Knight of Maison-Rouge Read online

  2003 Modern Library Edition

  Biographical note copyright © 1996 by Random House, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2003 by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  Translation copyright © 2003 by Random House, Inc.

  Notes and glossary copyright © 2003 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dumas, Alexandre, 1802–1870.

  [Chevalier de Maison-Rouge. English]

  The knight of Maison-Rouge: a novel of Marie Antoinette /

  Alexandre Dumas; a new translation by Julie Rose.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-335-0

  1. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Fiction. 2. Girondists—

  Fiction. 3. Marie Antoinette, Queen, consort of Louis XVI, King of

  France, 1755–1793—Fiction. I. Rose, Julie. II. Title.

  PQ2225.C713 2003

  843′.7—dc21

  2003044577

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  ALEXANDRE DUMAS

  Alexandre Dumas, who lived a life as dramatic as any depicted in his more than three hundred volumes of plays, novels, travel books, and memoirs, was born on July 24, 1802, in the town of Villers-Cotterêts, some fifty miles from Paris. He was the third child of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (who took the name of Dumas), a nobleman who distinguished himself as one of Napoleon’s most brilliant generals, and Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Labouret. Following General Dumas’s death in 1806 the family faced precarious financial circumstances, yet Mme. Dumas scrimped to pay for her son’s private schooling. Unfortunately he proved an indifferent student who excelled in but one subject: penmanship. In 1816, at the age of fourteen, Dumas found employment as a clerk with a local notary to help support the family. A growing interest in theater brought him to Paris in 1822, where he met François-Joseph Talma, the great French tragedian, and resolved to become a playwright. Meanwhile the passionate Dumas fell in love with Catherine Labay, a seamstress by whom he had a son. (Though he had numerous mistresses in his lifetime Dumas married only once, but the union did not last.) While working as a scribe for the duc d’Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe) Dumas collaborated on a one-act vaudeville, La Chasse et l’amour (The Chase and Love, 1825). But it was not until

  1827, after attending a British performance of Hamlet, that Dumas discovered a direction for his dramas. “For the first time in the theater I was seeing true passions motivating men and women of flesh and blood,” he recalled. “From this time on, but only then, did I have an idea of what the theater could be.”

  Dumas achieved instant fame on February 11, 1829, with the triumphant opening of Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court). An innovative and influential play generally regarded as the first French drama of the Romantic movement, it broke with the staid precepts of Neoclassicism that had been imposed on the Paris stage for more than a century. Briefly involved as a republican partisan in the July Revolution of 1830, Dumas soon resumed playwriting and over the next decade turned out a number of historical melodramas that electrified audiences. Two of these works—Antony (1831) and La Tour de Nesle (The Tower of Nesle, 1832)—stand out as milestones in the history of nineteenth-century French theater. In disfavor with the new monarch, Louis-Philippe, because of his republican sympathies, Dumas left France for a time. In 1832 he set out on a tour of Switzerland, chronicling his adventures in Impressions de voyage: En Suisse (Travels in Switzerland,1834–1837); over the years he produced many travelogues about subsequent journeys through France, Italy, Russia, and other countries.

  Around 1840 Dumas embarked upon a series of historical romances inspired by both his love of French history and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. In collaboration with Auguste Maquet, he serialized Le Chevalier d’Harmental in the newspaper Le Siècle in 1842. Part history, intrigue, adventure, and romance, it is widely regarded as the first of Dumas’s great novels. The two subsequently worked together on a steady stream of books, most of which were published serially in Parisian tabloids and eagerly read by the public. He is best known for the celebrated d’Artagnan trilogy—Les trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844), Vingt ans après (Twenty Years After, 1845), and Dix ans plus tard ou le Vicomte de Bragelonne (Ten Years Later; or, The Viscount of Bragelonne, 1848–1850)—and the so-called Valois romances—La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1845), La Dame de Monsoreau (The Lady of Monsoreau, 1846), and Les Quarante-cinq (The Forty-Five Guardsmen, 1848).

