The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [4]
Dumas’s novel Le Capitaine Paul, serialized in Le Siècle in 1838, brought the paper five thousand new subscribers in three weeks. In 1843, his reworking of Auguste Maquet’s Le Bonhomme Buvat, which became Le Chevalier d’Harmental, did even more for La Presse. Dumas had wanted Maquet to be named as coauthor, but the editor-in-chief refused because he was unknown. Maquet was well paid, however, and was also evidently well pleased. A year later, he brought Dumas a project for another collaboration: the plan of a novel involving Richelieu, Louis XIII, Anne d’Autriche, and the Duke of Buckingham, which eventually became The Three Musketeers.
Behind the novel, as Dumas tells us in his preface, there was an earlier book, the apocryphal Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan, actually written by a certain Gatien de Courtilz, or Gatien Courtilz de Sandras, first published in 1700. And behind Courtilz’s “memoirs” there was a historical personage: Charles de Batz-Castlemore, seigneur d’Artagnan, who served in the king’s musketeers under Louis XIII and Louis XIV and died at the battle of Maastricht in 1673. He has virtually nothing but the name in common with Dumas’s hero, and only slightly more with Courtilz’s pseudomemoirist. There is some uncertainty about whether Dumas or Maquet was the first to come across Courtilz’s book. Some have claimed it was Maquet. But an interesting fact that turned up in the records of the municipal library of Marseilles in 1875 seems to suggest otherwise. Once, while passing through Marseilles, where his friend Louis Méry was the librarian, Dumas borrowed the four volumes of the Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan from the library, and, despite repeated complaints from Méry, apparently never returned them. André Maurois dates this “borrowing” to 1843; Charles Samaran, editor of the Classiques Garnier edition of the novel, to 1841, when Dumas stopped in Marseilles on his way to Italy.
Maquet collaborated with Dumas on the two sequels to The Three Musketeers—Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1850)—as well as on The Count of Monte Cristo, La Reine Margot, Joseph Balsamo, and six other novels, not to mention several plays. Their relations, and Dumas’s work with other collaborators, have given rise to accusations of exploitation and mercantilism on Dumas’s part. As early as 1845, he was attacked in a crude pamphlet entitled The Novel Factory: Alexandre Dumas and Co., by a disappointed young writer who called himself Eugène de Mirecourt (his real name was Jean-Baptiste Jacquot). Dumas took him to court and won. But more telling than the decision of the judges is the fact that Maquet himself never accused Dumas of any exploitation or unfairness (though he did lodge a complaint later about Dumas’s habit of spending his collaborator’s royalties along with his own). Maquet knew the crucial importance of Dumas’s contribution to their work and acknowledged it openly in a letter to him, declaring that he considered himself “very lucky and very honored to be the collaborator and friend of the most brilliant of French novelists.” That was in 1845, on the occasion of Mirecourt’s pamphlet. Later he wrote in another letter:
People wrongly attribute the execution of the Musketeers to me. I had proposed, in concert with Dumas, to draw an important work from the first volume of the Memoirs of d’Artagnan. I had even begun, with the ardor of youth, to