The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [3]
Dumas once told Napoleon III that he had written 1200 volumes. His complete works as published by Michel Lévy (1860-1884) number 277 volumes. For one gazette alone in a single year Dumas produced 100,000 lines at Fcs.1.50 per line, earning roughly $30,000 in the process. Newspapers fought over him; he kept them supplied with serial copy and enriched them. One of his least-known works brought one periodical 5,000 new subscriptions in less than a month.
Is it a wonder, then, that editors would buy his manuscripts sight unseen? . . . that he had many collaborators and twelve paid secretaries? . . . that a stylist like Théophile Gautier was dismissed as a great writer whose writings were not worth ten new subscriptions? . . . that Balzac, wildly jealous of Dumas, could not penetrate into editorial offices where Dumas enjoyed the right of entry on his own terms?
But beyond the commercial consideration, there is a wonder, and it is a very understandable one. According to academic canons, Dumas wrote like a driveler. But he loved writing, he loved his characters, he put his own exuberant nature into their delineation and he presented so agreeable a product that while the millions rushed to buy it, Guizot, the statesman, read it avidly; Mérimée found it superior to Scott; Thackeray and R. L. Stevenson sang its praises, and Michelet called its author “not a man . . . no, an element . . . something like an inextinguishable volcano or a great American river . . . one of the forces of Nature. . . .”
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Had Dumas written for money alone, his works would belong merely to the annals of finance. He wrote for pleasure as well, his own pleasure chiefly. That is why he brought pleasure to others and why we read him today.
Talleyrand once said that the man who had not known France before 1789 had not experienced the real joy of living; by the same token, the child to whom Dumas is not read aloud before he, learning to read, does so for himself, has missed a very great deal. He has not known what excitement it is suddenly to discover the fascination of history nor has he felt the imaginative joys of identifying himself, according to his own personality, with one or the other of the immortal people who throng the pages of The Three Musketeers.
But there are compensations; even an adult can thrill to Dumas as historian, as animator and as narrator.
Historically, Dumas is no stickler for accuracy. “What is the use of raping History if you do not produce a child?” he once said. All his raping proved fruitful but pre-eminently in the case of a volume called The Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan by Courtilz de Sandras, published in Cologne in 1701 and itself a literary imposture.
Virtually all the characters—Tréville, the Musketeers, Monsieur de Vardes, Milady and her maid, the Cardinalist Guards and the rest—figure in Sandras. But it was from another book of this author’s that Dumas plucked the incident of the woman with the branded shoulder, and while Madame Bonacieux, in Dumas, is not the most credible character, she is infinitely above the slut in the original. Almost all the incidents in Dumas stem from Sandras, even such minor ones as concern the quarrel at Meung, Porthos and his baldric, the duel with Monsieur de Vardes.
But Dumas dramatized everything (especially Milady) and he humanized the entire work so that what is in the original a mere picaresque chronicle emerges as a document not devoid of idealism and cheer. Where originally many of the characters were merely vain or merely venturesome or merely ambitious or merely immoral, Dumas has given us four main heroes who, for all their weaknesses, remain admirable. In his gallery there are many minor characters worthy of respect.