  Yet perhaps his greatest success was Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo), which appeared in installments in Le Journal des débats from 1844 to 1845. Le Chevalier du Maison-Rouge (The Knight of Maison-Rouge, 1845–1846) was also a collaborative effort. A final tetralogy marked the end of their partnership: Mémoires d’un médecin: Joseph Balsamo (Memoirs of a Physician, 1846–1848), Le Collier de la reine (The Queen’s Necklace, 1849–1850), Ange Pitou (Taking the Bastille, 1853), and La Comtesse de Charny (The Countess de Charny, 1852–1855).

  In 1847, at the height of his fame, Dumas assumed the role of impresario. Hoping to reap huge profits, he inaugurated the new Théâtre Historique as a vehicle for staging dramatizations of his historical novels. The same year he completed construction of a lavish residence in the quiet hamlet of Marly-le-Roi. Called Le Château de Monte Cristo, it was home to a menagerie of exotic pets and a parade of freeloaders until 1850, when Dumas’s theater failed and he faced bankruptcy. Fleeing temporarily to Belgium in order to avoid creditors, Dumas returned to Paris in 1853, shortly after the appearance of the initial volumes of Mes Mémoires (My Memoirs, 1852). Over the next years he founded the newspaper Le Mousquetaire, for which he wrote much of the copy, as well as the literary weekly Le Monte Cristo, but his finances never recovered. In 1858 he traveled to Russia, eventually publishing two new episodes of Impressions de voyage: Le Caucase (Adventures in the Caucasus, 1859) and En Russie (Travels in Russia, 1865).

  The final decade of Dumas’s life began with customary high adventure. In 1860 he met Garibaldi and was swept up into the cause of Italian independence. After four years in Naples publishing the bilingual paper L’Indépendant/L’Indipendente, Dumas returned to Paris in 1864. In 1867 he began a flamboyant liaison with Ada Menken, a young American actress who dubbed him “the king of romance.” The same year marked the appearance of a last novel, La Terreur Prussiene (The Prussian Terror). Dumas’s final play, Les Blancs et les Bleus (The Whites and the Blues), opened in Paris in 1869.

  Alexandre Dumas died penniless but cheerful on December 5, 1870, saying of death: “I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to me.” One hundred years later his biographer André Maurois paid him this tribute: “Dumas was a hero out of Dumas. As strong as Porthos, as adroit as d’Artagnan, as generous as Edmond Dantès, this superb giant strode across the nineteenth century breaking down doors with his shoulder, sweeping women away in his arms, and earning fortunes only to squander them promptly in dissipation. For forty years he filled the newspapers with his prose, the stage with his dramas, the world with his clamor. Never did he know a moment of doubt or an instant of despair. He turned his own existence into the finest of his novels.”

  CONTENTS

  Cover
>
  Title Page

  Copyright

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  INTRODUCTION by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  THE KNIGHT OF MAISON-ROUGE

