Dumas Among the Gods

...I thought of the rabbits and burned for vengeance, for justice swift and sure and without mercy...

...A musketeer will reach for his sword at the drop of a hat, or of a lady's handkerchief, more easily dissed than the craziest homeboy, he will skewer anyone who comments unfavorably on his political allegiance, his taste in women, or the cut of his doublet...

...Pheasant aplenty nested in the waist-high grass and timothy weed...

...My Memoirs, which runs to over a million words and only covers his life to 1833, abounds in rich incident such as one finds in the life of a man who knows how to live as few men do...

...one by one my friends drifted home, and I was left by myself...

...No one doing the fighting seems to mind that he may die for no better reason than the jealousy or adulterous itch of king or queen or cardinal or nobleman...

...No real man, at any rate, minds dying for no good reason...

...some rabbits went up and came down several times before they died...

...Americans lose their innocence as readily and as repeatedly as they misplace their car keys...

...It became clear that our adventures meant something different to the others...

...Here ours was one of maybe a dozen handsome and capacious houses in an area a half-mile square...

...Between 1841 and 1850, when he was at the height of his powers, Dumas produced forty-one novels, twenty-three plays, seven histories, and six travel books...

...We went through the motions of entertaining ourselves for an hour or so, climbing trees that overlooked the creek...

...I was starting to think, however dimly, about the meaning of manliness, and Dumas did not offer any serious help...

...Not only does Dumas get the recognition he has always deserved, but the French populace, which in its wisdom has discerned Dumas's greatness all along, is honored for its literary and moral perspicacity...

...Thus lasting manly love is forged in the presence of death...

...Energy, determination, industry, sensuality, sentiment, curiosity, joie de vivre, these were the qualities in Dumas that prompted the historian Jules Michelet to tell him, "I love you and I admire you because you are one of the forces of nature...

...Should there happen to be any extant French literary men of discernment and backbone, they would best serve their country by digging Dumas up again and returning him to the blessed solitude where he belongs and where the sweet scent of violet and delphinium overwhelm the pestiferous fragrance of French national glory, so long dead but not yet buried...

...Adultery is a matter of course, with nothing shameful about it, except for the cuckold...

...No musketeer ever wants for courage...

...I did not read another word he had written for many years...

...The French, however, look to be forever and ever the French...

...Now this cuddling up to mass taste, as though the charms it favors were every bit as desirable as works of the highest intellect and beauty, we know all too well in our part of the world...

...but then there are those other men unworthy of the name, who are unwilling to die for any reason...

...Dumas himself, who lived from 1802 to 1870, was the sort of heroic figure every Frenchman imagines himself being...

...The French love Dumas only because they refuse to understand him, to recognize themselves for what they are: fearful little men, living for the pleasures of belly and groin, and thinking themselves the cream of humanity...

...Dirt-ball fights, usually conducted in the earthworks around construction sites—civilization was closing in—would last for days, with appropriate intermissions for eating, sleeping, and school...

...that evening my parents would be certain to denounce the savages who must have infiltrated from the low-rent neighboring town in order to do such a thing, surely with the intent of burning us out of house and home...

...Professors of literature in what were once distinguished universities commonly deride the notion of a canon or great books, since to suggest that some books are better than others offends against equality and diversity, which are not the inviolable democratic virtues...

...One summer day the boldest and most vital boy in our company arrived looking grim and distressed...

...the real French are the loathsome varlets...

...Here is the truth about Dumas's world, as only a disinterested foreign eye can now see it: the musketeers are pure fantasy, or at best a relic of a past long gone...

...He said that the night before he had gone to the movies with his elder brother, and in the parking lot afterward, they had come across a large group of high school kids, fifteen or sixteen years old: the older kids had dug up a rabbits' nest and were lobbing baby rabbits high in the air and cheering when the rabbits hit the pavement...

...Romantic and political intrigue are inseparable...

...As the young D'Artagnan's father tells his son as he sends him off to seekhis fortune, "Nowadays a gentleman makes his way by his courage—do you understand—by his courage alone...

...every war, every school shooting, every racist murder, every lie by a public official brings out the chorus of journalists, grief counselors, and other sages to tell us we have now lost our innocence...

...It is fair to assume that Dumas hoped his depiction of rare heroism and common cowardice would have a tonic effect, but what happened is that a nation of Bonacieux supposes itself a race of D'Artagnans...

...They eat without relish...

...Water was always near at hand—a creek cut through our preserve—yet it never did wash us clean...

...I cultivated a determined set to my jaw, a dauntless and penetrating gaze, and a confident gait tastefully just this side of a swagger...

...I continued ever to imagine myself as the superb D'Artagnan, winning every available distinction by virile daring, even as I did my utmost to brain one of my pals with the business end of an uprooted plant...

