The bells of the monastery were ringing. I remembered the continual peals of the bells the night before I took the veil, and a terrible suspicion crept into my mind and heart that these bells tolled for the same reason.
But I shook my head and told myself, “No, no, no!”
As I approached, I saw a long procession of monks make their way to the little white house and then, moments later, return toward the monastery.
Who did they seek in that house? Someone alive—or dead?
Soon I’d know, for I was barely a hundred steps from the house, when suddenly a deep mountain stream barred my way. It was a steep cascade, muddy and full of rocks, so deep I didn’t dare try to cross it.
I climbed toward its source, despite my fatigue, but it felt like I’d never reach that house before my fleeting strength abandoned me.
After a quarter hour’s walk, I found a tree that had fallen across the chasm. At any other time, I wouldn’t have dared to venture upon so flimsy a bridge. But I leaped onto it, my feet sure, my eye fixed on the far side, and then I was across.
There I found, instead of obstacles, a sort of paved path, so I went ever faster as I approached.
I reached my desired goal; the door was open; I crossed the threshold; a stairway opened to my right, and I rushed up it without calling out. I hadn’t dared breathe since passing the doorway—I was convinced I’d find an empty room.
The chamber was empty, the window open, and a letter was on the table, all wet with tears.
This letter, O my mother! It was less than half an hour old, and it was his final farewell.
I had arrived half an hour too late: he was at the church, taking his vows.
I felt the house shiver beneath my feet; everything seemed to spin around me. I began a shriek that would end as my last breath, when suddenly the thought came that maybe his sacrifice wasn’t yet made, his vows were not yet pronounced.
I rushed out of the house, instinctively taking my dove, which had perched on a branch of the blessed jasmine.
The monastery was no more than a hundred paces away, but I felt my strength would fail me before I reached the church. My brain was empty of thought, my lungs gasped for air.
I heard the priests singing the Magnificat.
I heard the organ playing the Veni Creator.
My God! I had only seconds, no more.
And woe betide me! As luck would have it, I’d gone around the wrong side of the apse—the door was on the other side.
The window to the nave was open—but how could I hope my voice would be heard above the organ and the chanting of the monks?
I tried to shout, but all my chest could produce was a dull rattle.
It was a moment in which it seemed all was lost, all was in vain.
My mind was confusion, my thoughts were a blur—and then, in the midst of this chaos came a light, and a fire lit my heart.
I cast my dove through the window, and fell in a swoon.
Heaven be praised! When I came to, I was in his arms.
He already wore the robe of a monk and had the tonsure of a priest—but he was mine! Mine! Mine!
Then, and forever.
The oath was upon his lips when the dove, like the Holy Spirit descending on a sunbeam, had interrupted it.
Beloved dove, your image will be carved on our tomb, asleep in our intertwined hands!
I promised I would write to you if I found him, Mother Superior. God, in his infinite mercy, has allowed me to find him—and so I write.
Your respectful and ever grateful daughter,
Isabelle de Lautrec, Comtesse de Moret
Palermo, September 10, 1638
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
Imagine it’s the middle of the nineteenth century, you’re a well-educated Englishman or American, and it’s your job to translate popular French literature into English. You are fully conversant with then-contemporary standards of the English language, in which “proper” writing is formal, staid, and largely in the passive voice. Everyone agrees that elevated diction is the hallmark of cultured literacy.
Then your publisher assigns you to translate a new novel by Alexandre Dumas.
What on Earth is this? It isn’t proper French, like Chateaubriand, or Alfred de Vigny, or even that young firebrand Victor Hugo, who at least writes solid, conventional prose. This fellow Dumas writes in a disturbingly dynamic style, propelling his story’s action with vigorous language in sentences that are strangely short and direct. His theatrical dialogue is sharp, punchy, and concise, almost like the way real people talk. There’s violence in the tale, sudden and brutal, and erotic thoughts and behavior are depicted in a frank and open manner quite unsuitable to a general audience.
In short, while the writing has an undeniable power of sorts, it’s rather vulgar and must be corrected.
