The Bridge of Beyond, Simone Schwartz-Bart

6 stars

First Sentence: A man’s country may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart.

Thoughts: The Lougandour women of Guadaloupe were always poor, but they were always strong. This is the story of three generations. Well, five if you count all of them. Really only two, but now we’re getting technical.

It began with Toussine, the daughter of Minerva, a freed slave. Toussine was beautiful and capable, even as a child. She made everyone happy, especially the fisherman Jeremiah. As soon as she was old enough, they got married and moved into a nice house in L’Abandoneé village. It was just a shack like all the other houses, but Toussine made it into something special. They had good luck twin daughters, and a garden full of flowers and vegetables. Then tragedy struck. The house burned down and one of the twins was badly burned. She died a few days later, in agonizing pain.

Toussine and Jeremiah moved into an abandoned manor house with their remaining daughter. No one saw them for years. Then Toussine came back out into the sun and started cleaning up the property. A few years later she had another daughter, Victory, and a new title, Queen Without a Name.

Victory grew up. She stayed in L’Abandoneé after Jeremiah’s death when Toussine moved to another village, Fond-Zombi. Victory had two daughters, Regina and Telumee. She never married, but had a string of lover. Angebert, Telumee’s father, was the best of the lot, but after he was killed in a bar fight, Victory sent Regina to live with her father and Telumee to live with her grandmother so she could gallivant off with her new man.

Toussine taught Telumee many things, but mostly how to be a strong woman. She introduced her to Ma Cia, the local witch who taught Telumee how to look beneath the surface. She sent Telumee to school to learn how to read and write. She taught her how to be “a woman with two hearts.”

Telumee, meanwhile, was more interested in Elie, the son of the local barkeeper. They fell in love in school, but couldn’t get married for a while. Elie had to earn enough money to build them a house so he went to work with local mystery man Amboise as a sawyer, cutting boards in the forest. Toussine didn’t want Telumee to work in the cane fields where any overseer might get hold of her, so Telumee went to work as a maid for the Desaragnes, the descendants of the White of Whites who once owned all this land. She endured mockery, insults, and a handsy master until Elie serenaded her one night to let her know their house was finished.

Telumee left the Desaragnes and went back to Fond-Zombi. She and Elie moved into their new house where they were very happy until one day they weren’t. Elie began to drink more and beat her when he came home. Toussine tried to help, but she was old and her life was almost over. Then the worst happened. Telumee left Fond-Zombi for the Mountain of Lost People where she made a new life. She found love and lost it. She found a child and lost her. She found another man and he lost himself.

By the end, Telumee is an old woman looking back at her life. It was a hard life filled with joy and sorrow, peaks and valleys, but it was a life well lived.

As I struggled others will struggle, and for a long time yet people will know the same sun and moon; they will look at the same stars and, like us, see in them the eyes of the dead. I have already washed and ironed the clothes I want to feel on my corpse. Sun risen, sun set, the days slip past and the sand blown by the wind will engulf my boat. But I shall die here, where I am, standing in my little garden. What happiness!

Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes, Mary S. Hartman

5 stars

First Sentence: The subjects of this study are thirteen nineteenth-century English and French women of “respectable” middle-class status, all of whom were accused of being murderesses or accomplices in murder.

Thoughts: Let’s give it up for the Longest Title of the Year So Far!

All of the murders in this book were extremely famous Back in The Day. They were covered extensively by the papers, opined about on various editorial pages, and the trials were well-attended by all sorts of looky-loos. Basically, they were the Victorian true crime channel. Everyone had an opinion on the guilt or innocence of each of these lady killers and sometimes they were even right.

Hartman explores all the murders through the lens of women’s roles in Victorian culture. How did this culture influence how and why and who these women killed? Why did so many of these women kill their husbands or lovers?* How much influence did novels have on these “wicked women” and were the newspapers exaggerating the effect?** Would a less repressed attitude towards sex have saved some of these people? Which of them was the most badass?

