None of this really got him anywhere. He felt he was stumbling around in the dark, surrounded by countless false or useless clues. And yet there had to be a link somewhere. With his good hand he typed Dumas.nov:
Novels by Alexandre Dumas that appeared in installments: 1831: Historical scenes (Revue des Deux Mondes). 1834: Jacques I and Jacques II (Journal des Enfants). 1835: Elizabeth of Bavaria (Dumont). 1836: Murat (La Presse). 1837: Pascal Bruno (La Presse), Story of a Tenor (Gazette Musicale). 1838: Count Horatio (La Presse), Nero’s Night (La Presse), The Arms Hall (Dumont), Captain Paul (Le Siecle). 1839: Jacques Ortis (Dumont), The Life and Adventures of John Davys (Revue de Paris), Captain Panphile (Dumont). 1840: The Fencing Master (Revue de Paris). 1841: Le Chevalier d’Harmental (Le Siecle). 1843: Sylvandire (La Presse), The Wedding Dress (La Mode), Albine (Revue de Paris), Ascanio (Le Siecle), Fernande (Revue de Paris), Amaury (La Presse). 1844: The Three Musketeers (Le Siecle), Gabriel Lambert (La Chronique), The Regent’s Daughter (Le Commerce), The. Corsican Brothers (Democratie Pacifique), The Count of Monte Cristo (Journal des Debats), Countess Bertha (Hetzel), Story of a Nutcracker (Hetzel), Queen Margot (La Presse). 1845: Nanon (La Patrie), Twenty Years After (Le Siecle), Le Chevalier de la Maison Rouge (Democratie Pacifique)} The Lady ofMonsoreau (Le Constitutional), Madame de Conde (La Patrie). 1846: The Viscountess of Cambes (La Patrie), The Half-Brothers (Le Commerce), Joseph Balsam (La Presse), Pessac Abbey (La Patrie). 1847: The Forty-Five (Le Constitu-tionnel), Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (Le Siecle). 1848: The Queen’s Necklace (La Presse). 1849: The Weddings of Father Olifus (Le Constitutionnel). 1850: God’s Will (Evenement), The Black Tulip (Le Siecle), The Dove (Le Siecle), Angel Pitou (La Presse). 1851: Olympe de Cleves (Le Siecle). 1852: God and the Devil (Le Pays), The Comtesse de Charny (Cadot), Isaac La-quedem (Le Constitutionnel). 1853: The Shepherd of Ashbourn (Le Pays), Catherine Blum (Le Pays). 1854: The Life and Adventures of Catherine-Charlotte (Le Mousquetaire), The Brigand (Le Mousquetaire), The Mohicans of Paris (Le Mousquetaire), Captain Richard (Le Siecle), The Page of the Duke of Savoy (Le Constituionnel). 1856: The Companions of Jehu (Journal pour Tous). 1857: The Last Saxon King (Le Monte-Cristo), The Wolf Leader (Le Siecle), The Wild Duck Shooter (Cadot), Black (Le Constitutionnel). 1858: The She-Wolves of Machecoul (Journal Pour Tous), Memoirs of a Policeman (Le Siecle), The Palace of Ice (Le Monte- Cristo). 1859: The Frigate (Le Monte-Cristo), Ammalat-Beg (Moniteur Universel), Story of a Dungeon and a Little House (Revue Europeenne), A Love Story (Le Monte-Cristo). 1860: Memoirs of Horatio (Le Siecle), Father La Ruine (Le Siecle), The Marchioness of Escoman (Le Constitutionnel), The Doctor of Java (Le Siecle), Jane (Le Siecle). 1861: A Night in Florence (Levy-Hetzel). 1862: The Volunteer of 92 (Le Monte-Cristo). 1863: The Saint Felice (La Presse). 1864: The Two Dianas (Levy), Ivanhoe (Pub. du Siecle). 1865: Memoirs of a Favorite (Avenir National), The Count of Moret (Les Nouvelles). 1866: A Case of Conscience (Le Soleil), Parisians and Provincials (La Presse), The Count of Mazarra (Le Mousquetaire). 1867: The Whites and the Blues (Le Mousquetaire), The Prussian Terror (La Situation). 1869: Hector de Sainte-Hermine (Moniteur Universel), The Mysterious Physician (Le Siecle), The Marquis’s Daughter (Le Siecle).