  1. THE RECRUITS

  2. THE STRANGER

  3. RUE DES FOSSÉS-SAINT-VICTOR

  4. THE CUSTOMS OF THE DAY

  5. WHAT SORT OF MAN MAURICE LINDEY WAS

  6. THE TEMPLE

  7. A GAMBLER’S OATH

  8. GENEVIÈVE

  9. SUPPER

  10. SIMON THE COBBLER

  11. THE NOTE

  12. LOVE

  13. THE THIRTY-FIRST OF MAY

  14. DEVOTION

  15. THE GODDESS OF REASON

  16. THE PRODIGAL SON

  17. THE MINERS

  18. CLOUDS

  19. THE REQUEST

  20. THE FLOWER GIRL

  21. THE RED CARNATION

  22. SIMON THE CENSOR

  23. THE GODDESS OF REASON

  24. MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

  25. THE NOTE

  26. BLACK

  27. THE MUSCADIN

  28. THE KNIGHT OF MAISON-ROUGE

  29. THE PATROL

  30. CARNATION AND UNDERGROUND TUNNEL

  31. THE SEARCH

  32. FAITH SWORN

  33. THE MORNING AFTER

  34. THE CONCIERGERIE

  35. THE HALL OF LOST FOOTSTEPS

  36. CITIZEN THÉODORE

  37. CITIZEN GRACCHUS

  38. THE ROYAL CHILD

  39. THE BOUQUET OF VIOLETS

  40. THE PUITS-DE-NOÉ BY NIGHT

  41. THE CLERK FROM THE WAR MINISTRY

  42. THE TWO NOTES

  43. DIXMER’S PREPARATIONS

  44. THE PREPARATIONS OF THE KNIGHT OF MAISON-ROUGE

  45. SEARCHING

  46. THE JUDGMENT

  47. PRIEST AND BUTCHER

  48. THE CART

  49. THE SCAFFOLD

  50. THE HOME VISIT

  51. LORIN

  52. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

  53. THE DUEL

  54. THE HALL OF THE DEAD

  55. WHY LORIN LEFT

  56. LONG LIVE SIMON!

  NOTES

  GLOSSARY OF HISTORICAL PERSONS AND TERMS

  About the Translator

  INTRODUCTION

  Lorenzo Carcaterra

  Alexandre Dumas was already at the head of his class. Few writers, if any, could approach his masterful way of intertwining historical fact (layered, of course, by his own imagination) with high-octane action, adventure, and romance. He proved it again and again in his novels about revenge-seeking counts and sword-slashing musketeers. And now he does it once more, with an even more powerful voice, in his tale of a magical and heroic young knight.

  The Knight of Maison-Rouge is one of those rare gifts that are all too seldom found in the book world. A work once thought lost in the dustbins of a shuttered store, with few if any editions in circulation, is rediscovered, lavished with a fresh coat of paint and polish, and brought out to the front of the shop for all to see and grasp. Once the pages are cracked open, from that very minute we enter the streets of Paris in early March 1793, we are thrust back into another time, hurtling into a distant world. It may well be a place we have never seen or even heard about. But it is one that, through the many works of Alexandre Dumas, we have come to know so very well.

  —

  His world was always my escape route. As I read through each page of this wonderful new novel, crammed to the brim with fights, betrayals, deceit, friendships, and the quest for honor, it became a simple feat to drift back and remember all that Dumas has given me. I was raised in a violent household, my parents always within inches of taking that final plunge toward death. When the battles became too difficult to face, the shouts and screams too wrenching to hear, I would turn to Dumas and his books, and in their company I would always find the safest refuge.

  I would sit in the rear of a small, quiet library in my New York City neighborhood, in a room that faced onto a busy and bustling avenue, a wood table with four chairs all to myself, the pages of one of his novels spread out before me. There, through many a long afternoon, I allowed Dumas to take me deep into his world, miles away from the anguish of my own. I have never been to Paris, but in the back room of that cramped library, I walked and fought my way through its streets with the best possible guide by my side.

  —

  All great writers offer a refuge through their work, speaking to us with words and tales they have chiseled with their own particular stamp. Dumas was a man of great wealth and high-end tastes who had spent his way through a fortune by the time he lay on the thick quilts of his deathbed, breathing his last. Yet, despite the money he spent so freely, his stories and his heart rested in the soul of the working man. His heroes are all colored with the flag of honor, each bred through the ranks of abject poverty. Dumas made himself so rich by writing so well about their adventures, each of their tales wrapped in the cloak of loyalty to king and queen, giving them the veneer of the respect each central character very often had to draw sword to obtain.

  With this fresh and vibrant novel now reclaimed, the heroic Maurice and Lorin will soon be placed in the vaunted ranks of other Dumas stalwarts—from Dantès to D’Artagnan and the rest of the glorious Musketeers. Brave men who willingly flipped aside their thick robes to clash swords for a noble cause or a beautiful woman (and few are as luminous as our current heroine, Geneviève), or very often both at the same time. Dumas’s characters all live through turbulent days, death always a mere flick of a blade away, romance ever elusive; they are men of power and wealth flaunting their riches in cities drowning in poverty and despair.