That last one is easy: Henriette Francey. She shot a man Hartman called Hippolyte Bazard+ and then turned herself in. “Asked whether Bazard was dead, she answered coolly, ‘I certainly hope so.’” Turns out she shot him because he tried to rape her, so good for you Henriette Francey. Bastard had it coming.

Another murderess of note is Marie Lefarge, who begins the book. She was accused of murdering her husband and her trial was a sensation in France. I can’t find any evidence but I strongly suspect that she was the inspiration behind the naming of Madame Thérèse Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities. Marie killed her husband in 1840 and ATOTC was published in 1859, so the timing is right. I also can’t leave without mentioning that there was a film made in France in 1938 called L’affair Lefarge which is notable for the wonderful title alone.

If you look at the chapter titles and count names you will note that there are only twelve women mentioned. “But the title says thirteen!” you might say. “Where’s the final murderess?” In the second chapter, “The Waiting Games of Brides-to-Be: Madeleine Smith and Angèline Lemoine.” The missing woman is Angèline’s mother Victoire who helped Angèline murder her newborn baby to hide her affair. I do not like them because they are heartless monsters who killed an infant. This is a snap judgment on my part and I stand behind it. Any sympathy I might have had for them is transferred to Constance Kent in the following chapter for reasons that you’ll have to read the book to find out.

*Because who else had more reason to kill them?

**Not as much as you’d think.

+She mentioned in a footnote that she had to change the victim’s name to get permission to access the trial files and publish her research on them. Why is never mentioned.

Henrietta Maria: The Warrior Queen Who Divided a Nation, Leanda Lisle

3 stars

First Sentence: Here are some of the things I have often read and heard said about Henrietta Maria: she was ‘frivolous,’ ‘extravagant,’ had bad teeth and skinny arms; she was an adulteress who secretly married Henry Jermyn; she was ‘implacably Catholic,’ she ‘made King Charles Catholic’ and caused the Civil War; later she proved to be an unloving mother to her son, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, whom she tried to make Catholic because she was a bigot, and finally, at the Restoration she was an irrelevance, nothing more than a shriveled and miserable old lady.

Thoughts: I’m sure you can tell all the accusations in the first sentence are pretty much all anti-Catholic propaganda. Henrietta Maria had the misfortune of being a French Catholic married to an English Protestant. And not just any English Protestant, but the particular one who was the head of the Church of England. And not just any head of the Church of England, but Charles I who, as you might recall, had the misfortune of losing his head to the Puritans after he lost the English Civil War.

And this is why “may you live in interesting times” is a curse.

Henrietta Maria was born into interesting times. Her father was King Henri IV, a former Huguenot who converted to Catholicism to gain/save the throne of France. Her mother was Marie de Medici who was one of Alexandre Dumas pere‘s favorite villains. After Henri IV was assassinated, Henrietta Maria, along with all the younger royal children, was sent to a country estate while her brother Louis gained his XIII. Still, she had a happy childhood and was close to her siblings. And then they grew up.

Princesses Elisabeth and Christine were married off to the princes of Spain and Savoy respectively. Henrietta Maria got mixed messages about marriage from their experiences, along with her brother Louis’ marriage to the (in)famous Anne of Austria. But that didn’t change anything. Soon it was Henrietta Maria’s turn to be married off for the good of France. Let’s see, who do they need to strengthen an alliance with? How about England? And so the final young French princess of the current batch was sent across the English Channel.

The marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria was a happy one. They both genuinely loved each other, which is borne out by the fact they had nine children. Charles also showed his affection by letting his wife have a Catholic chapel at her palace. The Puritans were Not Best Pleased by this. All sorts of anti-Catholic queen propaganda began flying off the presses. Charles didn’t help matters by being an imperious jerk, which is part of the reason why the English Civil War happened. And we all know how that ended.

