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igenlodeI originally picked this book up because it promised to cover precisely the material (Royalist resistance against Napoleon between 1800 and 1802) for my current fanfic that I was having trouble sourcing much information on elsewhere. It wasn't particularly helpful in that respect, probably because there really wasn't very much useful resistance going on at that point -- but its very existence is an interesting phenomenon in itself. Unfortunately that doesn't make it a terribly good book, especially considering its inordinate length: 750 pages in paperback plus extra editorial material.
As a long-lost novel by Alexandre Dumas (Author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo! proclaims the cover) it is, I'm afraid, little more than a historical curiosity. The translation does it no favours -- it is weird to read Dumas 'in American', where characters say "Huh?" and wear "short leather pants", I'm pretty sure all the "castles" near Paris in the narrative were actually chateaux rather than military fortresses, I seriously question the rendition of Caesar's wife as holding a "lesbian orgy", and the writer is clearly unfamiliar with English naval terminology of the era: prisoners of war were held in the infamous 'hulks' at Portsmouth and not on "pontoons", and there is no such body as the "Royal English Navy". The famous Georges Cadoudal is rechristened, for some reason, 'George', which is oddly offputting! But my issues with the book as a whole go a long way beyond that.
Perhaps the most obvious problem is that it is not so much a novel as a novelised history -- which, according to the editorial notes at the end of the volume was in fact Dumas' explicit intention, but which makes for heavy reading. The adventures of the Three Musketeers take place against a historical backdrop, but one that is only lightly sketched, with character and adventure taking precedence over real-life politics. Likewise, the fall and rise of Napoleon affect the story of the Count of Monte-Cristo, but only as distant plot levers; it is the story of human relations and of revenge.
"The Last Cavalier", however (a puzzling choice of title: the author's intended "Hector de Sainte-Hermine" or "Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine" would have made more sense, and I wonder if this is yet another mistranslation), does not really focus on Comte Hector as a character at all. Large parts of it are simply recounting history and/or acting as a travelogue: the trip to Burma began to remind me of "Around the World in Eighty Days", which in its unabridged version is simply an excuse to introduce an untravelled readership to descriptions of various exotic locations. Meanwhile the protagonist himself gets little development -- like Edmond Dantès he undergoes a long imprisonment during which he educates himself and develops superhuman strength by exercising to pass the endless hours (although I don't see how he also becomes a crack shot and deadly swordsman, talents one can hardly practise in jail!), and we are given a detailed family backstory, which I am assuming comprises a plot summary of the previous two novels in the sequence, and which sounds like prime Dumas adventure, albeit of the tragically doomed variety rather than the rollicking exploits of the young d'Artagnan or the Scarlet Pimpernel. But his personal story occupies a tiny proportion of this enormous book.
The youngest survivor of an aristocratic family who were all executed in turn for their Royalist activities, Hector de Sainte-Hermine takes up the cause in his turn and sacrifices the happiness of his impending marriage to renewed hostilities against an increasingly autocratic Bonaparte. He is not, however, a particularly effective guerilla and is rapidly caught, whereupon his sole hope is to follow his brothers into death without bringing further disgrace upon his unhappy fiancée. However, Fouché, the devious minister of police, contrives instead to have him forgotten in jail and finally released once Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, by which point Hector has seen the error of his ways and consents to serve the glorious new empire, giving his loyalty to France rather than to the exiled Bourbons for whom his family sacrificed their future.