And correct it these translators did. To be fair, those gentlemen knew their business, and gave their English and American readers what they expected, which was historical adventure in the tone and manner of popular authors like Sir Walter Scott and James Feni-more Cooper—a style stiff and stuffy by our modern standards, but entirely in line with the expectations of the day. Their translations of Dumas, conventional and bowdlerized though they were, were immensely popular, and they made “Alexandre Dumas” a brand name that stood for historical adventure with vivid characters and engaging, fast-moving stories.
But these early translations, endlessly reprinted and, in many cases, still the only available English versions, haven’t aged very well. For most twenty-first-century readers, they seem awkward, dense, and difficult—more trouble than they’re worth, really. And that does Dumas a terrible disservice, because his writing was truly ahead of its time, a precursor to the more direct, earthy styles of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Robert Louis Stevenson. He was in many ways a very modern author who wrote in a theatrical, almost cinematic style. And this should come as no surprise when you consider that he started out as a playwright, whose early fame came from lurid melodramas that shocked and captivated Parisian theatregoers. Dumas wrote in scenes, vivid set-pieces conveyed by sharp action and even sharper dialogue, punchy lines meant to carry impact all the way to the cheap seats at the back of the hall.
For us here in the twenty-first century, after a hundred years of Hemingway, Hammett, and Hollywood, original, unvarnished Dumas delivers exactly the kind of storytelling we want. As a fan of contemporary adventure fiction, I’m here to tell you that translating Alexandre Dumas for the modern reader is a lot of fun. The man was the living embodiment of joie de vivre, and that love of life permeates every line of his tales. His vibrant characters, trembling with passion, practically leap off the page, their lines rapped out in snappy patter that might have been written by Ben Hecht or Lawrence Kasdan. In short, Dumas rocks, and his work deserves to be presented in a fashion contemporary readers can appreciate.
So much for Dumas in general; now let’s turn to The Red Sphinx in specific. It’s a work from late in the master’s career, and while it’s not quite in the class of his early masterworks like The Three Musketeers or Monte Cristo, it’s definitely comparable, and when Dumas has the bit in his teeth, the story still races along like his best work. With The Red Sphinx, Dumas was making a deliberate attempt to recapture the glory of his early triumphs, and in the main he succeeded. The characters are as captivating and charming as any of their predecessors—especially Cardinal Richelieu, a figure Dumas clearly admired, and whose weaknesses are depicted as lovingly as his strengths. The action sequences are taut and exciting, the heroes are bold and clever, the period details ring true, and the king’s jester always manages to get in a zinger as the last word.
If only it had an ending! Fortunately, that’s where The Dove comes in. As mentioned in the Introduction, I think part of the reason Dumas couldn’t wrap up this novel is that he’d already written an ending for his protagonists fifteen years earlier, and couldn’t get easily from Moret as Richelieu’s protégé in 1630 to Moret as
his antagonist in 1632. And when his publishing vehicle, Les Nouvelles, went on the rocks, he just shrugged and gave it up.
Does The Dove really do the job of wrapping up the story of the Comte de Moret and Isabelle de Lautrec? I would argue that it does—and in spades. It was the only story Dumas ever wrote in epistolary, or exchange-of-letters, form, but he used that stylistic constraint to great effect. An unabashed romance, Dumas wrote it when still at the height of his powers, and the language is concise and emotionally compelling. Unlike the novel that precedes it, the pacing of The Dove is flawless, generating significant suspense even as we know, in our hearts, how it must turn out, finally culminating in a perfectly timed and entirely satisfying climax.
Some editorial notes: The Red Sphinx originally appeared in Les Nouvelles in four parts, or “volumes,” with the chapter numbering restarting with each new volume; since these divisions seem nowadays confusing and arbitrary, for the sake of simplicity and streamlining I abandoned that structure and just numbered the chapters sequentially, from I (1) to LXXIV (74). Also, Dumas’s spelling of character and place names was occasionally inconsistent from one part of the novel to the next; I have tried to remedy this by settling on one spelling in each case, usually the most historically recognizable.