For Charles, at least. But he didn’t go without his wife fighting for him. She wasn’t the kind of queen to wait in the wings wringing her hands while the men fought. She went out to the field with him where she was a valued addition to the team. She was the only one who could handle Prince Rupert, for example. When that got too dangerous, she went to France and the Netherlands to raise money for the cavaliers. And here’s where the book lost me.

I would have liked more of a focus on the queen during the Civil War than the general recitation of what the men were doing. I don’t care what they were doing. Fighting, that’s what they were doing and it was boring. How many times do I have to tell people that war is dull to read about? When are we, as a species, going to realize how banal war is and KNOCK IT OFF ALREADY? There are so many more interesting things we could be doing, like exploring the sea floor or space or the limits of our own minds.

Sorry. That rant just got away from me there. Back to the book.

Anyway, the cavaliers lost, Charles I lost his head, and Henrietta Maria fled back to her brother in France. Nine years later the Cromwell regime ended with regret and bitter recriminations. Charles II came home in triumph. Henrietta Maria returned a few months after* and planned to stay in England for the rest of her life. But then her daughter Henrietta married Prince Phillipe and returned to France with her mother where part of the plot of The Vicomte de Brangelonne happened. This part felt rushed. I would have liked more information on what the Dowager Queen was up to rather than the confusing conspiracy chapter. Anyway, stuff happened and Henrietta Maria died because one of her ladies in waiting followed the wrong doctor’s orders. Opium is a hell of a drug, kids.

On the whole this book is a good look at Princess Henrietta Maria’s life but only a fleeting glance at the life of the Queen. The author kept getting distracted by Charles I, which I guess is kind of understandable considering she has also written a biography of that king. But that doesn’t excuse the epilogue. It claimed to connect everything that happened to the queen’s point of view, but it was more of an abstract of the book I just read. And why do that in the epilogue anyway? Shouldn’t the whole book have been about Henrietta Maria’s views of the events of her time, at least as far as we can extrapolate it from the historical record? Too little, too late, and not enough when it did show up.

*If you’re reading along with Samuel Pepys’ diary, this is where we currently are. Current being October 2023 if you’re from the future.

The Red Sphinx, Alexandre Dumas

4.5 stars

First Sentence: Toward the end of the year of our Lord 1628, the traveler who came, for business or pleasure, to spend a few days in the capital of what was poetically called the Realm of the Lilies could depend on hospitality with or without a letter of introduction, at the Inn of the Painted Beard.

Thoughts: We have come to the end of the quest through all of the Alexandre Dumas pere novels in the North Carolina library system. And we’ve also come full circle because this book takes us back to the 1620s only four days after the end of The Three Musketeers. Our stalwart quartet is nowhere to be seen, however, because this book is about Cardinal Richelieu saving the monarchy. Hey, guys, he’s not the villain anymore! That role is taken up by the queens, Anne of Austria and her mother-in-law Marie de Medici.

But first, a little swashbuckling. We meet Etienne Latil at the Inn of the Painted Beard. He’s a sword for hire who couldn’t make ends meet in Skyrim so he went to seventeenth-century France instead. A mysterious man approaches him with a job offer. He wants Latil to kill a man for him. Latil’s interested until he hears that the target is the Comte de Moret, the illegitimate son of Henri IV. Latil won’t go for that. Not only was he Henri IV’s page back in the day, he was present when the king was assassinated. Avaunt, ye varlet! The varlet refuses to avaunt and draws his sword instead. Soon all of his rowdy friends are there and there’s a brawl in the inn. Both Latil and The Varlet are wounded, but The Varlet gets away with his friends.

Meanwhile there’s scheming going on in the Louvre, as always. Both Queen Anne and Queen Marie hate Louis XIII for various reasons, so they’re planning to get rid of him. First, though, Anne has to get pregnant by another royal descendant so there can be an heir for Anne and Marie to be regent to. However, Richelieu has spies everywhere and uncovers the scheme. He spends the rest of the book thwarting them so the rightful king remains on the throne. If Louis XIII remains king, Richelieu remains the power behind the throne.