...Tumbleweeds, airy skeletons, would skitter down the street, fast as the November wind...

...No one has explained how it always manages to grow back...

...We were not a highly principled bunch, and this ignominious and degenerate form of sport never offended our sense of martial propriety...

...At judicious intervals, we would set the prairie alight, for the hellion's joy of watching it burn...

...The lackeys and the bourgeois make a career of cringing and cowering and grubbing for a few copper coins...

...The occasion for death comes upon these men suddenly, but never unexpectedly...

...Dumas prides himself on wielding sword or firearm as capably as he does his pen...

...Rabbits, chipmunks, and field mice were everywhere, and their ubiquity and diminutive stature rendered them beneath contempt...

...And one's grave is always ready and waiting, for everyone is everyone else's potential enemy...

...Twice I spotted a fox padding insouciantly as a housecat along the dirt road leading to the hospital...

...I was startled at how small it was, but trembled at the sight of it, for some reason having always considered fox to be equal in size and ferocity to wolves...

...I had a largely idyllic if not entirely innocent boyhood myself, composed of equal parts bookishness and rampaging boisterous sport...

...but the worst we ever got was extremely dirty...

...Combat would traditionally begin with some pretense of dashing swordsmanship, but it always ended up in a riot of mad thrashing with the object of splintering your opponent's weapon and getting in as many licks to his head and shoulders as you could...

...the world's cruelty will see to that...

...When one man's amour-propre brushes indelicately against another's, blood is bound to be spilled...

...American innocence is often a pitiable and ridiculous and perilous thing, but French self-delusion is utter spiritual ruin...

...Today, Alexandre Dumas is no longer alone...

...Moral clarity announces itself more vehemently in childhood than later in life, when you would think your moral sense ought to be refined to a pure and pellucid focus, but when in fact it tends to grow ever cloudier and more tricky to read...

...To live fearlessly, like a born warrior, is the sweetest of fates, however it might end...

...And it is only natural that so magnificent a temperament should be bold and expansive in action as well as on paper...

...At the time, living it meant playing at war with my friends, whom I undertook to intoxicate with accounts of seventeenth-century Gallic military virtue...

...Nature should be so wantonly prolific...

...With him, our popular memory and our collective imagination enter the Pantheon...

...fatal erotic mishaps send France and England careening into savage war...

...Address, wit, brio, and easy courage: such a bravura display of virile plumage marks not a deskbound scribbler, but a virtual musketeer...

...On his second day in Paris, D'Artagnan finds himself scheduled to fight three duels in succession, with the very musketeers who will become his sworn brothers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis...

...I picked up a fallen branch thick as my waist and began swinging it like a baseball bat against a tree trunk...

...We were all studying French in school, and I took to spicing my conversation with oaths from the novel that the translator had thought it best to leave in the original: Morbleu and Sang de Dieu fell from my lips with casual Parisian splendor...

...Thus a grave historical injustice is redressed, with the solemn gaiety of a musketeer taking on a gang of Richelieu's guardsmen...

...During the Revolution of 1830, he goes barreling into the Parisian streets, gun in hand, where a crowd of men takes to him as their natural leader...

...Strict composure, which frequently takes the form of death's-head humor, is maintained to the grave's edge...

...The captain recognizes Dumas, whom he saw at a performance of one of his plays, and tells him he must be a lunatic to risk his life when his vocation is not to fight but to write: Go home, he advises, and convince your companions to do likewise...

...I considered myself an embryonic musketeer and did my best to look the part...

...they rut without fire...

...Reading him, you get the sharper sense of how the French like to think of themselves and of the difference between smug self-conception and unsavory actual fact...

...the finest women seem to be married to the ghastliest men, whether the cowardly haberdasher Bonacieux, whose beauteous wife becomes D'Artagnan's lover, or the unprepossessing King Louis XIII, whose beauteous wife is the lover of the Duke of Buckingham...

...Women really go for these men, and the men all hope for a serious worthy love themselves, though they are not above the usual trifling...

...but I now had an inkling of what makes justice-loving men go to war, even if they hate and fear it...

...On the one hand, the upstanding musketeers...

...I learned to keep a poker face...

...Most of the kids in that school up the street, and thus most of the friends I made, lived just outside the boundaries of this privileged territory, literally on the other side of the tracks, in a blue-collar town of wooden-frame duplexes...

...Of course, on this side of the infernal gates, there must always be hope...

...on the other, the born lackeys and the contemptible bourgeois...

...I was putting myself through an apprenticeship to a life of consummate glory, while they were just being kids...

...an Oldsmobile dealership and a hospital tacked down two corners of this space, and an elementary school stood just down the street from us, but the rest was glorious Midwestern prairie...

...We will get over our failing...

