The Club Dumas

This device was typical of him. It was one of his trademarks, like Rocambole’s leaving a playing card instead of a calling card. Corso would say something casually, as if he himself had no opinion on the matter, slyly goading you to react. If you put forward arguments and justifications when you are annoyed, you give out more information to your opponent. I was no fool and knew what Corso was doing, but even so, or maybe because of it, I felt irritated.

“Don’t talk in cliches,” I said. “The serial genre produced a lot of disposable stuff, but Dumas was way above all that. In literature, time is like a shipwreck in which God looks after His own. I challenge you to name any fictional heroes who have survived in as good health as d’Artagnan and his friends. Sherlock Holmes is a possible exception. Yes, The Three Mus­keteers was a swashbuckling novel full of melodrama and all the sins of the genre. But it’s also a distinguished example of the serial, and of a standard well above the norm. A tale of friendship and adventure that has stayed fresh even though tastes have changed and there is an now an idiotic tendency to despise action in novels. It would seem that since Joyce we have had to make do with Molly Bloom and give up Nausicaa on the beach after the shipwreck.... Have you read my essay ‘Friday, or the Ship’s Compass? Give me Homer’s Ulysses any day.”

I sharpened my tone at that point, waiting for Corso’s re­action. He smiled slightly and remained silent, but, remember­ing his expression when I had quoted from Scaramouche, I felt sure I was on the right track.

“I know what you’re referring to,” he said at last. “Your views are well known and controversial, Mr. Balkan.”

“My views are well known because I’ve seen to that. And as for patronizing his readers, as you claimed a moment ago, perhaps you didn’t know that the author of The Three Mus­keteers fought in the streets during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. And he supplied arms, paying for them out of his own pocket, to Garibaldi. Don’t forget that Dumas’s father was a well-known republican general.... The man was full of love for the people and liberty.”

“Although his respect for the truth was only relative.” “That’s not important. Do you know how he answered those who  accused  him  of raping  History?  ‘True,  I  have  raped History, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.’“

I put my pen down and went to the glass cabinets full of books. They covered the walls of my study. I opened one and took out a volume bound in dark leather.

“Like all great writers of fables,” I went on, “Dumas was a liar. Countess Dash, who knew him well, says in her memoirs that any apocryphal anecdote he told was received as the his­torical truth. Take Cardinal Richelieu: he was the greatest man of his time, but once the treacherous Dumas had finished with him, the image left to us was that of a sinister villain....” I turned to Corso, holding the book. “Do you know this? It was written by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, a musketeer who lived in the late seventeenth century. They’re the memoirs of the real d’Artagnan, Charles de Batz-Castelmore, Comte d’Artagnan. He was a Gascon, born in 1615, and was in­deed a musketeer. Although he lived in Mazarin’s time, not Richelieu’s. He died in 1673 during the siege of Maastricht, when, like his fictional namesake, he was about to be awarded the marshal’s staff.... So you see, Dumas’s raping did indeed produce beautiful offspring. An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist’s genius.”

Corso sat and listened. When I handed him the book, he leafed through it carefully, with great interest. He turned the pages slowly, barely brushing them with his fingertips, only touching the very edge. From time to time he paused over a name or a chapter heading. Behind his spectacles his eyes worked sure and fast. He stopped once to write in his notebook: “Memoires de M. d’Artagnan, G. de Courtilz, 1704, P. Rouge, 4 volumes in 12mo, 4th edition.” Then he shut the notebook and looked up at me.

“You said it: he was a trickster.”