I said he wasn’t the villain of this book, I didn’t say he wasn’t self-interested.

Meanwhile the Comte de Moret has arrived in Paris. He arrives at the Louvre for a clandestine meeting with Queen Anne who hopes to enlist him in her schemes. Instead he falls in love with Isabelle, one of her ladies-in-waiting, and she with him. For the rest of the book events conspire to keep them apart.

One of the conspiring events is one of the many, many wars with the Italian States that were so popular at the time. Richelieu helps the king take charge of the current battle. Isabelle is sent to her father who’s an ambassador to one of the friendly states. Moret is sent to spy out weaknesses in the defenses of one of the unfriendly states. The wars go well for France, but the queens are still scheming so….

So we don’t find out what comes of all that because the publication Dumas was serializing this novel in went out of business and he shelved the project. However, he did write a novella called The Dove that wraps up Moret and Isabelle’s story.

The Dove is a series of letters written between a novitiate nun and novitiate monk. The letters are carried by the titular bird. After a few back-and-forths the writers realize that the other is the love they thought they lost in the wars, specifically that they’re Moret and Isabelle. They arrange to meet and give up the religious life to get married. Unfortunately someone shoots the dove before Isabelle can get directions to the monastery so she has to wander the countryside to find the remote monastery before Moret can take his final vows.

All in all, this is another great adventure novel by Dumas, even though the conspiracy plot was never resolved one way or the other. Or maybe it was. Louis XIV was the reigning monarch in Twenty Years After and the following trilogy and he was the natural son of Louis XIII, so I guess we can file the scheming queen plot under “foiled.”

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbury

5 stars

First Sentence: “Marx has completely changed the way I view the world,” declared the Pallières boy this morning.

Thoughts: The Elegance of the Hedgehog is one of those books that you either love or hate. I’m on the love side of the spectrum, mainly because I, too, have had to hide my intelligence so I’ll fit in. The world is not kind to the overeducated.

Renee is a concierge at a high-class French apartment building. She conforms to what the tenants expect a concierge to be: a dumpy, unattractive woman with a cat who watches soap operas. Except that her cat is named after Leo Tolstoy and the soap operas are only on in the office so no one will notice her in her apartment reading Russian novels and watching Japanese art movies. She also reads philosophy as well, but only so the author can show off the fact that she (the author) is a professor of philosophy. Glad to see someone can make something of their useless degree.

Paloma lives upstairs. She’s twelve years old and way too smart for her own good. She, too, hides her intelligence so she won’t stick out more than she already does at school. She’s also deeply, profoundly depressed although she’d fight you if you told her that. She’s bored with life and her snobby family and so she’s decided to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. After setting the apartment on fire because teenagers are nothing if not dramatic. She keeps a journal where she records her profound (read as: pretentious) thoughts and its these journal entries that form her story. As you read them you start to feel sorry for her because under that prickly exterior she’s a very lonely child.

When one of the tenants dies, his widow sells his apartment so she can live with her children. The new tenant is a Japanese man named Kakuro Ozu. Renee almost falls over when she hears his name—her favorite director is also named Ozu. It’s not the same man, but Kakuro is distantly related to him. Kakuro quickly discovers Renee’s intelligence and reveals that he, too, loves Russian novels and Japanese art films. He invites Renee up to his apartment for dinner and a viewing of their favorite film.

Meanwhile, he’s also making friends with Paloma who’s studying Japanese at school and loves manga. He introduces Paloma and Renee who discover that kindred spirits exist. However, it all ends in tears because Literature. Although it doesn’t end with the tears you expect. Still it’s a sweet story of misfits finding each other and that’s why I like it. Also because I never took the book as seriously as it took itself.

