The Club Dumas

scribed him, in the supposed Memoirs of the real d’Artagnan, a man with the name of Rosnas. But the Rochefort with the scar didn’t exist in real life. Dumas took the character from another book, the Memoires de MLCDR (Monsieur le comte de Rochefort), possibly apocryphal and also attributed to Courtilz. Some say that that book could refer to Henri Louis d’Aloigny, Marquis de Rochefort, born around 1625, but that’s stretching things.”

I looked out at the lights of the evening traffic in the ave­nues beyond the window of the cafe where I meet with my literary friends. A few of them were sitting with us around a table covered with newspapers, cups, and smoking ashtrays— two writers, a painter down on his luck, a woman journalist on the rise, a stage actor, and four or five students, the kind who sit in a corner and don’t open their mouths, watching you as if you were God. Corso sat among them, still in his coat. He leaned against the window, drank gin, and occasionally took notes.

“To be sure,” I added, “the reader who goes through the sixty-seven chapters of The Three Musketeers waiting for the duel between Rochefort and d’Artagnan is in for a disappoint­ment. Dumas settles the matter in three lines, and is rather underhand about it. Because when we next meet Rochefort in Twenty Years After, he and d’Artagnan have fought three times, and Rochefort bears as many scars as a result. Nevertheless no hatred remains between them. Instead they have the twisted respect for each other that is possible only between two old enemies. Once again fate has decreed that they fight on different sides, but now they are friendly, complicit, two gentlemen who have known each other for twenty years.... Rochefort falls out of favor with Mazarin, breaks out of the Bastille, and helps the Duke of Beaufort escape. He conspires in the Fronde re­bellion and dies in the arms of d’Artagnan, who has stabbed him with his sword, failing to recognize him in all the confu­sion. ‘You were my fate,’ Rochefort more or less says to the Gascon. ‘I recovered from three of your sword wounds, but I will not recover from the fourth.’ And he dies. ‘I have just killed an old friend,’ d’Artagnan later tells Porthos. This is the only epitaph Richelieu’s former agent is given.”

My words provoked a lively discussion with several factions. The actor hadn’t taken his eyes off the woman journalist all afternoon. He was an old heartthrob who’d played Monte Cristo in a television series. Encouraged by the painter and the two writers, he launched into a brilliant account of his recollections of the characters. In this way we moved from Dumas to Zevaco and Paul Feval, and ended by once again confirming Sabatini’s indisputable influence on Salgari. I seem to recall that some­body timidly mentioned Jules Verne but was shouted down by all present. Verne’s cold, soulless heroes had no place in a dis­cussion of passionate tales of cloak and dagger.

As for the journalist, one of those fashionable young ladies with a column in a leading Sunday newspaper, her literary memory began with Milan Kundera. So she remained in a state of cautious expectation, agreeing with relief whenever a title, anecdote, or character (the Black Swan, Yanez, Nevers’s sword wound) stirred some memory of a film glimpsed on TV. Mean­while, Corso, with a hunter’s calm patience, looked steadily at me over his glass of gin, waiting for a chance to return the conversation to the original subject. And he succeeded, making the most of an awkward silence that fell when the journalist said that, anyway, she found these adventure stories rather lightweight, I mean kind of superficial, don’t you think?

Corso chewed the end of his pencil:

“And  how  do  you  see  Rochefort’s  role  in  history,  Mr. Balkan?” he asked.

They all looked at me, in particular the students, two of them girls. I don’t know why, but in certain circles I’m consid­ered a high priest of letters and every time I open my mouth, people expect to hear pearls of wisdom. A review of mine, in the appropriate literary magazine, can make or break a writer who’s starting out. Absurd, certainly, but that’s life. Think of the last Nobel prizewinner, the author of /, Onan and In Search of Myself and the ultrasuccessful Oui, C’est MoL It was I who made him a household name fifteen years ago, with a page and a half in Le Monde on April Fools’ Day. I’ll never forgive myself, but that’s how things work.

“At first, Rochefort is the enemy,” I said. “He symbolizes the hidden forces, darkness.... He is the agent of the satanic conspiracy surrounding d’Artagnan and his friends, of the cardinal’s plot growing in the shadows, threatening their lives....”

