'New’ Dumas novel appears 135 years after death

Alexandre Dumas was such a prolific author that the appearance of a "new" novel 135 years after his death ought not to be a surprise.

The only question might be: what took the author of 200 books, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, so long?

The 1000-page tome, which has just been published in France, provides its own answer to the question of who killed Admiral Horatio Nelson, as its hero is the man who shot England's celebrated sailor.

The book has previously appeared only in newspaper instalments, but is now set to be turned into a movie.

Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, the story of an aristocrat torn between revulsion against the French Revolution and fascination with the Emperor Napoleon, was re-discovered by a Dumas scholar, Claude Schopp, 10 years ago.

In the scenes set at Trafalgar, the sea battle off Cadiz between the British, French and Spanish fleets 200 years ago, the central character is presented as the man who shot Nelson.

The British commander was killed by a musket shot from the rigging of a French ship-of-the-line.

Schopp discovered a reference to the forgotten novel - the last to be written by Dumas - in a letter.

He unearthed the original from the micro-filmed copies of the Moniteur Universel from 1869 in the French National Library.

The scholar revised the text and added two and a half chapters at the close.

Dumas would presumably not have objected to the additions. It is now widely accepted that most of his works were written, or re-written, by ghost-writers based on his original ideas.

In an introduction to the novel, Schopp says: "It should not be a surprise if scholars sometimes find something which they were not looking for. They often search for things and find nothing."

Schopp says that the novel fills a gap in the vast scheme laid out by Dumas to create fictional works telling the whole of French history, from the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century.

Like many other Dumas novels, the book appeared in short instalments of the newspaper in 1869, the year before his death. It remains a mystery why the novel was never published in book form and why it was overlooked by Dumas scholars for so long.

Other characters in the novel include the Emperor himself - presented enigmatically as part hero and part villain - and the Empress Josephine.

"It's like a testament. [Dumas] knew he was ill and that he was going to die. The text is beautiful because we can feel that he was struggling with the mass of historical material he was working with," Schopp said.

Negotiations are under way for the film rights to the book and for translations into English and a dozen other languages.

- INDEPENDENT