouldn’t find out. What do you think of that?”

“Very moving.”

“You don’t seem very moved. But I assure you she’s an ad­mirable person. The fact is that, well... we became intimate. You’ll recall that earlier I mentioned the heritage that is the lost paradise of childhood. Well Liana’s heritage is The Three Musketeers. She was fascinated by the world depicted in its pages. She decided to marry Enrique after meeting him by chance at a party where they spent the evening exchanging quotes from the novel. He was already a very wealthy pub­lisher.”

“It was love at first sight,” said Corso.

“I don’t know why you say it like that. They married for the most sincere reasons. The thing is that, in the long run, even for someone as good-natured as his wife, Enrique could be tiresome.... We were good friends, and I often visited them. Liana...” I put my glass on the balustrade next to his empty one. “Anyway. You can imagine the rest.” “Yes, I can. Very clearly.”

“I wasn’t talking about that. She became an excellent col­laborator. So much so that, four years ago, I sponsored her entry to the society. She owns chapter 37, ‘Milady’s Secret.’ She chose it herself.”

“Why did you set her on me?”

“Let’s take this one step at a time. Not long ago, Enrique became a problem. Instead of limiting himself to the very profitable business of cookbooks, he decided to write a serial. But the novel was awful. That is a fact. Absolutely awful, be­lieve me. He brazenly plagiarized all the plots of the genre. It was called—”

“The Dead Man’s Hand.”

“Exactly. Even the title wasn’t his. And what’s worse, un­believably, he wanted Dumas & Co. to publish it. I refused, of course. His monstrous creation would never have been approved by the board. Anyway, Enrique had more than enough money to publish it himself, and I told him so.”

“I assume he took it badly. I saw his library.”

“Badly? That is something of an understatement. The ar­gument took place in his study. I can still picture him, small and chubby, standing very straight, on tiptoe, staring at me with wild eyes. He looked as if he might burst a blood vessel. All very unpleasant. He said he’d decided to devote his whole life to writing. And who was I to judge it. That was up to posterity. I was a biased critic, an insufferable pedant, and on top of everything I was playing around with his wife. This absolutely stunned me—I didn’t realize he knew. But appar­ently Liana talks in her sleep, and between cursing d’Artagnan and his friends (whom, by the way, she hates as if she had known them personally) she’d revealed the whole affair to her husband.... You can imagine my predicament.”

“Very difficult for you.”

“Extremely. Although the worst was yet to come. Enrique stormed. He said that if he was mediocre, Dumas wasn’t much of a writer either. Where would Dumas have been without Auguste Maquet, whom he wretchedly exploited? The proof lay in the white and blue pages of ‘The Anjou Wine,’ which En­rique kept in his safe.... The argument became even more heated. He called me an adulterer—rather an old-fashioned insult—and I called him a moron, adding a few snide com­ments about his latest cookbook successes. I ended up comparing him to the baker in Cyrano.... ‘I’ll get my revenge,’ he said, sounding rather like the Count of Monte Cristo. Til publicize the fact that your beloved Dumas was a big cheat who appro­priated other people’s work. I’ll make the manuscript public, and everyone will see how the old fraud produced his serials. I don’t give a damn about the rules of the society. That chap­ter’s mine, and I’ll sell it to whoever I like. And you can go to hell.’“

“He got nasty.”