books on the floor he found a huge red tome, a facsimile edition— J. C. Lattes, 1988—containing the entire cycle of The Musketeers and Monte Cristo in the Le Vasseur edition with engravings, published shortly after Dumas’s death. He found the chapter “The Anjou Wine” on page 144 and started to read, comparing it with the original manuscript. Except for a small error here and there, the texts were identical. In the book, the chapter was illustrated with two drawings by Maurice Leloir, engraved by Huyot. King Louis XIII arriving at the siege of La Rochelle with ten thousand men, four horsemen at the head of his escort, holding their muskets, wearing the wide-brimmed hat and jacket of de Treville’s company. Three of them are without doubt Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. A moment later they will be meeting their friend d’Artagnan, still a simple cadet in Monsieur des Essarts’s company of guards. The Gascon still doesn’t know that the bottles of Anjou wine, a gift from his mortal enemy Milady, Richelieu’s agent, are poisoned. She wants to avenge the insult done to her by d’Artagnan. He has passed himself off as the Comte de Wardes, slipped into her bed, and enjoyed a night of love that should have been the count’s. To make matters worse, d’Artagnan has by chance discovered Milady’s terrible secret, the fleur-de-lis on her shoulder, the shameful mark branded on her by the executioner’s iron. With such preliminaries, and given Milady’s disposition, the contents of the second illustration are easy to guess: as d’Artagnan and his companions watch in astonishment, the manservant Fourreau expires in terrible agony after drinking the wine intended for his master. Sensitive to the magic of a text he hadn’t read in twenty years, Corso came to the passage where the musketeers and d’Artagnan are speaking about Milady:
‘Well,” said d’Artagnan to Atkos. “So you see, dear friend It is a fight to the death.”
Athos nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I know. But do you think it’s really her?”
“I am sure of it”
“Nevertheless, I confess I still have doubts.”
“And the fleur-de-lis on her shoulder?”
“She is an Englishwoman who must have committed some crime in France, and who has been marked for her crime.”
“Athos, that woman is your wife, I tell you,” repeated d’Artagnan. “Do you not recall that both marks are identical?”
“Nevertheless I would have sworn that the woman was dead, I hanged her very well”
This time it was d’Artagnan who shook his head.
‘Well? What are we to do?” said the young man.
‘We certainly can’t go on like this, with a sword hanging eternally over our heads,” said Athos. ‘We must find a way out of this situation.”
“But how?”
“Listen, try to have a meeting with her and explain everything. Tell her: ‘Peace or war! My word as a gentleman that I will never say or do anything against you For your part, give me your solemn word to do nothing against me. Otherwise I will go to the Chancellor, the King, the executioner, I will incite the Court against you, I will denounce you as a marked woman, I will have you put on trial, and should you be acquitted, then upon my word as a gentleman, I will kill you myself, in any corner, as I would a rabid dog.’“
“I am delighted with this plan,” said d’Artagnan.
Memories brought other memories in their wake. Corso tried to hold a fleeting, familiar image that had crossed his mind. He managed to capture it just before it faded, and once again it was the man in the black suit, the chauffeur of the Jaguar outside Liana Taillefer’s house, at the wheel of the Mercedes in Toledo.... The man with the scar. And it was Milady who had stirred that memory.
He thought it over, disconcerted. And suddenly the image became perfectly sharp. Milady, of course. Milady de Winter as d’Artagnan first sees her at the window of her carriage in the opening chapter of the novel, outside the inn at Meung. Milady in conversation with a stranger. Corso quickly turned the pages, searching for the passage. He found it easily:
A man of forty to forty-five years of age, with black, piercing eyes, a pale complexion, a strongly pronounced nose, and a perfectly trimmed, black mustache...
Rochefort. The Cardinal’s sinister agent and d’Artagnan’s enemy, who has him beaten in the first chapter, steals the letter of recommendation to Monsieur de Treville and is indirectly responsible for the Gascon’s almost fighting duels with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.... Following this somersault of his memory, Corso scratched his head, puzzled by the unusual association of ideas and characters. What link was there between Milady’s companion and the driver who tried to run him down in Toledo? Then there was the scar. The paragraph didn’t mention a scar, but he remembered clearly that Rochefort always had a mark on his face. He turned more pages until he found the confirmation of this in chapter 3, where d’Artagnan is recounting his adventure to Treville:
“Tell me,” he replied, “did this gentleman have a faint scar on his temple?”
“Yes, the sort of mark that might have been made by a bullet grazing it...”
A faint scar on his temple. There was his confirmation, but as Corso remembered it, Rochefort’s scar was bigger, and not on his temple but on his cheek, like that of the chauffeur dressed in black. Corso went over it all until at last he let out a laugh. The picture was now complete, and in full color: Lana Turner in The Three Musketeers, at her carriage window, beside a suitably sinister Rochefort, not pale as in Dumas’s novel, but dark, with a plumed hat and a long scar—it was definite this time—cutting his right cheek from top to bottom. He remembered it as a film, not a novel, and his exasperation at this both amused and irritated him. Goddamn Hollywood.
Film scenes aside, he had at last managed to find some order to all of this, a common, if secret, thread, a tune composed of disparate, mysterious notes. Through the vague uneasiness that Corso had experienced since his visit to Taillefer’s widow, he could now glimpse outlines, faces, an atmosphere and characters, halfway between reality and fiction, and all linked in strange, as yet unclear ways. Dumas and a seventeenth-century book. The devil and The Three Musketeers. Milady and the bonfires of the Inquisition ... Although it was all more absurd than definite, more like a novel than real life.
He turned out the light and went to bed. But it took him some time to fall asleep, because one image wouldn’t leave his mind. It floated in the darkness before his open eyes. A distant landscape, that of his reading as a boy, filled with shadows which reappeared now twenty years later, materialized as ghosts that were so close, he could almost feel them. The scar. Rochefort. The man from Meung. His Eminence’s mercenary.
V. REMEMBER
He was sitting just as he had left him, in front of the fireplace.
—A. Christie, THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD
This is the point at which I enter the stage for the second time. Corso came to me again, and he did so, I seem to remember, a few days before leaving for Portugal. As he told me later, by then he already suspected that the Dumas manuscript and Varo Borja’s Nine Doors were only the tip of the iceberg. To understand it all he first needed to locate the other stories, all knotted together like the tie Enrique Taillefer used to hang himself. It wouldn’t be easy, I told him, because in literature there are never any clear boundaries. Everything is dependent on everything else, and one thing is superimposed on top of another. It all ends up as a complicated intertextual game, like a hall of mirrors or those Russian dolls. Establishing a specific fact or the precise source involves risks that only some of my very stupid or very confident colleagues would dare take. It would be like saying that you can see the influence of Quo Vadis, but not Suetonius or Appollonius of Rhodes, on Robert Graves. As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. And when I want to know something, I look it up in books—their memory never fails.
“Count Rochefort is one of the most important secondary characters in The Three Musketeers” I explained to Corso when he came to see me. “He is the cardinal’s agent, a friend of Milady’s, and the first enemy that d’Artagnan makes. I can pinpoint the exact date: the first Monday of April 1625, in Meung-sur- Loire.... I refer to the fictional Rochefort of course, although a similar character did exist. Gatien de Courtilz de
