KEY POINTS:
Touted by the publisher as "the lost masterpiece", this valedictory work by the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo is not quite that. It was never lost, though it has been overlooked since its serial publication in 1869; it is hardly a masterpiece and it reads as if Dumas - a one-man factory who sometimes dictated rather than bothering to pick up the pen, and employed ghostwriters to supplement his efforts - improvised it as he went along.
When it breaks off after 750 pages, the hero is recapitulating the plot so far, as if reminding himself and his disoriented creator who he is. The Last Cavalier was meant to conclude a historical epic that sequentially bridged the centuries, starting with the feudal seigneury in Queen Margot, proceeding through the absolutism of Louis XIV in the Musketeers, at last reaching modernity and its rancorous, outcast individualism in Monte Cristo.
The hero Hector, identified by the title as the last of the swashbucklers, fills in the decades after the French Revolution. When his multiple careers as soldier, lover, pirate and pianist are over, the age of romance officially ends. However the true protagonist of The Last Cavalier is Napoleon Bonaparte or, rather, the opposed figures who are called, in the titles given to the novel's two parts, "Napoleon" and "Bonaparte": first the Corsican upstart, then the self-crowned emperor.
Dumas, as Tolstoy said, was a "novelising historian" rather than a historical novelist. He knew that fiction flourished in the margins of history, which is confined to obtuse and incorrigible facts; the novel specialises in the scrutiny of private lives, not public affairs. The Last Cavalier therefore approaches Napoleon obliquely and begins with a marital tiff about Josephine's bill for clothes; she wears two hats each day and never repeats them. The Last Cavalier roams through space and time with an impunity Napoleon never enjoyed.
Hector wanders off to India, where he dives into the ocean to scythe open a shark's belly, fights tigers, shoots down vampire bats and rescues two elephants being strangled by a python; the only purpose being to colonise an imaginative terrain that was beyond even Napoleon's grasp.
Hector is the last of the cavaliers because his swaggering victories, likened both to the muscular labours of Hercules and to the crusading of knights in chivalric romance, are a fictional illusion, mocked by a world that consists of atoms randomly colliding; he cannot even be sure it was a bullet from his gun that felled Nelson.
In an interval of metaphysical reverie, Hector abandons the notion of a personal God who keeps an eye on every individual. He decides instead to imagine God as "the creator of all those worlds and universes spinning in space by the thousands". The image recalls a scene in which Hector, like God juggling planets, tosses cannonballs from hand to hand, but it also prods us to remember who created Hector.
Napoleon is merely a would-be god. The novel's true divinity, its chaotically prolific or even profligate God, is Dumas himself.
The Last Cavalier
By Alexandre Dumas (Harper Perennial $26.99)
