Plumed hats, rapiers and heaving bosoms

Gerald Warner

14 June 2008

Gerald Warner celebrates the unexpected appearance of one last ‘swashbuckling novel’, and mourns the loss of a genre that taught boys honour, courage and chivalry

‘Do you have the new novel by Alexandre Dumas?’ Who ever imagined going into the local branch of Waterstone’s and asking that question, in the 21st century? Yet the unexpected — the impossible — has happened and an authentically new historical novel by the legendary author of The Three Musketeers has recently been published for the first time in Britain. Its classically Dumas title in French, Le chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, has been changed for an Anglophone readership to The Last Cavalier.

An account of how the Master’s last novel was rediscovered by Claude Schopp, the leading Dumas scholar in France, is given by him in an appendix to The Last Cavalier which describes how the complete book was painstakingly reconstructed. It is the continuation of Dumas’s French Revolutionary novel The Companions of Jehu and completes his panoramic fictional account of French history by covering the Napoleonic period.

In the literary canon of the swashbuckling novel, nobody ever rivalled Dumas père. He brought history to life as never before or since. Behind the arras in every statesman’s cabinet lurked a listener; a party of horsemen cantering into an inn-yard at dusk betokened high adventure; no rapier rested long in its scabbard when there was a quarrel to be settled (the more trivial the better), a lady’s (frequently fragile) honour to be defended, or a service to be rendered the King of France (as distinct from his villainous ministers).

Although Dumas’s heroes took the aristocratic principle of noblesse oblige for granted, acting as unreflecting partisans of divine right kingship, the author was unfaithful to his own ethos. In 1830, when the ancient Bourbon monarchy that was the backdrop to his romances was brought down, Dumas played an unheroic role as a self-interested supporter of the usurper Duc d’Orléans, shortly transformed into the umbrella-wielding Citizen King Louis-Philippe. He later made an equally ineffective, grandstanding intervention against the Bourbons of the Two Sicilies during the Risorgimento. The musketeers would not have been impressed.

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Jane Bodington

June 17th, 2008 11:16pm Report this comment

Well, you've never played 'Monkey Island' have you? Or 'Broken Sword'. Quite a few computer games are full of swash and buckle, and the designers are well-read in the genre and historical context.

But I agree with your main point, about the dearth of historical novels that are true to their period but have a sense of adventure. (Not Sharpe? No sense of humour?).

Anyway Perez Reverte wrote his books as a response to 'Sharpe', offended his sense of national pride, and also because he loves the British Nautical yarns, Hornblower etc., and wanted to do something similar for the Spanish.

In my opinion you forgot 'The Children of the New Forest'by Marryat, 'Kim' by Kipling, Erskine Childers 'The Riddle of the Sands' and Buchan, 'Greenmantle'?

Brian E. Birdnow

July 26th, 2008 4:37am Report this comment

I am an American writer of your magazine and was wondering why you did not place G. A. Henty in your pantheon of swashbuckling novelists. Henty may not have been a master literary stylist but he told a great tale and did so with verve and elan. His subjects were Scottish partisans, soldiers-of-fortune in seventeenth century Germany, and "cavaliers" fighting in the American Civil War. He was undoubtedly politically incorrect, but isn't the whole chivalric ideal politically incorrect today?

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