And that is basically the entire plot. The rest of the novel consists of Hector under multiple aliases travelling around the fringes of history and impressing everybody with how incredibly good he is at everything -- he is supposed to be a tragically romantic figure mourning his lost love and doing his best to get himself killed, but unlike, say, Athos, who is likewise noble, handsome, reticent about his past, and emotionally scarred, he remains very much a cipher rather than engaging the reader in any way. Despite having been imprisoned and being the heir to a family all executed for treason against the new régime, he appears to have retained all his aristocratic income, and like Phileas Fogg (who, however, is sacrificing his entire fortune in the process) he is able to overcome obstacles and win obedience simply by throwing large amounts of money around. He never comes across as a man in despair who takes wild risks in the hopes of finding oblivion; he never undertakes anything he is not supremely confident of being able to do, from killing a shark underwater to acting as a sharpshooter at the Battle of Trafalgar, for which of course he gets back to Europe just in time to volunteer. And we never get much indication of his ongoing desire for his fiancée: when one of his cousins (and a childhood romantic interest) falls for him during their shared adventures, Hector knows that it Cannot Be because he is committed to another woman, but the circumstances and setting are romantic and we have far more of a sense that he is tempted to return her feelings than that he is actually pining for Claire de Sourdis, with whom his relationship consisted largely of admiring her from afar.
The novel is oddly ambivalent about Napoleon, as well. One gathers that this reflects Dumas' own attitude, and it's a salutary reminder that while English history tends to regard him as one more in a series of dictators who tried to conquer the Continent by bloody means and against whom Britain Stood Alone, the French view of history perceives him as the Man Who Made France Great Again when she was fighting against all the crowned heads of Europe, and/or as a vital staging-post in the inevitable march of democracy from Kings to its current highly-evolved form (see also Victor Hugo and the progression of Marius' opinions from his grandfather's nostalgia for the ancien régime via his father's veneration for the Emperor to Enjolras' egalitarianism).
All the same, what we actually see of Napoleon's behaviour and character in the first part of this story is in general far from flattering -- to the degree that Dumas apparently found it necessary to defend his depiction by citing research and original sources -- and the tale of how Hector's family are wiped out one by one in gory detail while fighting in defence of the monarchy is a harrowing one that makes it hard to see how the young man could reconcile himself with the victorious party. Napoleon's brief appearances later on in the book are not calculated to arouse admiration either, as he is portrayed as vindictive, petty, and ruthless. But the novel breathes a general air of admiration towards him and his campaigns, and despite the fact that he keeps getting kicked in the teeth by his Emperor Hector serves him loyally (and, according to Dumas' plot sketch, was eventually to end up assisting in Napoleon's return from the Isle of Elba). It feels like a betrayal of the oath young Sainte-Hermine has taken and of everything that happened in the previous books, to the degree that when we do get tiny references to his tragic past (notably, the editor feels the need to insert one in his 'reconstructed/suggested' ending to the unfinished bandit chapter, where the bandit's severed head reminds him of "some heads that were dear to me"), it comes as a breath of fresh air and a much-needed deepening of his character.
Perhaps the most interesting narrative choice, conscious or not, that Dumas makes in this context is that all the great Napoleonic victories seem to take place off-screen, while the engagements the protagonist actually gets involved in, however heroic his personal actions (e.g. breaking single-handedly through the English lines at the battle of Maida or killing Admiral Nelson) appear to be losing ones... (And one very odd piece of moral judgement, to modern eyes, is the fact that after capturing and condemning an American slaver for the crime of "removing the black people in his hold from their lands and families by force or by trickery", with the judgement that he should be hung at his own yard-arm, after pardoning him for his sincere repentance the victors then authorise him to sell off the eighty Negroes he still has on board in order to restore his fortunes; fair enough as an exemplar of dealing with a gallant enemy, apart from the high indignation shown on behalf of those same slaves and their sufferings a few scenes earlier!)
