The Club Dumas

“To be sure,” I added, “the reader who goes through the sixty-seven chapters of The Three Musketeers waiting for the duel between Rochefort and d’Artagnan is in for a disappoint­ment. Dumas settles the matter in three lines, and is rather underhand about it. Because when we next meet Rochefort in Twenty Years After, he and d’Artagnan have fought three times, and Rochefort bears as many scars as a result. Nevertheless no hatred remains between them. Instead they have the twisted respect for each other that is possible only between two old enemies. Once again fate has decreed that they fight on different sides, but now they are friendly, complicit, two gentlemen who have known each other for twenty years.... Rochefort falls out of favor with Mazarin, breaks out of the Bastille, and helps the Duke of Beaufort escape. He conspires in the Fronde re­bellion and dies in the arms of d’Artagnan, who has stabbed him with his sword, failing to recognize him in all the confu­sion. ‘You were my fate,’ Rochefort more or less says to the Gascon. ‘I recovered from three of your sword wounds, but I will not recover from the fourth.’ And he dies. ‘I have just killed an old friend,’ d’Artagnan later tells Porthos. This is the only epitaph Richelieu’s former agent is given.”

My words provoked a lively discussion with several factions. The actor hadn’t taken his eyes off the woman journalist all afternoon. He was an old heartthrob who’d played Monte Cristo in a television series. Encouraged by the painter and the two writers, he launched into a brilliant account of his recollections of the characters. In this way we moved from Dumas to Zevaco and Paul Feval, and ended by once again confirming Sabatini’s indisputable influence on Salgari. I seem to recall that some­body timidly mentioned Jules Verne but was shouted down by all present. Verne’s cold, soulless heroes had no place in a dis­cussion of passionate tales of cloak and dagger.

As for the journalist, one of those fashionable young ladies with a column in a leading Sunday newspaper, her literary memory began with Milan Kundera. So she remained in a state of cautious expectation, agreeing with relief whenever a title, anecdote, or character (the Black Swan, Yanez, Nevers’s sword wound) stirred some memory of a film glimpsed on TV. Mean­while, Corso, with a hunter’s calm patience, looked steadily at me over his glass of gin, waiting for a chance to return the conversation to the original subject. And he succeeded, making the most of an awkward silence that fell when the journalist said that, anyway, she found these adventure stories rather lightweight, I mean kind of superficial, don’t you think?

Corso chewed the end of his pencil:

“And  how  do  you  see  Rochefort’s  role  in  history,  Mr. Balkan?” he asked.

They all looked at me, in particular the students, two of them girls. I don’t know why, but in certain circles I’m consid­ered a high priest of letters and every time I open my mouth, people expect to hear pearls of wisdom. A review of mine, in the appropriate literary magazine, can make or break a writer who’s starting out. Absurd, certainly, but that’s life. Think of the last Nobel prizewinner, the author of /, Onan and In Search of Myself and the ultrasuccessful Oui, C’est MoL It was I who made him a household name fifteen years ago, with a page and a half in Le Monde on April Fools’ Day. I’ll never forgive myself, but that’s how things work.

“At first, Rochefort is the enemy,” I said. “He symbolizes the hidden forces, darkness.... He is the agent of the satanic conspiracy surrounding d’Artagnan and his friends, of the cardinal’s plot growing in the shadows, threatening their lives....”