He smiled, wondering how much the late Enrique Taillefer would have paid to obtain all those titles. His glasses were misted, so he took them off and carefully cleaned the lenses. The lines on the computer were now blurred, as were other strange images he couldn’t identify. With his glasses back on, the words on the screen became sharp again, but the images were still floating around, indistinct, in his mind, and without a key to give them any meaning. And yet Corso felt he was on the right path. The screen began to flicker again:
Baudry, editor of Le Siecle. Publishes The Three Musketeers between the 14th of March and the llth of July 1844.
He took a look at the other files. According to his information, Dumas had had fifty-two collaborators at different periods of his literary life. Relations with a large number of them had ended stormily. But Corso was only interested in one of the names:
Maquet, Auguste-Jules. 1813-1886. Collaborated with Alexandre Dumas on several plays and 19 novels, including the most famous ones (The Count of Monte Cristo, Le Chevalier de la Maison Rouge, The Black Tulip, The Queen’s Necklace) and, in particular, the cycle of The Musketeers. His collaboration with Dumas made him famous and wealthy. While Dumas died penniless, Maquet died a rich man at his castle in Saint-Mesme. None of his own works written without Dumas survives.
He looked at his biographical notes. There were some paragraphs taken from Dumas’s Memoirs:
We were the inventors, Hugo, Balzac, Soulie, De Mussel, and myself, of popular literature. We managed, for better or worse, to make a reputation for ourselves with that kind of writing, even though it was popular....
My imagination, confronted with reality, resembles a man who, visiting the ruins of an old building, must walk over the rubble, follow the passageways, bend down to go through doorways, so as to reconstruct an approximate picture of the original building when it was full of life, when joy jilled it with laughter and song, or when it echoed with sobs of sorrow.
Exasperated, Corso looked away from the screen. He was losing the feeling, it was disappearing into the corners of his memory before he could identify it. He stood up and paced the dark room. Then he angled his lamp at a pile of books on the floor, against the wall. He picked up two thick volumes: a modern edition of the Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas pere. He went back to his desk and began to leaf through them until three photographs caught his eye. In one of them, his African blood clearly visible in his curly hair and mulatto looks, Dumas sat smiling at Isabelle Constant, who, Corso gathered from the caption, was fifteen when she became the novelist’s mistress. The second photograph showed an older Dumas, posing with his daughter Marie. Here, at the height of his fame, the father of the adventure serial sat, good-natured and placid, before the photographer. The third photograph, Corso decided, was definitely the most amusing and significant. Dumas aged sixty-five, gray-haired but still tall and strong, his frock coat open to reveal a contented paunch, was embracing Adah Menken, one of his last mistresses. According to the text, “after the seances and sessions of black magic of which she was such a devotee, she liked to be photographed, scantily clad, with the great men in her life.” In the photograph, La Menken’s legs, arms, and neck were all bare, which was scandalous for the time. The young woman, paying more attention to the camera than to the object of her embrace, was leaning her head on the old man’s powerful right shoulder. As for him, his face showed the signs of a long life of dissipation, pleasure, and parties. His smile, between the bloated cheeks of a bon viveur, was satisfied, ironic. His expression for the photographer was teasing, crafty, seeking complicity. The fat old man with the shameless, passionate young girl who showed him off like a rare trophy: he, whose characters arid stories had made so many women dream. It was as if old Dumas was asking for understanding, having given in to the girl’s capricious wish to be photographed.
After all, she was young and pretty, her skin soft and her mouth passionate, this girl that life had kept for him on the last lap of his journey, only three years before his death. The old devil.
Dumas was embracing Adah Menken, one of his last mistresses.
Corso shut the book and yawned. His watch, an old chronometer that he often forgot to wind up, had stopped at a quarter past midnight. He went and opened the window and breathed in the cold night air. The street was still deserted.
It was all very strange, he thought as he went back to his desk and turned off the computer. His eyes came to rest on the folder with the manuscript. He opened it mechanically and took another look at the fifteen pages covered with two different types of handwriting, eleven of the pages blue, four of them white. Apres de nouvelles presque desesperees du roi... Upon almost desperate news from the king... In the pile of
