The Club Dumas

Achille Replinger was standing by the table. He was thickset and had a reddish complexion. Porthos with a bushy gray mus­tache and double chin overlapping the collar of his shirt, which was worn with a knitted tie. He was expensively but carelessly dressed. His jacket strained to contain his girth, and his flannel trousers were creased and sagging.

“Corso ... Lucas Corso,” he said, holding Boris Balkan’s letter of introduction in his thick, strong fingers and frowning. “Yes, he called me the other day. Something about Dumas.”

Corso put his bag on the table and took out the folder with the fifteen manuscript pages of “The Anjou Wine.” The book­seller spread them out in front of him, arching his brow.

“Interesting,” he said softly. “Very interesting.”

He wheezed as he spoke, breathing with difficulty like an asthmatic. He took his glasses from one of his jacket pockets and put them on after a brief glance at his visitor. He bent over the pages. When he looked up, he was smiling ecstatically.

“Extraordinary,” he said. “I’ll buy it from you here and now.”

“It’s not for sale.”

Replinger seemed surprised. He pursed his lips, nearly pout­ing. “I thought...”

“I just need an expert opinion. You’ll be paid for your time, of course.”

Achille Replinger shook his head. He didn’t care about the money. Confused, he stopped to look at Corso mistrustfully a couple of times over his glasses. He bent over the manuscript again.

“A pity,” he said at last. He regarded Corso with curiosity, as if wondering how on earth such a thing had fallen into his hands. “How did you get hold of it?”

“I inherited it from an old aunt. Have you ever seen it before?”

Still suspicious, Replinger looked over Corso’s shoulder, through the window at the street, as if someone out there might be able to give him some information about his visitor. Or maybe he was considering how to answer Corso’s question. He pulled at his mustache, as if it were false and he were making sure it was still in place, and smiled evasively.

“Here in the quartier you can never be sure if you’ve seen something before.... This has always been a good area for people who deal in books and prints. People come here to buy and sell, and everything has passed several times through the same hands.” He paused to catch his breath, then looked at Corso uneasily. “I don’t think so.... No, I’ve never seen this manuscript before,” he said. He looked out at the street again, flushed. “I’d be sure if I had.”

“So it’s authentic?” asked Corso.

“Well... In fact, yes.” Replinger wheezed as he stroked the blue pages. He seemed to be trying to stop himself from touching them. Finally he held one up between his thumb and forefinger. “Semirounded, medium-weight handwriting, no annotations or erasures ... Almost no punctuation marks, and unexpected capi­tal letters. This is definitely Dumas at his peak, toward the mid­dle of his life, when he wrote The Musketeers.” He’d become more animated as he spoke. Now he fell silent and lifted a finger. Corso could see him smiling beneath his mustache. He seemed to have reached a decision. “Wait just one moment.”

He went over to one of the filing cabinets marked D and took out some buff-colored folders.

“All this is by Alexandre Dumas pere. The handwriting is identical.”

There were about a dozen documents, some unsigned or else initialed A. D. Some had the full signature. Most were short notes to publishers, letters to friends, or invitations.

“This is one of his American autographs,” explained Replinger. “Lincoln requested one, and Dumas sent him ten dollars and a hundred autographs. They were sold in Pittsburgh for charity.” He showed Corso all the documents with restrained but obvious professional pride. “Look at this one. An invitation to dine with him on Montecristo, at the house he had built in Port-Marly. Sometimes he signed only his initials, and some­times he used pseudonyms. But not all the autographs in cir­culation are authentic. At the newspaper The Musketeer, which he owned, there was a man called Viellot who could imitate his handwriting and signature. And during the last three years of his life, Dumas’s hands trembled so much he had to dictate his work.”

“Why blue paper?”

“He had it sent from Lille. It was made for him specially by a printer who was a great admirer. He almost always used this color, especially for the novels. Occasionally he used pale pink for his articles, or yellow for poetry. He used several dif­ferent pens, depending on the kind of thing he was writing. And he couldn’t stand blue ink.”

Corso pointed to the four white pages of the manuscript, with notes and corrections. “What about these?”