The Club Dumas

We had stopped in front of the closed door to the reception room. Through it the muffled sound of music and voices could be heard. I put the candelabrum down on a console table while Corso watched me, again suspicious. He was probably wonder­ing what new trick was hidden there. He didn’t understand, I realized, that we really had reached the solution to the mystery.

“Please allow me to introduce you,” I said, opening the door, “to the members of the Club Dumas.”

almost everyone was there. Through the French windows opening onto the castle terrace, late arrivals entered a room full of people, cigarette smoke, and the murmur of con­versation above a background of gentle music. On the central table covered with a white linen cloth, there was a cold buffet: bottles of Anjou wine, sausages and hams from Amiens, oysters from La Rochelle, boxes of Montecristo cigars. Groups of guests, about fifty men and women, were drinking and conversing in several languages. Among them were well-known faces from the press, cinema, and television. I saw Corso touch his glasses.

“Surprised?” I asked, looking to see his reaction.

He nodded, disconcerted, surly. Several guests came to greet me, so I shook hands, exchanged amenities and jokes. The at­mosphere was cordial. Corso looked like someone who had fallen out of bed and woken up. Highly amused, I introduced him to some of the guests and watched with perverse satisfac­tion as he greeted them, confused and unsure of the terrain he was crossing. His customary composure was in shreds, and this was my small revenge. After all, it was he who first came to me with “The Anjou Wine” under his arm, determined to com­plicate things.

“Allow me to introduce Mr. Corso.... Bruno Lostia, an an­tique dealer from Milan. Permit me. This is Thomas Harvey, of Harvey’s Jewelers: New York, London; Paris, Rome. And Count von Schlossberg, owner of the most famous collection of paintings in Europe. As you can see, we have a little of every­thing here: a Venezuelan Nobel laureate, an Argentine ex-president, the crown prince of Morocco ... Did you know that his father is an avid reader of Alexandre Dumas? Look who’s arrived. You know him, don’t you? Professor of semiotics in Bologna... The blond lady talking to him is Petra Neustadt, the most influential literary critic in Central Europe. In the group next to the duchess of Alba there’s the financier Rudolf Villefoz and the English writer Harold Burgess. Amaya Euskal, of the Alpha Press group, with the most powerful publisher in the USA, Johan Cross, of O&O Papers, New York. And I assume you remember Achille Replinger, the book dealer from Paris.”

This was the last straw. I savored Corso’s shaken expression, almost pitying him. Replinger was holding an empty glass and smiling pleasantly beneath his musketeer’s mustache, just as he had smiled when he identified the Dumas manuscript at his shop on the Rue Bonaparte. He greeted me with a huge bear hug and then warmly patted Corso on the back before going off in search of another drink, puffing away like a jovial, rosy-cheeked Porthos.

“Damn this,” muttered Corso, drawing me aside. “What’s going on here?”

“I told you it’s a long story.”

“Well, finish telling it, will you?”

We had moved close to the table. I poured us a couple of glasses of wine, but he shook his head. “Gin,” he muttered. “Don’t you have any gin?”

I indicated the liquor cabinet at the other end of the room. We walked over to it, stopping three or four times on the way to exchange more greetings: a well-known film director, a Leb­anese millionaire, a Spanish minister of the interior... Corso grabbed a bottle of Beefeater and filled a glass to the brim, swallowing half of it in one gulp. He shuddered, and his eyes shone behind his glasses (one lens broken, the other intact). He held the bottle to his chest, as if afraid to lose it.

“You were going to tell me,” he said.

I suggested we go out on the terrace beyond the French windows, where we could talk without interruption. Corso filled his glass again before following me. The storm had died down. Stars shone above us.

“I’m all ears,” he announced after another large gulp.

I leaned on the balustrade still damp from the rain and took a sip from my glass of Anjou wine.

“Owning the manuscript of The Three Musketeers gave me the idea,” I said. “Why not form a literary society, a sort of club for devoted admirers of the novels of Alexandre Dumas and the classic adventure serial? Through my work I already had contact with several ideal candidates for membership....” I gestured toward the brightly lit salon. In the tall French win­dows the guests could be seen coming and going, chatting an­imatedly. It was proof of my success, and I didn’t conceal my authorial pride. “A society dedicated to studying novels of that kind, rediscovering writers and forgotten works, promoting their republication and sale under an imprint with which you may be familiar: Dumas & Co.”

“I know it,” said Corso. “They’re based in Paris and have just published the entire works of Ponson du Terrail. Last year it was Fantomas. I didn’t know you had a part in it.”

I smiled. “That’s the rule: no names, no starring roles... As you can see, the matter is scholarly and slightly childish at the same time. A nostalgic literary game that rediscovers long-lost novels and returns us to our innocence, to how we used to be. As we mature, we admire Flaubert or prefer Stendhal, or Faulkner, Lampedusa, Garcia Marquez, Durrell, Kafka. We be­come different from each other, opponents even. But we all share a conspiratorial wink when we talk about certain magical authors and books. Those that made us discover literature with­out weighing us down with dogma or teaching us rules. This is our true common heritage: stories faithful not to what people see but to what people dream.”

I let the words hang and paused, awaiting their effect. But Corso just raised his glass to look at it against the light. His homeland was in there.

“That was before,” he answered. “Now neither children nor young people nor anyone has a spiritual heritage. They all watch TV.”

I shook my head. I had written something on this very subject for the literary supplement of the ABC newspaper a couple of weeks before. “I don’t agree. Even then they’re tread­ing, unknowingly, in old footsteps. Films on television, for in­stance, maintain the link. Those old movies. Even Indiana Jones is the direct descendant of all that.”

Corso grimaced in the direction of the French windows. “It’s possible. But you were telling me about these people. I’d like to know how you ... recruited them.”

“It’s no secret,” I answered. “I’ve been running this select society, the Club Dumas, for ten years now. It holds its annual meeting here in Meung. As you can see, the members arrive punctually from all corners of the globe. Every last one of them is a reader—”

“Of serials? Don’t make me laugh.”

“I don’t have the slightest intention of making you laugh, Corso. Why are you looking at me like that? You know yourself that a novel, or a film made for pure consumption, can turn into an exquisite work, from The Pickwick Papers to Casablanca and Goldfinger. Audiences turn to these archetype-packed sto­ries to enjoy, whether consciously or unconsciously, the device of repeated plots with small variations. Dispositio rather than elocutio... That’s why the serial, even the most trite television serial, can become a cult both for a naive audience and for a more sophisticated one. There are people who find excitement in Sherlock Holmes’s risking his life, while others go for the pipe, the magnifying glass, and the ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ which, by the way, Conan Doyle never actually wrote. The plot devices, the variations and repetition, are so ancient that they’re mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics. And what is a television serial if not an updated version of a classic tragedy, a great romantic drama, or a Dumas novel? That’s why an intelligent reader can obtain great enjoyment from all this, an exception to the rule. For exceptions to the rule are based on rules.”

I thought Corso would be interested in what I was saying, but he shook his head, a gladiator refusing to accept the chal­lenge offered by his opponent.

“Cut the literature lecture and get back to your Club Dumas, will you?” he said impatiently. “To that loose chapter that’s been floating around ... Where’s the rest?”

“In there,” I answered, looking at the salon. “I based the organization of the society on the sixty-seven chapters of the manuscript—a maximum of sixty-seven members, each having a chapter as a registered share. Allocation is strictly based on a list of applicants, and changes in membership require the approval of the executive board, which I chair. Each applicant is discussed in depth before his admission is approved.”

“How are shares transferred?”

“On no account are the shares transferred. If a member dies or wishes to leave the society, his chapter must