Alexandre Dumas
THE WOMEN’S WAR
Translated by Robin Buss
576pp. Penguin. Paperback, £9.99.
978 0 1404 4977 8
Alexandre Dumas
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
Translated by Richard Pevear
736pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 0 7139 9952 5
Alexandre Dumas
CAPTAIN PAMPHILE
Translated by Andrew Brown
200pp. Hesperus Press. Paperback, £7.99.
978 1 8439 1134 0
Alexandre Dumas’s books are rarely in vogue, perhaps because they sell so consistently that they are never ripe for rehabilitation. Recently, though, there has been an upturn in interest, partly owing to Dumas’s bicentenary in 2002 and induction into the Panthéon, and partly because long-lost works have been discovered or rediscovered. As he wrote or co-wrote hundreds of novels, plays, travelogues, memoirs and articles (and even a dictionary of cuisine), there is plenty to choose from. The Women’s War is a good example of a vintage Dumas that has been long neglected. The new English translation by the late Robin Buss is the first in over a century, and it is very welcome.
The novel is set in the mid-seventeenth century, during the uprising against Cardinal Mazarin and Queen Anne of Austria known as the Fronde (as Buss helpfully reminds us, the rebels used to fire slingshots at the windows of their enemies, and “une fronde” is a sling). The civil unrest has become “la guerre des femmes”, because Anne and Mazarin, rulers until Louis XIV comes of age, have imprisoned the main leaders of the Fronde, including the great Prince Condé, so his wife has taken over as leader of the rebels. Both women have a young son to protect and promote, and both are surrounded by male advisers, some helpful, some less so. However, the heart of the plot concerns two lesser, fictional women, Nanon de Lartigues in the Queen’s corner and the Viscountess de Cambes in the Princess of Condé’s camp. These two are rivals for the affections of the Baron de Canolles, a dashing young Gascon (it is rare to find a Dumas hero who isn’t a Gascon) who becomes embroiled in political and amorous intrigues. Nanon has a brother, the mercenary Cauvignac, a cynical joker who always manages to turn up at the wrong time and yet proves to be indispensable to the action and moral course of the novel. The real villains of the piece are exposed in a pointed final scene, when the great powers who have been at war with each other and shed much blood in the process are shown laughing and talking together, all differences forgotten in a moment, of no more consequence than a spat at court.
Dumas deals with this period in The Three Musketeers and its sequel, Twenty Years After, and he wrote The Women’s War at around the same time. He seems to have been attracted by the intrigue, lawlessness and high exploits still possible in the seventeenth century, and The Women’s War contains the same elements of bravado, comedy, romance, politics and tragedy made familiar by his more famous work. Dumas makes clear in the novel that the Queen and the Princess are not up to the task of making war, but the women he creates, Nanon and the Viscountess, are among the best of his female creations and outshine the men around them. Buss explains that, “considering that The Women’s War is meant first and foremost as an entertainment”, he has “tended to ‘over-translate’ rather than ‘under-translate’”. The version he produces is clear, fluid and readable.
Richard Pevear seems to have made the opposite decision in his new translation of The Three Musketeers; his stated aim is “to keep as much as possible of the pace, pungency and wit of the original”. He also keeps all the oaths (and there are many) in French, so we find Athos, for instance, saying “Not so loud, sacrébleu!” when his friends are making too much noise. They also call each other “my dear” where Dumas has “mon cher”, which has the unsettling effect of making the dashing blades sound like a group of elderly ladies taking tea. Pevear sometimes takes his methods to extremes; when Porthos has wheedled money for his military equipment out of his mistress Mme Coquenard, we read that she tries to make him stay “by making soft eyes at him”. This will not really do as a translation of “en lui faisant les yeux doux”; we may be able work out what it means, but it sounds distinctly odd in English and interrupts the flow of the narrative. The spelling is American throughout, where it was English in The Women’s War, yet both are published by Penguin Classics. This version does have a lot of pace and little excess baggage, but a less literal rendering would have provided an even better introduction to Dumas’s greatest work.
The most curious rediscovery to have been unveiled recently is Captain Pamphile, an uncharacteristically short, sharp little book. It is seemingly narrated by Dumas himself, not a lofty authorial voice; Dumas centres the story on a group of his friends and is unusually accurate with dates and names, going as far as to give the actual Parisian addresses of some of his acquaintances at that time, around 1830. The action, such as it is, takes place in the studio of the painter Decamps, who has an unusual collection of animals to keep him company while he works – a monkey, a bear and a frog. This collection gains and loses members throughout the course of the narrative, which relates how the animals came into Decamps’s possession and what happened to them once they did. Interspersed with these scenes are the tales of Captain Pamphile, who found the animals in their native habitats and brought them to Paris. Pamphile is a Provençal buccaneer, ostensibly the captain of a respectable cargo ship but in fact a lawless trader who knows neither fear nor mercy. He is an engaging character nonetheless, and the tall stories of his exploits hold the other strands together, until the end, when we focus solely on his last venture and leave the animals and the bohemians behind. This venture, in which Pamphile gains dominion over huge tracts of uninhabitable land off the Mosquito Coast and convinces gullible Englishmen to invest in it and even emigrate there, turns out to be closely modelled on a true story, as Andrew Brown explains in his brief but helpful introduction.
Dumas was always interested in animals and had his own menagerie at Monte-Cristo, the extravagant chateau he built on the proceeds of his bestsellers; he is neither patronizing nor sentimentally anthropomorphic, and treats the animals and their stories with interest and curiosity. The humans are shown to be just as greedy and cruel as their pets, if not more so; yet Dumas refuses to draw a moral for the reader, or rather, in a sly footnote, he claims he won’t and then does it anyway. Andrew Brown’s translation is clear, lively and unfazed by demands such as how to convey Provençal seafaring slang. It is not clear why the actor Tony Robinson (known to millions as Baldric in Blackadder) was asked to write the foreword, but it is, appropriately, brief, odd and diverting. Preoccupations such as the nature of slavery and colonialism make this unusual book feel all too relevant today. The irony and bite in Captain Pamphile are not qualities usually associated with Dumas’s work; 200 years on, he still has the power to surprise.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lucy Dallas is the editor of TLS Online and the In Brief pages.