Obviously it is unfortunate that the author died long before he could finish his ambitious intended scope for the story, which was, according to his notes, to have extended throughout the entire fourteen years of 'widowhood' foretold for Claire de Sourdis and have covered the whole of Napoleon's career. And it is possible that with a masterly narrative twist or two and a great deal of editing of irrelevant ancedote -- as was apparently Dumas' wont when revising newspaper serials like this, where he was required to churn out a certain relentless column length per issue, for subsequent publication in coherent novel form -- he might have managed to turn it into something more readable; after all, "The Count of Monte-Cristo" is pretty diffuse and waffly, and the titular protagonist is effectively peripheral to the action for large chunks of the book. But while an unfinished story is always frustrating, it's hard to feel that this one would have amounted to anything more than a continued recital of Napoleonic history with Hector de Sainte-Hermine popping up at long intervals, winning vows of undying brotherhood from all the men alongside whom he fights and attracting admiration in vain from all the women.
In terms of Dumas' better-known output, this is probably closer in concept to "Louise de la Vallière", in which the main focus is on the historical characters while the former musketeers have only bit-parts around the edges. But the difference is that the reader actually gets caught up instead in the affairs of Madame Henriette and of Louis XIV as main characters, whereas here there is no clear set of 'alternative protagonists', but an endless succession of people whom we meet for a few chapters before moving on; for example, the beginning, with its drama between Bonaparte's aide-de-camp Roland de Montrevel and the Chouans (with the latter coming out decidedly the better) is as good as anything Dumas ever wrote, but in the next section Roland is now disconcertingly dead off-screen.
There is nothing inherently wrong in having a noble and flawless hero in this sort of fiction, and arguably the eponymous and unlucky Raoul de Bragelonne is one such. But I found I cared more about the fate of Raoul, however minor a role he may play in the book that bears his name. Hector de Sainte-Hermine may be both gifted and highly educated in all the arts of war and peace, kind, generous and intelligent, but ultimately he simply isn't terribly interesting.
(Praise, however, must go to Claude Schopp, who not only edited and rediscovered the text in the first place, but manages to conclude the half-finished chapter of the serial in a manner that is not only indistinguishable, to my eye, from the style and moralising of the original, but which manages in that short space to be more humane and engaging (the ex-bandit Tomeo names his mule; René is reminded of his lost family) than the genuine unpublished later chapters that were completed by Dumas before he died! Apparently Schopp subsequently proceeded to produce a complete novel based on Dumas' plot outline for the remainder of the story, under the title Le Salut de l'Empire, though I'm afraid I don't find myself inspired enough to seek it out...)
As a long-lost novel by Alexandre Dumas (Author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo! proclaims the cover) it is, I'm afraid, little more than a historical curiosity. The translation does it no favours -- it is weird to read Dumas 'in American', where characters say "Huh?" and wear "short leather pants", I'm pretty sure all the "castles" near Paris in the narrative were actually chateaux rather than military fortresses, I seriously question the rendition of Caesar's wife as holding a "lesbian orgy", and the writer is clearly unfamiliar with English naval terminology of the era: prisoners of war were held in the infamous 'hulks' at Portsmouth and not on "pontoons", and there is no such body as the "Royal English Navy". The famous Georges Cadoudal is rechristened, for some reason, 'George', which is oddly offputting! But my issues with the book as a whole go a long way beyond that.
Perhaps the most obvious problem is that it is not so much a novel as a novelised history -- which, according to the editorial notes at the end of the volume was in fact Dumas' explicit intention, but which makes for heavy reading. The adventures of the Three Musketeers take place against a historical backdrop, but one that is only lightly sketched, with character and adventure taking precedence over real-life politics. Likewise, the fall and rise of Napoleon affect the story of the Count of Monte-Cristo, but only as distant plot levers; it is the story of human relations and of revenge.