Speaking of history, just how accurate in that regard are the events of The Red Sphinx? In the main, Dumas’s account of King Louis’s Court and Richelieu’s transalpine campaigns of 1629 and 1630 is on the money, though the side adventures of the Comte de Moret and Étienne Latil are entirely invented. In fact, we don’t know for sure exactly what the historical Comte de Moret was doing during the French invasion of Piedmont and Savoy—but no one can prove he wasn’t involved in it, and that was good enough for Dumas.
As for The Dove, did Antoine de Bourbon really survive the Battle of Castelnaudary that ended Prince Gaston’s fourth rebellion against his brother King Louis? According to history, almost certainly not, despite the persistent rumors and legends of the time that had him surviving in seclusion until late into the seventeenth century. But, as with the rumors about who was really behind the assassination of King Henri IV, Dumas always preferred to follow gossip and scandal, because they invariably make better stories.
The reader who wants to know more about the historical background of The Red Sphinx is invited to visit the translator’s website, www.swashbucklingadventure.net, and click through to the Red Sphinx page. There are other articles and reviews on the site that may be of interest as well. Feel free to drop in and leave a comment.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
Dumas’s final visit to the milieu of the Musketeers has an interesting publishing history. The Red Sphinx—or Le Comte de Moret, as it was then known—was first published as a serial in the Parisian weekly Les Nouvelles, from October 17, 1865, to March 23, 1866. Because it was unfinished, and because the author’s brand of historical adventure was temporarily out of vogue in France, at the time it received no book publication in its author’s native land—and wouldn’t for the better part of a century.
However, Dumas’s name still had considerable cachet in the United States, where all his works were in print, and publishers were even commissioning ghost writers to concoct sequels to his bestsellers that they then unashamedly published under his name. Even an unfinished novel by Dumas was considered worthy of publication, and late in 1866 Le Comte de Moret appeared in a French-language (and probably unauthorized) edition from the tiny New York publisher H. de Mareil, as part of their Bibliothèque du Messager Franco-Américain series. It was presumably this edition that the prolific hack writer Henry L. Williams, Jr., used as the basis of his English translation, which appeared as The Count of Moret from the likewise-tiny Philadelphia publisher Peterson Bros. in 1868. Though Williams wrote his own ending to the novel, in which Moret personally broke the Siege of Casale at the head of a troop of swashbucklers before dying in Latil’s arms, it was an awful translation, and the book disappeared without a ripple. In fact, there may be no more than three copies still in existence. (For the curious, bits of this “lost” translation can be found in The Works of Dumas, a one-volume collection of novel excerpts published in 1927 by the Walter J. Black Co. of New York without editorial attribution.)
And that was the end of the story for The Red Sphinx—or would have been, if not for a dramatic event so unlikely that it could have come from the pen of the master himself. In 1945, Dumas’s original handwritten manuscript of the novel, or at least the first three quarters of it, was unexpectedly discovered in near-perfect condition “in a Paris garret” (according to Dumas bibliographer Frank Wild Reed). After authentication by experts—the text was entirely in Dumas’s well-known longhand—this manuscript version was published as Le Comte de Moret in 1946, in two volumes, by Paris publisher Édition Universelles. It was republished in 1964 by Éditions Galic, appearing for the first time under the title Le Sphinx Rouge.
In general, the 1946 manuscript version differed little from what had appeared in Les Nouvelles eighty years before—some spelling differences, such as Lathil instead of Latil, and Pisani instead of Pisany—with one notable exception: the manuscript contained an entire chapter omitted from the published serial version. Upon reading this missing chapter, titled Les Habitués de l’Hotel de Rambouillet, one quickly sees why it was omitted, as it is no more than 3,500 words about the amusing eccentricities of certain members of the Rambouillet household and social set. This series of anecdotes, mainly lifted from the Historiettes of Tallemant des Réaux, are just the kind of juicy historical gossip Dumas delighted in, but they add exactly nothing to the progress of the novel—in fact, they stop the book dead in its tracks. I think Dumas (or his editor, Jules Noriac) made the right decision in leaving this chapter out, and I’ve followed their example for this edition of The Red Sphinx.
