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.
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