The Club Dumas

Exasperated, Corso looked away from the screen. He was losing the feeling, it was disappearing into the corners of his memory before he could identify it. He stood up and paced the dark room. Then he angled his lamp at a pile of books on the floor, against the wall. He picked up two thick volumes: a mod­ern edition of the Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas pere. He went back to his desk and began to leaf through them until three photographs caught his eye. In one of them, his African blood clearly visible in his curly hair and mulatto looks, Dumas sat smiling at Isabelle Constant, who, Corso gathered from the cap­tion, was fifteen when she became the novelist’s mistress. The second photograph showed an older Dumas, posing with his daughter Marie. Here, at the height of his fame, the father of the adventure serial sat, good-natured and placid, before the photographer. The third photograph, Corso decided, was defi­nitely the most amusing and significant. Dumas aged sixty-five, gray-haired but still tall and strong, his frock coat open to reveal a contented paunch, was embracing Adah Menken, one of his last mistresses. According to the text, “after the seances and sessions of black magic of which she was such a devotee, she liked to be photographed, scantily clad, with the great men in her life.” In the photograph, La Menken’s legs, arms, and neck were all bare, which was scandalous for the time. The young woman, paying more attention to the camera than to the object of her embrace, was leaning her head on the old man’s powerful right shoulder. As for him, his face showed the signs of a long life of dissipation, pleasure, and parties. His smile, between the bloated cheeks of a bon viveur, was satis­fied, ironic. His expression for the photographer was teasing, crafty, seeking complicity. The fat old man with the shameless, passionate young girl who showed him off like a rare trophy: he, whose characters arid stories had made so many women dream. It was as if old Dumas was asking for understanding, having given in to the girl’s capricious wish to be photographed.

After all, she was young and pretty, her skin soft and her mouth passionate, this girl that life had kept for him on the last lap of his journey, only three years before his death. The old devil.

Dumas was embracing Adah Menken, one of his last mistresses.

Corso shut the book and yawned. His watch, an old chro­nometer that he often forgot to wind up, had stopped at a quarter past midnight. He went and opened the window and breathed in the cold night air. The street was still deserted.

It was all very strange, he thought as he went back to his desk and turned off the computer. His eyes came to rest on the folder with the manuscript. He opened it mechanically and took another look at the fifteen pages covered with two different types of handwriting, eleven of the pages blue, four of them white. Apres de nouvelles presque desesperees du roi... Upon almost desperate news from the king... In the pile of books on the floor he found a huge red tome, a facsimile edition— J. C. Lattes, 1988—containing the entire cycle of The Muske­teers and Monte Cristo in the Le Vasseur edition with engrav­ings, published shortly after Dumas’s death. He found the chapter “The Anjou Wine” on page 144 and started to read, comparing it with the original manuscript. Except for a small error here and there, the texts were identical. In the book, the chapter was illustrated with two drawings by Maurice Leloir, engraved by Huyot. King Louis XIII arriving at the siege of La Rochelle with ten thousand men, four horsemen at the head of his escort, holding their muskets, wearing the wide-brimmed hat and jacket of de Treville’s company. Three of them are without doubt Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. A moment later they will be meeting their friend d’Artagnan, still a simple cadet in Monsieur des Essarts’s company of guards. The Gascon still doesn’t know that the bottles of Anjou wine, a gift from his mortal enemy Milady, Richelieu’s agent, are poisoned. She wants to avenge the insult done to her by d’Artagnan. He has passed himself off as the Comte de Wardes, slipped into her bed, and enjoyed a night of love that should have been the count’s. To make matters worse, d’Artagnan has by chance discovered Milady’s terrible secret, the fleur-de-lis on her shoul­der, the shameful mark branded on her by the executioner’s iron. With such preliminaries, and given Milady’s disposition, the contents of the second illustration are easy to guess: as d’Artagnan and his companions watch in astonishment, the manservant Fourreau expires in terrible agony after drinking the wine intended for his master. Sensitive to the magic of a text he hadn’t read in twenty years, Corso came to the passage where the musketeers and d’Artagnan are speaking about Milady: