The Club Dumas

A faint scar on his temple. There was his confirmation, but as Corso remembered it, Rochefort’s scar was bigger, and not on his temple but on his cheek, like that of the chauffeur dressed in black. Corso went over it all until at last he let out a laugh. The picture was now complete, and in full color: Lana Turner in The Three Musketeers, at her carriage window, beside a suitably sinister Rochefort, not pale as in Dumas’s novel, but dark, with a plumed hat and a long scar—it was definite this time—cutting his right cheek from top to bottom. He remem­bered it as a film, not a novel, and his exasperation at this both amused and irritated him. Goddamn Hollywood.

Film scenes aside, he had at last managed to find some order to all of this, a common, if secret, thread, a tune composed of disparate, mysterious notes. Through the vague uneasiness that Corso had experienced since his visit to Taillefer’s widow, he could now glimpse outlines, faces, an atmosphere and charac­ters, halfway between reality and fiction, and all linked in strange, as yet unclear ways. Dumas and a seventeenth-century book. The devil and The Three Musketeers. Milady and the bonfires of the Inquisition ... Although it was all more absurd than definite, more like a novel than real life.

He turned out the light and went to bed. But it took him some time to fall asleep, because one image wouldn’t leave his mind. It floated in the darkness before his open eyes. A distant landscape, that of his reading as a boy, filled with shadows which reappeared now twenty years later, materialized as ghosts that were so close, he could almost feel them. The scar. Rochefort. The man from Meung. His Eminence’s mercenary.

 V. REMEMBER

He was sitting just as he had left him, in front of the fireplace.

—A. Christie, THE  MURDER  OF  ROGER  ACKROYD

This is the point at which I en­ter the stage for the second time. Corso came to me again, and he did so, I seem to remember, a few days before leaving for Portugal. As he told me later, by then he already suspected that the Dumas manuscript and Varo Borja’s Nine Doors were only the tip of the iceberg. To understand it all he first needed to locate the other stories, all knotted together like the tie Enrique Taillefer used to hang himself. It wouldn’t be easy, I told him, because in literature there are never any clear boundaries. Ev­erything is dependent on everything else, and one thing is su­perimposed on top of another. It all ends up as a complicated intertextual game, like a hall of mirrors or those Russian dolls. Establishing a specific fact or the precise source involves risks that only some of my very stupid or very confident colleagues would dare take. It would be like saying that you can see the influence of Quo Vadis, but not Suetonius or Appollonius of Rhodes, on Robert Graves. As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. And when I want to know something, I look it up in books—their memory never fails.

“Count Rochefort is one of the most important secondary characters in The Three Musketeers” I explained to Corso when he came to see me. “He is the cardinal’s agent, a friend of Milady’s, and the first enemy that d’Artagnan makes. I can pinpoint the exact date: the first Monday of April 1625, in Meung-sur-Loire.... I refer to the fictional Rochefort of course, although a similar character did exist. Gatien de Courtilz de­scribed him, in the supposed Memoirs of the real d’Artagnan, a man with the name of Rosnas. But the Rochefort with the scar didn’t exist in real life. Dumas took the character from another book, the Memoires de MLCDR (Monsieur le comte de Rochefort), possibly apocryphal and also attributed to Courtilz. Some say that that book could refer to Henri Louis d’Aloigny, Marquis de Rochefort, born around 1625, but that’s stretching things.”

I looked out at the lights of the evening traffic in the ave­nues beyond the window of the cafe where I meet with my literary friends. A few of them were sitting with us around a table covered with newspapers, cups, and smoking ashtrays— two writers, a painter down on his luck, a woman journalist on the rise, a stage actor, and four or five students, the kind who sit in a corner and don’t open their mouths, watching you as if you were God. Corso sat among them, still in his coat. He leaned against the window, drank gin, and occasionally took notes.