The Club Dumas

“Quite a lot. Partly because he had a sizable police file. He was born in 1644 or 1647 and was a musketeer, a bugler in the Royal-Etranger, which was a type of foreign legion of the time, and captain of the cavalry regiment of Beaupre-Choiseul. At the end of the war against Holland, in which d’Artagnan was killed, Courtilz remained in Holland and traded his sword for a pen. He wrote biographies, historical monographs, more or less apocryphal memoirs, shocking tales of gossip and intrigue at the French court. This got him into trouble. The Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan was astonishingly successful: five editions in ten years. But the book displeased Louis XIV. He disliked the irreverent tone used to recount certain details regarding the royal family and its entourage. As a result Courtilz was arrested on his return to France and held in the Bastille at His Majesty’s pleasure until shortly before his death.”

The actor made the most of my pause to slip in, quite ir­relevantly, a quotation from “The Sun Has Set in Flanders” by Marquina. “Our captain” he recited, “gravely wounded, led us, sparing no effort though in his jinal agony. Sirs, what a captain he was indeed that day....” Or something like that. It was a shameless attempt to shine in front of the journalist, whose thigh he now held with a proprietary air. The others, in par­ticular the novelist who wrote under the pseudonym of Emilia Forster, were looking at him with either envy or barely con­cealed resentment.

After a polite silence, Corso decided to hand control of the situation back to me.

“How much does Dumas’s d’Artagnan owe to Courtilz?” he asked.

“A great deal. Although in Twenty Years After and in Bragelonne he used other sources, the basic story of The Three Musketeers is to be found in Courtilz. Dumas applied his genius to it and gave it breadth, but it contained a rough outline of all the elements of the story: d’Artagnan’s father granting his blessing, the letter to Treville, the challenge to the musketeers, who incidentally were brothers in the first draft. Milady also appears. And the two d’Artagnans were like two peas in a pod. Courtilz’s character was slightly more cynical, more miserly, and less trustworthy. But they’re the same.”

Corso leaned forward slightly. “Earlier you said that Rochefort stands for the evil plot surrounding d’Artagnan and his friends. But Rochefort is just a henchman.”

“Indeed. In the pay of His Eminence Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu...”

“The evil one,” said Corso.

“The spirit of evil,” commented the actor, determined to butt in.

Impressed by our foray into the subject of serials that afternoon, the students were taking notes or listening open-mouthed. The girl with the green eyes, however, remained impassive, slightly apart, as if she had only dropped in by chance.

“For Dumas,” I went on, “at least in the first part of The Musketeers cycle, Richelieu provided the character essential to all romantic adventure and mystery stories: the powerful enemy lurking in the shadows, the embodiment of evil. For the history of France, Richelieu was a great man. But in The Musketeers he is rehabilitated only twenty years later. Shrewd Dumas fitted in with reality without diminishing the novel’s interest. He’d found another villain: Mazarin. This correction, even as voiced by d’Artagnan and his companions when they praise the nobility of their former enemy, is morally questionable. For

Dumas it was a convenient act of contrition. Nevertheless in the first volume of the cycle, whether plotting Buckingham’s murder, Anne of Austria’s downfall, or giving carte blanche to the sinister Milady, Cardinal Richelieu is the embodiment of the perfect villain. His Eminence is to d’Artagnan what Prince Gonzaga is to Lagardere, or Professor Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes. A mysterious, demonic presence.”

Corso seemed about to interrupt me, which I thought odd. I was getting to know him and typically he wouldn’t interrupt until the other person had delivered all his information, until every last detail had been squeezed out.

“You’ve used the word demonic twice,” he said, looking over his notes. “And both times referring to Richelieu. Was the car­dinal a devotee of the occult?”

His words had a strange effect. The young girl turned to look curiously at Corso. He was looking at me, and I was watch­ing the girl. He awaited my answer, unaware of this strange triangle.

“Richelieu was keenly interested in many things,” I ex­plained. “In addition to turning France into a great power, he had time to collect pictures, carpets, porcelain, and statues. He was also an important book collector. He bound his books in calfskin and red morocco leather—”