Castle Eppstein, Alexandre Dumas

5 stars

First Sentence: It happened during one of those prolonged and delightful evening parties we attended in the winter of 1841 at the palace of the Princess Galitzin in Florence.

Thoughts: Apparently the thing to do in the mid-nineteenth century was to throw a house party and have all the guests gather together after dinner to tell ghost stories. I think we should still do this. I have some great ghost stories that would be sure to simultaneously charm and terrify my fellow house party guests. Real ones, that happened to me. Those are the best as evidenced by this novel.

There’s always that one guy at these ghost story house parties who refuses to participate but, once persuaded, tells the story that wins the night. He’s at the party in this book, too. His story happened when he was out hunting in Germany. He stayed out too long and ended up having to stay at a crumbling old castle in the woods, the Castle Eppstein of the title. The only inhabitants were an elderly caretaker and his elderly wife, but they gave the hunter a good dinner and a comfortable bed in the Red Chamber. Which was haunted as the hunter discovered when he woke up in the middle of the night to find a ghostly woman leaning over him. “No, it’s not him,” she said sadly as she disappeared into the woodwork.

The next morning the hunter told the caretaker what he saw and got the whole story of the ghost from him. He wrote it down and of course he brought it to the party with him. The next night all the guests gather round as the hunter reads from his manuscript.

The Eppsteins were a fine noble German family in the late eighteenth century. The current count had two sons: Maximilian, who was a rapist jackass, and Conrad, who was the complete opposite. The count loved his sons, but he wasn’t blind to their faults. Unfortunately Conrad committed the unforgivable sin of marrying the gamekeeper’s daughter, so he was disowned. Maximilian, whose late wife was appropriately pedigreed, was given the reward of a second wife with an even more noble pedigree. That second wife, Albina, was only sixteen and read way too many medieval romances than was healthy. She fell hard for the tall, dark, and handsome count-to-be, and doomed herself to an unhappy marriage.

A year or so after the marriage, Napoleon tried to take over Europe. His armies came very close to Castle Eppstein, so Maximilian lit on out of there, leaving his wife behind to watch over the place. While he was gone, the servants discovered a wounded French soldier in the woods. They brought him back to the castle where Albina nursed him back to health. She and the soldier became great friends. Alas, duty called and the solider left. Meanwhile, Maximilian was coming back home. He was met by a servant who updated him on all the gossip, especially about Albina and the soldier which he put the worst spin on. And then, when Albina greeted her husband, she revealed that she was six months pregnant. Maximilian had been gone for about six months.

Oh boy.

For the next three months, Maximilian refused to see or speak to Albina. Then, on Christmas Eve, they had their final showdown. He threw her infidelity at her, she insisted that she had been faithful and the baby was his. Maximilian didn’t believe her. He hit her so hard she fell down, hit her head, and immediately went into labor. She died in childbirth. The baby lived.

There was a curse on the House of Eppstein that stated that if a Lady Eppstein died on Christmas Eve, she would only be half dead. It happened a few centuries before when Lady Eppstein died naturally on that night and ended up haunting the castle for a few decades. Now Albina is a half-dead ghost and she’s furious. She has two goals in her afterlife: to protect her son, Everard, and get revenge on Maximilian. She succeeds for a while in the first goal by chasing her husband away from the place while Everard grows up. Then history repeats itself when Everard falls in love with Rosamund, the gamekeeper’s daughter.

This is very much a Gothic romance, heavy on the atmosphere and light on sense. It’s full of doomed love, wild children, ghosts, dark chambers, and more nature than you can shake a stick at. No one ends up happy except, perhaps, Albina. But even she doesn’t get to fade away after fulfilling her goals, so maybe not so great after all. She’s still haunting the Red Chamber to this very day.

Horror at Frontenay, Alexandre Dumas

5 stars

First Sentence: Some of the most unlikely and mysterious adventures in the world have had their beginnings in the prosaic circumstances of everyday arrangements.