I saw one of the students smile, but I couldn’t tell if her absorbed, slightly mocking expression was a result of my com­ments or of private thoughts that had nothing to do with the discussion. I was surprised because, as I’ve said, students tend to listen to me with the awe of an editor of the Osservatore Romano getting the exclusive rights to one of the Pope’s en­cyclicals. So it made me look at her with interest. Although she’d already caught my eye at the beginning, when she joined us, because of her unsettling green eyes. She was wearing a blue duffel coat and carried a pile of books under her arm. Her chestnut hair was cut short, like a boy’s. Now she sat at a slight distance, not quite part of the group. There are always a few young people at our table, literature students that I invite for a coffee. But this girl had never attended before. It was im­possible to forget her eyes. In contrast to her tanned face, their color was so light, it was almost transparent. A slender, supple girl, one could tell she spent a lot of time outdoors. Under her jeans her long legs were no doubt also tanned. And I noticed another thing about her: she wore no rings, no watch, no ear­rings. Her ears weren’t pierced.

“Rochefort is also the man glimpsed, never caught,” I went on. “A mysterious mask with a scar. He stands for paradox and d’Artagnan’s powerlessness. D’Artagnan is always in pursuit but never quite catches up with him. He tries to kill him but only manages to do so by mistake twenty years later. By then Rochefort is not an adversary but a friend.”

“Your d’Artagnan’s a bit jinxed,” said one of my circle, the older of the two writers. He’d sold only five hundred copies of his last novel, but he earned a fortune writing mysteries under the perverse pseudonym of Emilia Forster. I looked at him gratefully, pleased by his opportune remark.

“Absolutely. The love of his life gets poisoned. Despite all his exploits and services to the crown of France, he spends twenty years as an obscure lieutenant in the musketeers. And in the last lines of The Vicomte de Bragelonne, when he is finally awarded the marshal’s staff, which has taken him four voluro.es and four hundred and twenty-five chapters to achieve, he is killed by a Dutch bullet.”

“Like the real d’Artagnan,” said the actor, who had managed to place his hand on the fashionable woman columnist’s thigh.

I took a sip of coffee before nodding. Corso was staring at me intently.

“There are three d’Artagnans,” I explained. “Of the first, Charles de Batz Castlemore, we know that he died on the twenty-third of June 1673, from a shot in the throat during the siege of Maastricht, as reported in the Gazette de France at the time. Half his men fell with him. Apart from this post­humous detail, in life he was only slightly more fortunate than his fictional namesake.”

“Was he a Gascon too?”

“Yes,   from   Lupiac.   The   village   still   exists,   and   he   is commemorated by a stone plaque there: ‘D’Artagnan, whose real name was Charles de Batz, was born here around 1615. He died in the siege of Maastricht in 1675.’ “

“It doesn’t quite fit historically,” said Corso, looking at his notes. “According to Dumas, d’Artagnan was eighteen at the start of the novel, around 1625. At that time the real d’Artagnan would have been only ten years old.” He smiled like a clever, skeptical little rabbit. “Too young to handle a sword.”

I agreed. “Yes. Dumas altered things so d’Artagnan could take part in the adventure of the diamond tags under Richelieu and Louis XIII. Charles de Batz must have arrived in Paris very young: he was listed among the guards of Monsieur Des Essarts’s company in documents on the siege of Arras in 1640, and two years later in the Roussillon campaign. But he never served as a musketeer under Richelieu, because he joined the elite regiment only after Louis XIII’s death. His real protector was Cardinal Jules Mazarin. There is indeed a gap of ten or fifteen years between the two d’Artagnans. But following the success of The Three Musketeers, Dumas extended the action to cover almost forty years of France’s history. In later volumes he adjusted his story to coincide better with real events.”

“Which events have been verified? I mean, historical events in which the real d’Artagnan was involved?”

“Quite a few. His name appears in Mazarin’s letters and in the correspondence of the Ministry of War. Like the fictional hero, he was the cardinal’s agent during the Fronde rebellion, with important responsibilities at the court of Louis XIV. He was even entrusted with the delicate matter of detaining and escorting the finance minister Fouquet. All these events were confirmed in the letters of Madame de Sevigne. He could even have met the painter Velazquez on the Isle of Pheasants when he accompanied Louis XIV on the king’s journey to meet his bride-to-be, Maria Theresa of Austria....”

“He was quite a man of the court then. Very different from Dumas’s swashbuckling d’Artagnan.”