The Club Dumas

“He was quite a man of the court then. Very different from Dumas’s swashbuckling d’Artagnan.”

I raised my hand in defense of Domas’s respect for the facts.

“Don’t be fooled. Charles de Batz, or d’Artagnan, went on fighting to the end of his life. He served under Turenne in Flanders, and in 1657 was appointed lieutenant in the gray musketeers, which was equivalent to commander. Ten years later he became a captain in the musketeers and fought in Flanders, a post equivalent to cavalry general.”

Corso was squinting behind his glasses.

“Excuse me.” He leaned across the table toward me, pencil in hand. He’d been writing down a name or date. “In what year did this happen?”

“His promotion to general? 1667. Why did that draw your attention?”

He showed his incisors as he bit his lower lip. But only for an instant. “No reason.” As he spoke, his face regained its im­passivity. “That same year a certain person was burned at the stake in Rome. A strange coincidence....” Now he was staring at me blankly. “Does the name Aristide Torchia mean anything to you?”

I tried to remember. I had no idea. “Not a thing,” I an­swered. “Does he have anything to do with Dumas?”

He hesitated. “No,” he said at last, although he didn’t seem very convinced. “I don’t think so. But please go on. You were talking about the real d’Artagnan in Flanders.”

“He died at Maastricht, as I’ve said, at the head of his men. A heroic death. The English and the French were besieg­ing the town. They needed to cross a dangerous pass, and d’Artagnan offered to go first put of courtesy to his allies. A musket bullet tore through his jugular.”

“He never got to be marshal, then.”

“No. Alexandre Dumas deserves sole credit for giving the fictional d’Artagnan what a miserly Louis XIV refused his flesh-and-blood predecessor.... There are a couple of interesting books on the subject. You can take down the titles if you want. One is by Charles Samaran, D’Artagnan, capitaine des mousquetaires du roi, histoire veridique d’un heros de roman, published in 1912. The other one is Le vrai d’Artagnan, written by the Duke of Montesquieu-Fezensac, a direct descendant of the real d’Artagnan. Published in 1963, I think.”

None of this information was obviously related to the Dumas manuscript, but Corso noted it down as if his life depended on it. Occasionally he looked up from his notepad and glanced at me inquisitively through his crooked glasses. Or he put his head to one side as if he were no longer listening, absorbed in his own thoughts. At that time, I knew all the facts about “The Anjou Wine,” even certain keys to the mystery of which Corso was unaware. But I had no idea of the complex implications that The Nine Doors would have for this story. Despite his logical turn of mind, Corso was already beginning to glimpse sinister links between the facts at his disposal and—how shall I put it—the literary source of those facts. This may all appear rather confused, but we must remember that this was how it seemed to Corso at the time. And although I am narrating the story after the resolution of its momentous events, the very nature of the loop—think of Escher’s paintings, or the work of that old trickster, Bach—forces us to return continually to the beginning and limit ourselves to the narrow confines of Corso’s knowledge. The rule is to know and keep silent. Even if there is foul play, without the rule there is no game.

“OK,” said Corso once he’d written down the recommended titles. “That’s the first d’Artagnan, the real one. And Dumas’s fictional character is the third one. I’m assuming the connection between them is the book by Gatien de Courtilz you showed me the other day, the Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan.”

“Correct. We can call him the missing link, the least famous of the three. A Gascon who is an intermediary, a literary char­acter and a real person in one. The very same that Dumas used to create his character... The writer Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras was a contemporary of d’Artagnan. He recognized the novelistic potential of the character and set to work. A century and a half later, Dumas found out about the book during a trip to Marseilles. His landlord had a brother who ran the municipal library. Apparently the brother showed Dumas the book, edited in Cologne in 1700. Dumas saw that he could make use of the story and asked to borrow the book. He never re­turned it.”

“What do we know about this predecessor of Dumas’s, Gatien de Courtilz?”