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So allow Dumas to do what he does best—turn us all once again into quiet children sitting in the warmth of small libraries, at empty tables, our heads buried in one of his books, our imaginations filled with the raging battles and the fierce loves of another century and another place. As we turn each page, we are once again free to turn his adventures into our very own.

It is the truest gift any novelist can hope to give.

And none has been more generous than Alexandre Dumas.

—

LORENZO CARCATERRA is the bestselling author of five books, A Safe Place, Sleepers, Apaches, Gangster, and Street Boys. He has also written scripts for movies and television. He lives in New York.

1

THE RECRUITS

It was the night of the tenth of March, 1793. The bell at Notre-Dame had just struck ten, and each stroke rang out clear and distinct, one after the other, before flying off into the ether like a night bird soaring from some bronze nest, sad, monotonous, and resonant.

Night had descended on Paris. But it was not the usual noisy, stormy Paris night, punctuated by lightning yet cold and misty. Paris itself was not the Paris we know today, dazzling by night with its thousands of lights reflected in its golden mire, the Paris of busy promeneurs, jubilant whisperings, and deliciously sleazy outskirts where fierce feuds and reckless crimes flourish, a wildly roaring furnace. It was a shabby little dive, tremulous, beetling, whose rarely seen inhabitants would run whenever they had to cross a street and scuttle away into their alleyways or under their porte-cochères, the way feral creatures pursued by hunters sink into their burrows.

It was, in a word, the Paris of the tenth of March, 1793, as I think I might have said. But first let me tell you a little bit about the extreme situation that made the capital so different from what it is today, and then we can start on the events that are the whole point of this story.

With the death of Louis XVI,1 France cut its ties2 with the rest of Europe. The three enemies it had already defeated3—Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,4 and Piedmont—were then joined by England, Holland, and Spain. Sweden and Denmark alone maintained their former neutrality, busy as they were watching Catherine II tear up Poland,5 as it happens.

The situation was alarming. Less looked down upon as a physical force, but also less esteemed as a moral one, since the September massacres6 and the execution of Louis XVI on the twenty-first of January, France was literally surrounded, like a mere town, by the whole of Europe.

England was at the coast, Spain along the Pyrenees, Piedmont and Austria across the Alps, Holland and Prussia to the north of the Netherlands, and at one single point, at Escaut, along the Upper Rhine, two hundred fifty thousand combatants marched against the Republic.

Our generals were thrust back at every turn. Maczinski had been forced to abandon Aix-la-Chapelle and to withdraw to Liège. Steingel and Neuilly were pushed back to the Limburg; Miranda, who had been laying siege to Maastricht, fell back on Tongres. Valence and Dampierre,7 reduced to beating a hasty retreat, had let part of their supplies be spirited away. More than ten thousand deserters had already fled the army and scattered throughout the interior. Finally, the Convention,8 putting all its hopes in Dumouriez9 alone, had fired off letter after letter to the general ordering him to quit the banks of the Biesboos, where he was preparing a landing in Holland, and to return and take command of the army of the Meuse.

Vulnerable at the heart like a living body, France felt in its very heart—for that is what Paris was—every one of the blows that invasion, revolt, or treason leveled against its extremities. Every victory brought a riot of joy, every defeat an uprising of terror. It is not hard to imagine the tumult that broke out with the news of the successive defeats France had just suffered.

On the ninth of March, the day before, the meeting of the National Convention had been among the stormiest ever