Thoughts: Dumas is back, baby! As a character in his own story, that is. This one begins when he accepts an invitation to go hunting at a friend’s house in Frontenay. He was promised good hunting, but that was a lie. After a boring afternoon plodding around in the pheasantless woods, he sneaks off to town to see what’s going on there. Quite a bit, as it turns out.

A man with bloody hands is banging on the door of the mayor’s house. When the mayor comes out, the man confesses to murdering his own wife. Okay, says the mayor who alerts the proper authorities. The gendarmerie show up and insist on taking the man back to the scene of the crime. The man freaks out. He won’t go back there! He won’t! Why not? Because after he cut his wife’s head off, it bit him and called him a coward!

One has to wonder, can this marriage be saved?

The gendarmerie don’t believe him. They drag him back to his house anyway and investigate the crime scene. Always alert to drama, a crowd of villagers follow as well as Dumas. They all have to give statements about what they saw. The mayor is impressed that the great Dumas is visiting their humble village and invites him to dinner. He sweetens the deal by promising to tell Dumas why he alone believed the man when he said his wife’s head spoke to him. Of course Alexandre will come!

What follows is an evening of strange supernatural tales. Not only does the mayor tell his own story of speaking decapitated heads (going back to the French Revolution, as you’d suspect) but the other guests at dinner have their own weird chronicles as well. They’re each as entertaining as the one that happened in town that day, but the best one in my opinion was the last. It’s a vampire story told by the mysterious woman who hangs around the mayor’s garden. She is, as you’d expect, Eastern European, and her story gets quite Gothic at times.

Horror at Frontenay is a good, quick read and it would have been better if the translator hadn’t bragged in the preface about how he cut out all the boring parts and descriptions. Sir, have you ever read Dumas before? There are no boring parts! Sure the descriptions can drag a bit, but that’s just so you can catch your breath before getting on the next roller coaster ride of adventure. Cut out the boring parts. Indeed!

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

5 stars

First Sentence: On the 24th of February, 1815, the lookout of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.

Thoughts: After a year of Weighty Tomes, I come across the Weightiest Tome of Them All. The Count of Monte Cristo is 1400 pages long. Fast-moving, exciting pages that pull you along for every single step of the long journey. Certain other authors of Weighty Tomes could learn something from Dumas, mainly how not to be boring.

We all know Monte Cristo as the classic tale of revenge served icy-cold. It begins with Edmond Dantes. He seemed like a nice enough guy—at first. He was the first mate of the Pharaon, promoted to temporary captain after the actual captain died on their last journey. He’s impressed M. Morrell, the shipping company owner, enough that he’s going to be promoted to actual captain himself on the next journey. Which is great because now he has enough money to marry the lovely Mercedes and pay off his father’s debts so he won’t starve while Edmond is overseas.

Except…there are those who are jealous of his good fortune. There’s Fernand who’s in love with Mercedes and furious that she’s brushed him off for that Dantes guy. Then there’s Danglars, the second mate who wanted the captain’s chair. And there’s Caderousse, Dantes’ father’s neighbor whose been bleeding Dantes Sr dry financially while his son is away.

Danglars has a plan. Before the captain died, he made Edmond promise to stop off at the Isle of Elba to deliver a letter to You Know Who. (This part of the story takes place in 1815 in case You Don’t Know Who.) Rumor has it that Edmond saw You Know Who in person while he was there. And he has another letter he’s supposed to deliver to Paris. So Danglars concocts a conspiracy involving Dantes and writes a letter outlining it. Caderousse, drunk as usual, just laughs it off. Danglar laughs too, and crumples up the letter, making sure Fernand sees where he throws it. Later Fernand picks it up and delivers it to the deputy crown prosecutor, Villefort. He’s the worst possible person to get this letter because Villefort’s father is part of the actual conspiracy to return You Know Who to France. Desperate to hide this spot on his family’s name, Villefort takes advantage of You Know Who’s return to condemn Dantes to life imprisonment in the Chateu d’If, the Alcatraz of Marseilles.

