Alexandre Dumas rides again – 137 years later

Yet another swashbuckler joins 'The Three Musketeers' and 'The Count of Monte Cristo.'

from the September 18, 2007 edition

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Both novels share the classic Dumas trait of relentless storytelling combined with derring-do. James Bond, Indiana Jones, and many others owe a deep debt to Dumas, who stuffs his tales with thrilling exploits and exotic locales.

Hector traipses across the globe in search of adventure and, he hopes, a speedy death. On the latter count, he fails in spectacular fashion.

Thank God – or, rather, Dumas – for that. Hector's gung-ho globetrotting takes us from Paris to the jungles of Burma and beyond. He guts a shark with his knife while saving a sailor in ocean waters. In the East Indies, Hector kills a dozen tigers, staves off a four-foot python and trains elephants to protect his traveling party.

That is just the beginning. At every turn, Hector finds peril and perseverance. Dumas tells his tall tales with relish – and the genial wink of an eye.

Hector tries to lay low with the nondescript name Rene, but his exploits supersede mere nomenclature. Napoleon spared his life after losing track of Hector's political prison sentence, but doomed the erstwhile Count of Sainte-Hermine to a humbling role as a workaday soldier.

No matter. Hector shines wherever he goes, a zealous Zelig with courage to spare. He arrives on the cusp of the Battle of Trafalgar and kills Lord Nelson, the lone highlight in a day of loss for the French navy.

"The Last Cavalier" suffers from digression and disquisition – a malady common to Dumas novels. It's worth remembering that Dumas regularly wrote bloated serials in part because he was a prodigious storyteller and in part because he was a prodigious spender, eternally on the brink of bankruptcy. Dumas could best be described as the Stephen King of his day. (That is, if Stephen King had a retinue of mistresses and used Enron's accountants to look after his millions.)

Surely Dumas would appreciate the irony that it was his impassioned defense of a passage written about Josephine Bonaparte's profligate spending in "The Last Cavalier" that led Schopp to rediscover the novel at all.

No one with a pulse will be able to resist Dumas' lost classic, though its epic grandeur suffers a bit because it lacks an ending. It just stops. If nothing else, that frustrating lack of finality offers fitting tribute to this tireless storyteller.

Only death could silence Dumas.

• Erik Spanberg is a freelance writer in Charlotte, N.C.

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