The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon
Alexandre Dumas
The story about the discovery of this novel is almost more interesting than the novel. It seems it has puzzled Dumas experts for years that with all the novels he wrote about French history he had left out a novel about one of the most exciting periods. It turned out he did not, but the novel, which appeared in installments in one of the journals of the day, was first never finished and second, lost in the journal's archives. Once rediscovered The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon
has been reassembled, all 110 plus chapters of it, and though pretty much nothing in the novel ever gets resolved , it was published in 2008. The copy I "read" was a download from the National Library Services for the Blind and was a cool 34 hours long.I won't even begin to pretend to review a novel this old by a novelist so enshrined in history. There's no point, really, but I will give you a sense of what you are in for if you pick it up and start to read it. To start with, you don't even meet the title character until well into the novel. The entire first section is all about Napoleon Bonaparte, his wife's debts, his enemies, his personality, his plans. When we finally meet Count Sainte-Hermine we find him falling in love and getting married.. almost. It seems he is the last of a line of royalists and I mean last... the rest were all at best exiled and at worst guillotined. Loyal to their memory, the young Count leaves his wedding and his bride in tears to go and rejoin the resistance. He is caught and imprisoned and then forgotten by the author for a while. To make a long, long, long story shorter, he has a friend in a high place, no not Napoleon, who gets him released and makes him choose either to be a common sailor or a common soldier. You soon learn he is anything but common as he faces dangers beyond imagining and reckoning in his Elerde-like desire to get himself killed. His elaborate suicide attempt takes him into the crew of a famous corsair, then to Burma to fight tigers, and after that to Trafalgar where he is the marksman who kills Nelson. Returning to Paris much lauded, he comes out as a royalist to Bonaparte himself and instead of reaping richly deserved rewards he gets sent down to help the Emperor's brother Joseph rid Italy of brigands as colorfully as possible. That's apparently when he died.. no not the Count, but the author.
One of the fascinating things about this novel is that it breaks every rule in the How To Write a novel Book. As I am tempted to believe all those hard and fast rules are largely some one's persnickety idea rather than actual I got a big kick out of this. "Show, Don't Tell"? Not only does the author tell you what is going on all the time, he doesn't even confine the telling to the story at hand. Dumas isn't shy about telling. Some of the most interesting chapters, and there are tons of them, have no direct bearing on the protagonist's story at all. There is one about what was doing on the Appian Way fifty years before the birth of Christ, another on a Breton island famous for its corsairs, several in a row about Chateaubriand travels in America. "Point of View"? Dumas doesn't hesitate to jump from character to character, leaving the Count in the dust numerous times. I am sure if I had paid close attention I would have heard speech tags other than said and asked all over the place.
You realize fairly quickly that this "novel" is really a serial. Clearly Dumas was being paid by the installment, as he was far from finished after well over 100 chapters. As a result the resolution remains elusive, no return to his betrothed, no kiss and make up with Napoleon, and I can't say if these resolutions would ever have come through, though Dumas does appear to presage them.
One must remember that this man wrote The Three Musketeers
and The Man In the Iron Mask
, to mention just a couple of ins swashbuckling novels, when watching the Count shoot better,k fence better and more nobly, give his millions away right and left, tear up romantically when anyone reminds him of his sorrows, dress impeccably, know the right wine to have with the fish course, run faster than a speeding locomotive and leap high buildings in a single bound -- well you get the point. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the man who apparently is a virgin still at the end of the romance (sic). Women fall for him of course, but his true love back in Paris is his one and only.. and having never had the honeymoon ... oh merd.Major commitment, readers.. I confess I skipped two chapters, both asides from the main story.
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