The Club Dumas

He smiled, wondering how much the late Enrique Taillefer would have paid to obtain all those titles. His glasses were misted, so he took them off and carefully cleaned the lenses. The lines on the computer were now blurred, as were other strange images he couldn’t identify. With his glasses back on, the words on the screen became sharp again, but the images were still floating around, indistinct, in his mind, and without a key to give them any meaning. And yet Corso felt he was on the right path. The screen began to flicker again:

Baudry, editor of Le Siecle. Publishes The Three Musketeers between the 14th of March and the llth of July 1844.

He took a look at the other files. According to his infor­mation, Dumas had had fifty-two collaborators at different pe­riods of his literary life. Relations with a large number of them had ended stormily. But Corso was only interested in one of the names:

Maquet, Auguste-Jules. 1813-1886. Collaborated with Alexandre Dumas on several plays and 19 novels, including the most famous ones (The Count of Monte Cristo, Le Chevalier de la Maison Rouge, The Black Tulip, The Queen’s Necklace) and, in par­ticular, the cycle of The Musketeers. His collaboration with Dumas made him famous and wealthy. While Dumas died pen­niless, Maquet died a rich man at his castle in Saint-Mesme. None of his own works written without Dumas survives.

He looked at his biographical notes. There were some par­agraphs taken from Dumas’s Memoirs:

We were the inventors, Hugo, Balzac, Soulie, De Mussel, and myself, of popular literature. We managed, for better or worse, to make a reputation for ourselves with that kind of writing, even though it was popular....

My imagination, confronted with reality, resembles a man who, visiting the ruins of an old building, must walk over the rubble, follow the passageways, bend down to go through doorways, so as to reconstruct an approximate picture of the original building when it was full of life, when joy jilled it with laughter and song, or when it echoed with sobs of sorrow.