The Club Dumas

“And had weapons of silver and three red angles on his coat of arms.” Corso gestured impatiently. All this information was trivial and he didn’t need me to tell him about it. “There’s a very well-known Richelieu catalogue.”

“The catalogue is incomplete, because the collection was bro­ken up. Parts of it are now kept in the national library of France, the Mazarin library, and the Sorbonne, while other books are in private hands. He owned Hebrew and Syrian man­uscripts, notable works on mathematics, medicine, theology, law, and history.... And you were right. Scholars were most surprised to find many ancient texts on the occult, from cabbala to black magic.”

Corso   swallowed  without  taking  his  eyes  off mine.   He seemed tense—a bowstring about to snap. “Any book in particular?”

I shook my head before I answered. His insistence intrigued me. The girl was listening attentively, but it was apparent that she was no longer directing her attention at me. I said, “My information on Richelieu as a character in a serial doesn’t go that far.”

“What about Dumas? Was he, too, interested in the occult?” Here I was emphatic:

“No. Dumas was a bon vivant who did everything out in the open, to the great enjoyment and shock of all those around him. He was also somewhat superstitious. He believed in the evil eye, wore an amulet on his watch chain, and had his for­tune told by Madame Desbarolles. But I don’t see him practic­ing black magic in the back room. He wasn’t even a Mason, as he confesses in The Century of Louis XV. He had debts, and he was hounded by his publishers and his creditors—he was too busy to waste his time on such things. Perhaps when re­searching one of his characters once, he studied the subject, but never in much depth. I believe he drew all the Masonic prac­tices described in Joseph Balsam and The Mohicans of Paris directly from Clavel’s Picturesque History of Freemasonry.” “What about Adah Menken?”

I looked at Corso with respect. This was an expert’s question. “That was different. Adah-Isaacs Menken, his last lover, was an American actress. During the Exhibition of 1867, while at­tending a performance of The Pirates of the Savannah, Dumas noticed a pretty young woman on stage who had to grab hold of a galloping horse. The girl embraced the novelist as he left the theater and told him bluntly that she had read all his books and was prepared to go to bed with him immediately. Old Dumas needed a great deal less than that to become infatuated with a woman, so he accepted her tribute. She claimed to have been the wife of a millionaire, a king’s mistress, a general’s wife.... Actually she was a Portuguese Jew born in America and the mistress of a strange man who was both a pimp and a boxer. Her relationship with Dumas caused a great deal of scandal, because Menken liked to be photographed scantily clad and frequented number 107 Rue Malesherbes, Dumas’s last house in Paris. She died from peritonitis after falling from a horse at the age of thirty-one.”

“Was she interested in black magic?”

“So they say. She liked ceremonies where she would dress in a tunic, burn incense, and make offerings to the Prince of Darkness.... Sometimes she claimed to be possessed by Satan, in various ways that today we might describe as pornographic. I’m sure old Dumas never believed a word of it, but he must have enjoyed the whole performance. It seems that when Menken was possessed by the devil, she was very hot in bed.”

There was laughter around the table. I even allowed myself a slight smile, but the girl and Corso remained serious. She seemed to be thinking, her light-colored eyes intent on Corso while he nodded slowly, though he was now distracted and distant. He was looking out the window at the streets and seemed to be searching in the night, in the silent flow of car lights reflected in his glasses, for the lost word, the key to uniting all these different stories that floated like dead leaves on the dark waters of time.

I NOW MOVE ONCE more into the background, as the near-omniscient narrator of Lucas Corso’s adventures. In this way, with the information Corso later confided to me, the tragic events that followed can be put into some sort of order. So we come to the moment when, returning home, he sees that the concierge has just swept the hallway and is about to leave. He passes him as the man is bringing the garbage cans up from the basement.

“They came to fix your TV this afternoon, Mr. Corso.”

Corso had read enough books and seen enough films to know what that meant. So he couldn’t help laughing, much to the concierge’s astonishment.

“I haven’t had a television for ages.”