"The Last Cavalier", however (a puzzling choice of title: the author's intended "Hector de Sainte-Hermine" or "Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine" would have made more sense, and I wonder if this is yet another mistranslation), does not really focus on Comte Hector as a character at all. Large parts of it are simply recounting history and/or acting as a travelogue: the trip to Burma began to remind me of "Around the World in Eighty Days", which in its unabridged version is simply an excuse to introduce an untravelled readership to descriptions of various exotic locations. Meanwhile the protagonist himself gets little development -- like Edmond Dantès he undergoes a long imprisonment during which he educates himself and develops superhuman strength by exercising to pass the endless hours (although I don't see how he also becomes a crack shot and deadly swordsman, talents one can hardly practise in jail!), and we are given a detailed family backstory, which I am assuming comprises a plot summary of the previous two novels in the sequence, and which sounds like prime Dumas adventure, albeit of the tragically doomed variety rather than the rollicking exploits of the young d'Artagnan or the Scarlet Pimpernel. But his personal story occupies a tiny proportion of this enormous book.
The youngest survivor of an aristocratic family who were all executed in turn for their Royalist activities, Hector de Sainte-Hermine takes up the cause in his turn and sacrifices the happiness of his impending marriage to renewed hostilities against an increasingly autocratic Bonaparte. He is not, however, a particularly effective guerilla and is rapidly caught, whereupon his sole hope is to follow his brothers into death without bringing further disgrace upon his unhappy fiancée. However, Fouché, the devious minister of police, contrives instead to have him forgotten in jail and finally released once Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, by which point Hector has seen the error of his ways and consents to serve the glorious new empire, giving his loyalty to France rather than to the exiled Bourbons for whom his family sacrificed their future.
And that is basically the entire plot. The rest of the novel consists of Hector under multiple aliases travelling around the fringes of history and impressing everybody with how incredibly good he is at everything -- he is supposed to be a tragically romantic figure mourning his lost love and doing his best to get himself killed, but unlike, say, Athos, who is likewise noble, handsome, reticent about his past, and emotionally scarred, he remains very much a cipher rather than engaging the reader in any way. Despite having been imprisoned and being the heir to a family all executed for treason against the new régime, he appears to have retained all his aristocratic income, and like Phileas Fogg (who, however, is sacrificing his entire fortune in the process) he is able to overcome obstacles and win obedience simply by throwing large amounts of money around. He never comes across as a man in despair who takes wild risks in the hopes of finding oblivion; he never undertakes anything he is not supremely confident of being able to do, from killing a shark underwater to acting as a sharpshooter at the Battle of Trafalgar, for which of course he gets back to Europe just in time to volunteer. And we never get much indication of his ongoing desire for his fiancée: when one of his cousins (and a childhood romantic interest) falls for him during their shared adventures, Hector knows that it Cannot Be because he is committed to another woman, but the circumstances and setting are romantic and we have far more of a sense that he is tempted to return her feelings than that he is actually pining for Claire de Sourdis, with whom his relationship consisted largely of admiring her from afar.
The novel is oddly ambivalent about Napoleon, as well. One gathers that this reflects Dumas' own attitude, and it's a salutary reminder that while English history tends to regard him as one more in a series of dictators who tried to conquer the Continent by bloody means and against whom Britain Stood Alone, the French view of history perceives him as the Man Who Made France Great Again when she was fighting against all the crowned heads of Europe, and/or as a vital staging-post in the inevitable march of democracy from Kings to its current highly-evolved form (see also Victor Hugo and the progression of Marius' opinions from his grandfather's nostalgia for the ancien régime via his father's veneration for the Emperor to Enjolras' egalitarianism).
All the same, what we actually see of Napoleon's behaviour and character in the first part of this story is in general far from flattering -- to the degree that Dumas apparently found it necessary to defend his depiction by citing research and original sources -- and the tale of how Hector's family are wiped out one by one in gory detail while fighting in defence of the monarchy is a harrowing one that makes it hard to see how the young man could reconcile himself with the victorious party. Napoleon's brief appearances later on in the book are not calculated to arouse admiration either, as he is portrayed as vindictive, petty, and ruthless. But the novel breathes a general air of admiration towards him and his campaigns, and despite the fact that he keeps getting kicked in the teeth by his Emperor Hector serves him loyally (and, according to Dumas' plot sketch, was eventually to end up assisting in Napoleon's return from the Isle of Elba). It feels like a betrayal of the oath young Sainte-Hermine has taken and of everything that happened in the previous books, to the degree that when we do get tiny references to his tragic past (notably, the editor feels the need to insert one in his 'reconstructed/suggested' ending to the unfinished bandit chapter, where the bandit's severed head reminds him of "some heads that were dear to me"), it comes as a breath of fresh air and a much-needed deepening of his character.