And there Dantes would have died if not for the Abbe Faria, who popped up in Dantes’ cell after he miscalculated the distance he would need to dig his escape tunnel. The two quickly became friends. Faria taught Edmond languages, mathematics, philosophy, and other subjects to pass the time. Then Faria has a stroke that leaves him partially paralyzed. Knowing that the killing stroke will be coming soon, he tells Edmond the location of a treasure hidden on the isle of Monte Cristo off the coast of Italy. When Faria dies, Edmond switches places with the body and escapes d’If by being tossed off a cliff into the sea. He gets free of the shroud, washes up on an islet, and gets rescued by some passing pirates. Edmond bides his time, makes some friends among the local pirates, gets some money, buys his own skiff, and now he’s ready. He goes to Monte Cristo and finds the treasure. And what a fabulous treasure it is!

Over the next couple of decades, Dantes uses his treasure to formulate his plans for revenge. He buys a title from the Italian government and becomes the Count of Monte Cristo. He develops several secret identities to help him nudge events in the way he wants them to go. He rescues a lovely Greek princess from slavery. He makes friends in high and low places. Now it’s 1838 and he’s ready to return to France.

Dantes’ enemies have prospered over the intervening quarter century. Danglars is now Baron Danglars, a wealthy banker. Fernand has married Mercedes and become a Count himself. Villefort is now the chief prosecutor of Paris. Caderousse owns an inn. All of them have wives and (except Caderousse) children who will be convenient pawns in Dantes’ game.

One by one, Dantes brings down the people who tried to destroy him while he saves the ones who weren’t to blame. In the end, the wicked are punished, the good are rewarded, Dantes has learned a valuable lesson about Man’s place in this world in relation to the Almighty, and the young lovers live happily ever after. A satisfying tale in all respects.

The Corsican Brothers, Alexandre Dumas

4 stars

First Sentence: During the early part of the month of March, in the year 1841, I traveled in Corsica.

Thoughts: Before diving into the Weighty Tome that is The Count of Monte Cristo, let’s have an amuse bouche in the form of The Corsican Brothers, a novella where the author himself is a character. Hi, M. Dumas! You are as entertaining a character as you are a writer.

We join our friend Alexandre on vacation in Corsica. There were no hotels or hostels at the time, so he stayed at private homes throughout his journey. The Corsicans, he tells us, are a very hospitable people. One night he stops at the home of Signora di Franchi, a widow with twin sons. One son, Louis, is studying law in Paris while the other, Lucien, has nailed his feet to the ground. He’s a Corsican through and through and has no truck with French culture. Although he does like his French guest and invites him to his rooms to show off his weapons collection. He also lets Dumas come along as he negotiates a truce between two feuding families in their town.

This fight started off over a stolen chicken and quickly blew up all out of proportion. Now it’s a full-blown vendetta. Louis wrote home from Paris asking Lucien to stop the fighting. Lucien grudgingly agrees. After all, the only other option is for one family to completely exterminate the other and Daleks haven’t been invented yet. So he talks to the heads of the families, gets them to agree to sign a peace treaty, and arranges a truce ceremony in the town square in which one family gives the other a chicken, they shake hands, and sign the treaty. Dumas is duly impressed.

When Dumas gets ready to go back to Paris, the Signora asks him to look in on Louis. She’s worried about him because Lucien is worried. The boys, she tells Dumas, were actually conjoined at birth, joined by a flap of skin that was easily severed. The psychic connection between them, however, remained, and Lucien knows that Louis is in some kind of trouble he doesn’t want to tell them about. So Dumas promises and keeps his promise.