  It is what helps make Dumas timeless—his Paris of 1793, with a mere shuffling of the deck, can be any other major city, with little care to decade or century. The turmoil faced by Lorin during the glory years of Marie Antoinette could easily be matched in today’s world in many a city and any number of countries.

  —

  In The Knight of Maison-Rouge, as in all his other works, Dumas treats history with the casual indifference of the storyteller. He uses it not for accuracy but to propel his story forward, to turn its laws and abuses to suit the goals of his tale. His fictional creations mingle easily in the company of historical personages, fighting for their causes, bowing to their lineage, pledging fidelity to their reign. All of it done for the sake of story. Yet despite any quibbles historians may have with Dumas, his Parisian novels paint a more than accurate picture of an explosive time and a changing world.

  In this enchanting book, the anger that percolates on the stone streets of Paris is felt through every page. The tension between the classes, between those casually dismissive of their wealth and the hands and faces of those one missed meal away from death, is as palpable as a baby’s heartbeat. The seeds of a revolution are not merely planted in a careless manner but seem always to be on the brink of a bountiful harvest. Through his many novels, this latest just one more brilliant addition, Dumas has made the city and its history his own and is more than eager to share it with a willing world.

  —

  It is so very easy to get lost in the pages of a Dumas novel. To forget time and place and be engulfed by characters rich and full, battles one-sided and hopeless, promises that must be kept and deceptions that cannot be forgiven. There are dozens of unforgettable characters in The Knight of Maison-Rouge, each one of them a complete portrait, his strengths, weaknesses, foibles, and motives painted with a palette of many colors. The panorama is, as always, lush and layered, from the overview of a struggling nation to the turmoil of a small side street, all drawn down to the most precise detail. It is the work of a writer trolling within the full force of his powers, both the destiny and the direction of his story resting in his hands alone. The reader is merely a passenger venturing on a literary journey that will always be remembered.

  —

  After my childhood, I continued to turn to the works of Alexand
re Dumas. As a troubled teen, I sought out his stories as a safe haven from the questions of a life that offered me so few answers. As a young man, I looked to his work as my template for the proper way to deliver a story, to coat it and coax it and bring it to a conclusion with the power and brilliance it so much deserved. I have always fallen short in my attempts, while Dumas never failed to succeed with his own. And now, as a middle-aged man, I read his works for the fond memories they never fail to bring. The time I’ve spent with those fine novels will always belong to no one else but me.

  Ride with The Knight of Maison-Rouge. If you have never read Dumas before, let this be the first of many steps in his direction. If you’ve crossed his path, are familiar with his many sagas, then there should be no hesitation to journey on yet another adventure. Either way, once we are inside the pages, there is no escape, as we are again taken hostage and made this master’s literary prisoners.

  So allow Dumas to do what he does best—turn us all once again into quiet children sitting in the warmth of small libraries, at empty tables, our heads buried in one of his books, our imaginations filled with the raging battles and the fierce loves of another century and another place. As we turn each page, we are once again free to turn his adventures into our very own.

  It is the truest gift any novelist can hope to give.

  And none has been more generous than Alexandre Dumas.

  —

  LORENZO CARCATERRA is the bestselling author of five books, A Safe Place, Sleepers, Apaches, Gangster, and Street Boys. He has also written scripts for movies and television. He lives in New York.

  1

  THE RECRUITS

  It was the night of the tenth of March, 1793. The bell at Notre-Dame had just struck ten, and each stroke rang out clear and distinct, one after the other, before flying off into the ether like a night bird soaring from some bronze nest, sad, monotonous, and resonant.

  Night had descended on Paris. But it was not the usual noisy, stormy Paris night, punctuated by lightning yet cold and misty. Paris itself was not the Paris we know today, dazzling by night with its thousands of lights reflected in its golden mire, the Paris of busy promeneurs, jubilant whisperings, and deliciously sleazy outskirts where fierce feuds and reckless crimes flourish, a wildly roaring furnace. It was a shabby little dive, tremulous, beetling, whose rarely seen inhabitants would run whenever they had to cross a street and scuttle away into their alleyways or under their porte-cochères, the way feral creatures pursued by hunters sink into their burrows.