...Our childish wars generally took one of two forms...

...The Library of America, purportedly dedicated to preserving and propagating native masterpieces, has placed the writings of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain on an equal footing with those of Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and William Faulkner...

...Only the provocative appearance of the detested cardinal's detested men keeps the story from ending before it's begun...

...But for us the weapon of choice was the saber, which in the absence of cold steel left us improvising with the sinewy stalks of sunflowers, preferring the shorter specimens—a length of two to three feet was ideal—to the unwieldy giants that towered over us and might have served as lances, but not as respectable swords...

...It was with scornful amusement, then, that I read last December that Dumas's corpse had been ceremoniously exhumed from the village churchyard in his hometown of Villers-Cotterets, where it had lain since 1870, and that it had been relocated to the most hallowed of resting places for French literary men: the crypt of the Pantheon in Paris, where his remains join those of Hugo, Rousseau, Voltaire, and other divinities...

...Needless to say, like nature's own productions, they weren't all impressive...

...In due course reality sandbagged us...

...The order for this belated apotheosis came from the very top, by presidential decree...

...Sometimes the fire department would arrive to douse the blaze, which achieved some spectacular effects...

...Boyish fantasies of derring-do, of risking everything for fame, wealth, and love—I'd had a pin-up of Ann-Margret in short-shorts taped inside my desk at school—never possessed the same allure after that...

...Dumas says he really cannot do that...

...For me, hearing the account of the rabbits tortured and killed for sport was the definitive loss that changed my view of the world...

...I had outgrown la gloire as advertised by its most accomplished shill...

...They are the precursors of Nietzsche's last men, whose only appetites are the lowest ones, and whom democracy will produce in cockroach multitudes...

...Six or eight of us formed a band of brothers, or a tribe of Indians, or a scouting party of frontiersmen...

...I'm fighting," Porthos blushed a dee crimson...

...Accordingly, the earlier your acquaintance with the world's brutality, the harder it strikes and the longer it stings...

...I'm fighting because I'm fighting...

...These were my friends, and they all humored me, but none of them went so far as actually reading the sacred text...

...M. Jacques Chirac, whose animadversions on American gunslinger foreign policy are ever pungent and overripe as fine Camembert, struck the more customary note of insipid sonority as he oversaw Dumas's reburial among the gods...

...When an army regiment in the service of the king blocks their path, Dumas buttonholes a captain and requests that the impromptu platoon of revolutionaries be allowed to pass, for there is fighting to be done at the city hall...

...the only works from that period to last were The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845...

...Earth, water, and fire figured prominently in our festive rites...

...We dug a lot of holes—mostly wide-mouthed pits, but sometimes burrows diving straight down, then bending sideways sharply, like tunnels leading out of stalag or stir to sweet freedom, though ours, of course, never really led anywhere...

...on parting, with the Gallic equivalent of chutzpah, Dumas tells the captain to come see him if he want tickets to Dumas's latest play, which the Censorship has suppressed but which will open as soon as the Revolution is over...

...The reason for such duels is not often a very good reason...

...The cleansing element was fire...

...electric shivers shot through my arms, but I kept swinging and swinging...

...The engineering was primitive as it gets, and by all rights one of these excavations—we called them forts—ought to have collapsed with ourselves inside...

...As I've said, we were not a principled bunch, but none of us showed any sign of amusement at this tale;it simply shocked and sickened...

...When I was seven, our family moved from a Chicago suburb of tightly clustered bungalows (which happened to be the place where the young Theodore Kaczynski would cultivate his prowess in mathematics and social theory) to the next town over, just two miles west but a world apart...

...they bolt when danger threatens...

...But there is something very French indeed about just what it is in Dumas that the people's memory and imagination so treasure: Dumas did contribute significantly to making the French French...

...The Three Musketeers was a boys' book...

...There is nothing finer, in Dumas's world, than to be a musketeer...

...Still, prodigiousness on this order makes an impression all its own...

...Nobody bit...

...we'd go wading in pursuit of frogs, turtles, and crayfish, and turned our dirt to mud...

...Then Dumas leads his boys by a roundabout route to see some action...

...The branch never broke, and at last, cotton-mouthed and panting, I dropped it and started running home as fast as I could...

...Somehow amid all this boyish commotion I read a lot of books, and when I was ten years old, I came upon The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas and discovered the way of life I was surely born to lead: manly adventure transformed into literature...

...D'Artagnan, no musketeer yet, declares he has a musketeer's heart, nevertheless, and joins the fight on the side of the men he was ready to kill a moment before...

...First I'd live it, then I'd write it...

...So there is nothing distinctively French about this genuflection before the household gods of "popular memory and collective imagination": it is kowtowing to the democratic abstractions currently in favor, here as over there...