Turns out Louis is in trouble. He’s in love with an unfaithful woman. He finds out how unfaithful when he and Dumas go to a dinner party and find the woman in question in the company of a notorious man. Strong words are exchanged and next thing you know there’s a duel on. Louis gives Dumas a letter to send to his mother in case he loses the duel. In it he tells his mother that he died of a brain fever so she won’t know how stupid he was.

As you’d expect, Louis loses the duel. Dumas mails the letter and a few weeks later Lucien knocks on his door. He knows the truth. Louis couldn’t lie to him. Why, at the exact moment of his death, Lucien felt a sharp pain in his abdomen and got a nasty bruise. He came to Paris to avenge his brother’s death like a proper Corsican.

It’s a quick read and a thrilling one. Dumas could write a heckuva page-turner when he wasn’t writing about Napoleon. Napoleon’s birthplace, fine, but the man himself, no.

La Reine Margot, Alexandre Dumas

5 stars

First Sentence: On Monday, the 18th of August, 1572, there was a splendid fête at the Louvre.

Thoughts: In the interval between The Man in the Iron Mask and now I tried to read two of Dumas’ Napoleonic novels, The Whites and the Blues and The Last Cavalier. I ditched both of them two-thirds of the way through because I was in serious danger of being bored to death. Dumas is at his best further back in history. La Reine Margot is set in the 1570s and it has all the love, intrigue, daring adventures, and true bromance that I expect from Dumas.

The titular queen is Marguerite Valois, the sister of King Charles IX and the wife of Henry of Navarre (later to be Henry IV). Her marriage to Henry was a political alliance, trying to reconcile the Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots.

Shortly after the wedding the Queen Mother Catherine Medici began her machinations. We already know not to trust her because she’s a Medici, one of the most infamous families of historical legend. She did not want reconciliation between the Catholics and Protestants. She wanted the Protestants to shut up and go away. She pulled a few strings, had a few people killed, and next thing you know the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre broke out.

The day before the massacre, two young men met in a Parisian inn. They were Annibale Coconnas (Catholic) and Joseph de la Mole (Huguenot). The massacre found them on opposite sides, with Annibale out in the city with his fellow Catholics slaughtering Protestants. That was when he met Henriette, Duchess of Nevers, a friend of Marguerite. It was love at first thrown rock.

La Mole, meanwhile, was not having a good night. He found himself being chased through the Louvre until he found an open door to hide behind. The door happened to be the one to Marguerite’s bedroom where the queen was trying to sleep if all of these CATHOLICS would stop KILLING PEOPLE in the HALLWAY. Some of us have to get up in the morning and go to the King’s levee! Marguerite protected la Mole, nursed his wounds, and fell in love with him. And vice versa.

Coconnas and La Mole are reunited later when they both went into service to Francois, Duke d’Alencon. They snapped at each other a bit, talked about their lovely noble lovers, and soon became the best of friends because it’s not a Dumas novel without a bromance.

Meanwhile the King of Navarre is trying to save himself. He wins Charles’ favor when he saves him from an angry boar during a royal hunt. To Catherine’s dismay, the two are soon BFFs. The Queen Mother visits the astrologer René who checks the stars and tells her that, according to the heavens, Henry of Navarre is destined to become King of all France. But there’s another King between him and Charles, Catherine’s favorite son Henry d’Anjou who has just been elected King of Poland. Catherine decides she wants her favorite son back, so she asks René to put on his other hat and poison various objects for her to scatter around the Louvre to try to kill off the competition.

Catherine’s plan backfires on her thanks to Marguerite and Henry’s counter-scheming, but not before most of the heroes of the piece are killed and also King Charles IX. You will never ever lick your fingers before turning the pages of a book after you read about his death.

In case you were wondering if the dog dies, the answer is yes. Don’t let your dog chew books, either.

This is part of a trilogy about the rise and fall of Henry III, but no library in the state of North Carolina has the other two books. That’s okay, this one stands on its own just fine.