As noted above, the original French version of the novel had first been published in book form in the United States as Le Comte de Moret in 1866, but as of the first years of our current century it still had yet to appear in the author’s native France. To rectify this, prominent Romanian editor Radu Portocala painstakingly mined original copies of Les Nouvelles out of the depths of the French Bibliothèque Nationale to compile a full serial version of Dumas’s incomplete novel; and, thanks to his work, 2008 finally saw the first complete French book publication of Le Sphinx Rouge (Éditions Kryos, Paris). Portocala even included the lost Habitués chapter from the 1946 manuscript version—so if you want to read this novel in the original French, that’s the edition this editor recommends.
The Dove (in French, La Colombe) was originally published in 1850 in Brussels by Alphonse Lebègue, and then the following year in Paris by Cadot. A novella, or short novel, it was an awkward length for book publication, and wasn’t printed much again until publishers started compiling Dumas’s “Complete Works” in the 1870s, after his death. The only known English version prior to the current edition was by the noted English translator Arthur Allinson, published by Methuen & Co. in London in 1906 in combination with another short Dumas novel, Maître Adam. It’s a rather rare edition, and this editor hasn’t actually seen it, but I’ve read other Allinson translations of Dumas, and they’re pretty good. This volume’s version of The Dove is the story’s first appearance in English in the United States.
Dramatis Personae: Historical Character Notes
Ancre see CONCINI
ANGELY: l’Angely, King’s Fool to Louis XIII. Not much is known about King Louis’s fou de titre, other than that he was said to have been “of a noble family, but poor,” and may have been an equerry to the Prince de Condé before entering the king’s service.
ANNE: “Anne d’Autriche,” Anne of Austria, Queen of France (1601–66). Eldest daughter of King Philip III of Spain and sister to King Philip IV, Anne was wed to King Louis XIII of France in a political marriage at the age of fourteen. A Spaniard among the French, unloved by the king, proud but intimidated, and vulnerable to manipulation by her friends, Dumas’
s depiction of Anne is, in the main, accurate. The eventual mother of Louis XIV, she will outlive her husband and reign as regent in her son’s name, appearing as a major character in the next novel in the cycle, Twenty Years After.
BARADAS: Chevalier François de Baradas, “Monsieur Baradas.” Royal equerry and king’s favorite in 1628–29, the handsome but shallow Baradas fell from Louis’s favor after engaging in an illegal duel.
BASSOMPIERRE: François de Bassompierre, Marshal of France, Colonel-General of the Swiss Guard (1579–1646). A gentleman of Lorraine, this suave and adaptable chevalier was successively a favorite of Henri IV, Queen-Regent Marie de Médicis, and Louis XIII, and one of the leading ornaments of their Courts—especially by his own estimation. As a general, a lover, a diplomat, and above all a courtier, he cut a swath, but delved too deep into intrigue and spent the last years of his life in the Bastille. His lively memoirs of the period are among Dumas’s primary sources.
BAUTRU: Guillaume Bautru, Comte de Serrant (1588–1685). Courtier, wit, poet, and diplomat, Bautru was one of Richelieu’s trusted envoys. A mediocre writer, he was nonetheless one of the founding members in 1634 of the Académie Française, mainly due to his association with its patron the cardinal.
BERINGHEN: Henri, Comte de Beringhen, Premier Valet de Chambre, “Monsieur le Premier” (1603–92). The king’s loyal valet, his weakness was pride, and he would be banished in 1630 after falling for Madame de Fargis and conspiring with her and Vautier.
BÉRULLE: Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629). Though eventually outmaneuvered and sidelined by Richelieu, as a leader of the “Devout” party and ally of the Queen Mother, Bérulle was a big noise in the early years of the reign of Louis XIII. Though influential at the time, he wasn’t a deep thinker, and was important mainly as a figurehead of the pro-Spanish faction opposed to Cardinal Richelieu.