Perhaps the most interesting narrative choice, conscious or not, that Dumas makes in this context is that all the great Napoleonic victories seem to take place off-screen, while the engagements the protagonist actually gets involved in, however heroic his personal actions (e.g. breaking single-handedly through the English lines at the battle of Maida or killing Admiral Nelson) appear to be losing ones... (And one very odd piece of moral judgement, to modern eyes, is the fact that after capturing and condemning an American slaver for the crime of "removing the black people in his hold from their lands and families by force or by trickery", with the judgement that he should be hung at his own yard-arm, after pardoning him for his sincere repentance the victors then authorise him to sell off the eighty Negroes he still has on board in order to restore his fortunes; fair enough as an exemplar of dealing with a gallant enemy, apart from the high indignation shown on behalf of those same slaves and their sufferings a few scenes earlier!)
Obviously it is unfortunate that the author died long before he could finish his ambitious intended scope for the story, which was, according to his notes, to have extended throughout the entire fourteen years of 'widowhood' foretold for Claire de Sourdis and have covered the whole of Napoleon's career. And it is possible that with a masterly narrative twist or two and a great deal of editing of irrelevant ancedote -- as was apparently Dumas' wont when revising newspaper serials like this, where he was required to churn out a certain relentless column length per issue, for subsequent publication in coherent novel form -- he might have managed to turn it into something more readable; after all, "The Count of Monte-Cristo" is pretty diffuse and waffly, and the titular protagonist is effectively peripheral to the action for large chunks of the book. But while an unfinished story is always frustrating, it's hard to feel that this one would have amounted to anything more than a continued recital of Napoleonic history with Hector de Sainte-Hermine popping up at long intervals, winning vows of undying brotherhood from all the men alongside whom he fights and attracting admiration in vain from all the women.
In terms of Dumas' better-known output, this is probably closer in concept to "Louise de la Vallière", in which the main focus is on the historical characters while the former musketeers have only bit-parts around the edges. But the difference is that the reader actually gets caught up instead in the affairs of Madame Henriette and of Louis XIV as main characters, whereas here there is no clear set of 'alternative protagonists', but an endless succession of people whom we meet for a few chapters before moving on; for example, the beginning, with its drama between Bonaparte's aide-de-camp Roland de Montrevel and the Chouans (with the latter coming out decidedly the better) is as good as anything Dumas ever wrote, but in the next section Roland is now disconcertingly dead off-screen.
There is nothing inherently wrong in having a noble and flawless hero in this sort of fiction, and arguably the eponymous and unlucky Raoul de Bragelonne is one such. But I found I cared more about the fate of Raoul, however minor a role he may play in the book that bears his name. Hector de Sainte-Hermine may be both gifted and highly educated in all the arts of war and peace, kind, generous and intelligent, but ultimately he simply isn't terribly interesting.
(Praise, however, must go to Claude Schopp, who not only edited and rediscovered the text in the first place, but manages to conclude the half-finished chapter of the serial in a manner that is not only indistinguishable, to my eye, from the style and moralising of the original, but which manages in that short space to be more humane and engaging (the ex-bandit Tomeo names his mule; René is reminded of his lost family) than the genuine unpublished later chapters that were completed by Dumas before he died! Apparently Schopp subsequently proceeded to produce a complete novel based on Dumas' plot outline for the remainder of the story, under the title Le Salut de l'Empire, though I'm afraid I don't find myself inspired enough to seek it out...)