The Club Dumas

I raised my hand in defense of Domas’s respect for the facts.

“Don’t be fooled. Charles de Batz, or d’Artagnan, went on fighting to the end of his life. He served under Turenne in Flanders, and in 1657 was appointed lieutenant in the gray musketeers, which was equivalent to commander. Ten years later he became a captain in the musketeers and fought in Flanders, a post equivalent to cavalry general.”

Corso was squinting behind his glasses.

“Excuse me.” He leaned across the table toward me, pencil in hand. He’d been writing down a name or date. “In what year did this happen?”

“His promotion to general? 1667. Why did that draw your attention?”

He showed his incisors as he bit his lower lip. But only for an instant. “No reason.” As he spoke, his face regained its im­passivity. “That same year a certain person was burned at the stake in Rome. A strange coincidence....” Now he was staring at me blankly. “Does the name Aristide Torchia mean anything to you?”

I tried to remember. I had no idea. “Not a thing,” I an­swered. “Does he have anything to do with Dumas?”

He hesitated. “No,” he said at last, although he didn’t seem very convinced. “I don’t think so. But please go on. You were talking about the real d’Artagnan in Flanders.”

“He died at Maastricht, as I’ve said, at the head of his men. A heroic death. The English and the French were besieg­ing the town. They needed to cross a dangerous pass, and d’Artagnan offered to go first put of courtesy to his allies. A musket bullet tore through his jugular.”

“He never got to be marshal, then.”

“No. Alexandre Dumas deserves sole credit for giving the fictional d’Artagnan what a miserly Louis XIV refused his flesh-and-blood predecessor.... There are a couple of interesting books on the subject. You can take down the titles if you want. One is by Charles Samaran, D’Artagnan, capitaine des mousquetaires du roi, histoire veridique d’un heros de roman, published in 1912. The other one is Le vrai d’Artagnan, written by the Duke of Montesquieu-Fezensac, a direct descendant of the real d’Artagnan. Published in 1963, I think.”

None of this information was obviously related to the Dumas manuscript, but Corso noted it down as if his life depended on it. Occasionally he looked up from his notepad and glanced at me inquisitively through his crooked glasses. Or he put his head to one side as if he were no longer listening, absorbed in his own thoughts. At that time, I knew all the facts about “The Anjou Wine,” even certain keys to the mystery of which Corso was unaware. But I had no idea of the complex implications that The Nine Doors would have for this story. Despite his logical turn of mind, Corso was already beginning to glimpse sinister links between the facts at his disposal and—how shall I put it—the literary source of those facts. This may all appear rather confused, but we must remember that this was how it seemed to Corso at the time. And although I am narrating the story after the resolution of its momentous events, the very nature of the loop—think of Escher’s paintings, or the work of that old trickster, Bach—forces us to return continually to the beginning and limit ourselves to the narrow confines of Corso’s knowledge. The rule is to know and keep silent. Even if there is foul play, without the rule there is no game.

“OK,” said Corso once he’d written down the recommended titles. “That’s the first d’Artagnan, the real one. And Dumas’s fictional character is the third one. I’m assuming the connection between them is the book by Gatien de Courtilz you showed me the other day, the Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan.”

“Correct. We can call him the missing link, the least famous of the three. A Gascon who is an intermediary, a literary char­acter and a real person in one. The very same that Dumas used to create his character... The writer Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras was a contemporary of d’Artagnan. He recognized the novelistic potential of the character and set to work. A century and a half later, Dumas found out about the book during a trip to Marseilles. His landlord had a brother who ran the municipal library. Apparently the brother showed Dumas the book, edited in Cologne in 1700. Dumas saw that he could make use of the story and asked to borrow the book. He never re­turned it.”

“What do we know about this predecessor of Dumas’s, Gatien de Courtilz?”

“Quite a lot. Partly because he had a sizable police file. He was born in 1644 or 1647 and was a musketeer, a bugler in the Royal-Etranger, which was a type of foreign legion of the time, and captain of the cavalry regiment of Beaupre-Choiseul. At the end of the war against Holland, in which d’Artagnan was killed, Courtilz remained in Holland and traded his sword for a pen. He wrote biographies, historical monographs, more or less apocryphal memoirs, shocking tales of gossip and intrigue at the French court. This got him into trouble. The Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan was astonishingly successful: five editions in ten years. But the book displeased Louis XIV. He disliked the irreverent tone used to recount certain details regarding the royal family and its entourage. As a result Courtilz was arrested on his return to France and held in the Bastille at His Majesty’s pleasure until shortly before his death.”

The actor made the most of my pause to slip in, quite ir­relevantly, a quotation from “The Sun Has Set in Flanders” by Marquina. “Our captain” he recited, “gravely wounded, led us, sparing no effort though in his jinal agony. Sirs, what a captain he was indeed that day....” Or something like that. It was a shameless attempt to shine in front of the journalist, whose thigh he now held with a proprietary air. The others, in par­ticular the novelist who wrote under the pseudonym of Emilia Forster, were looking at him with either envy or barely con­cealed resentment.

After a polite silence, Corso decided to hand control of the situation back to me.

“How much does Dumas’s d’Artagnan owe to Courtilz?” he asked.

“A great deal. Although in Twenty Years After and in Bragelonne he used other sources, the basic story of The Three Musketeers is to be found in Courtilz. Dumas applied his genius to it and gave it breadth, but it contained a rough outline of all the elements of the story: d’Artagnan’s father granting his blessing, the letter to Treville, the challenge to the musketeers, who incidentally were brothers in the first draft. Milady also appears. And the two d’Artagnans were like two peas in a pod. Courtilz’s character was slightly more cynical, more miserly, and less trustworthy. But they’re the same.”

Corso leaned forward slightly. “Earlier you said that Rochefort stands for the evil plot surrounding d’Artagnan and his friends. But Rochefort is just a henchman.”

“Indeed. In the pay of His Eminence Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu...”

“The evil one,” said Corso.

“The spirit of evil,” commented the actor, determined to butt in.

Impressed by our foray into the subject of serials that afternoon, the students were taking notes or listening open-mouthed. The girl with the green eyes, however, remained impassive, slightly apart, as if she had only dropped in by chance.

“For Dumas,” I went on, “at least in the first part of The Musketeers cycle, Richelieu provided the character essential to all romantic adventure and mystery stories: the powerful enemy lurking in the shadows, the embodiment of evil. For the history of France, Richelieu was a great man. But in The Musketeers he is rehabilitated only twenty years later. Shrewd Dumas fitted in with reality without diminishing the novel’s interest. He’d found another villain: Mazarin. This correction, even as voiced by d’Artagnan and his companions when they praise the nobility of their former enemy, is morally questionable. For

Dumas it was a convenient act of contrition. Nevertheless in the first volume of the cycle, whether plotting Buckingham’s murder, Anne of Austria’s downfall, or giving carte blanche to the sinister Milady, Cardinal Richelieu is the embodiment of the perfect villain. His Eminence is to d’Artagnan what Prince Gonzaga is to Lagardere, or Professor Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes. A mysterious, demonic presence.”

Corso seemed about to interrupt me, which I thought odd. I was getting to know him and typically he wouldn’t interrupt until the other person had delivered all his information, until every last detail had been squeezed out.

“You’ve used the word demonic twice,” he said, looking over his notes. “And both times referring to Richelieu. Was the car­dinal a devotee of the occult?”

His words had a strange effect. The young girl turned to look curiously at Corso. He was looking at me, and I was watch­ing the girl. He awaited my answer, unaware of this strange triangle.

“Richelieu was keenly interested in many things,” I ex­plained. “In addition to turning France into a great