‘Tous pour un, un pour tous’: Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet, and the Musketeers Trilogy

Paraschas, Sotirios

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-69290-6_5

‘Tous pour un, un pour tous’: Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet, and the Musketeers Trilogy

Sotirios Paraschas⁵

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First Online: 20 April 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature ((PMEL))

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the musketeers trilogy by Alexandre Dumas and his unacknowledged collaborator, Auguste Maquet, who took Dumas to court in 1858 demanding to be recognised as co-author of the novels they had written together. I identify a series of metaphors used in the nineteenth century to describe literary collaboration (friendship, association, employer–employee relation) and I examine the ways in which these metaphors are echoed, on the one hand, in the friendship between d’Artagnan and the three musketeers and, on the other hand, in the relation between d’Artagnan and his masters, both of which are modified in the successive reappearances of the characters in the three novels of the trilogy.

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Notes

1.
Jules Claretie, ‘Souvenirs littéraires: Dumas père et Maquet,’ Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 17^e année, no. 850 (8 October 1899): 229.
2.
On the four friends as possessing women in common, see Pierre Tranouez, ‘Cave filium! Étude du cycle des Mousquetaires,’ Poétique, no. 71 (1987): 321–22. It should be noted that d’Artagnan’s affairs in Courtilz de Sandras’s pseudo-memoirs are described in detail and play a much more significant role than in the musketeers trilogy.
3.
Letter dated 4 March 1845, cited in ‘M. Auguste Maquet contre M. Alexandre Dumas père,’ Gazette des tribunaux, 21 January 1858.
4.
Armand Baschet, ‘Réponse à M. Alexandre Dumas sur la question Dutacq,’ Le Mousquetaire, 8 December 1853.
5.
For a complete list of fifty-one collaborators, see the relevant section of ‘Quid de Dumas’, Claude Schopp’s and Dominique Frémy’s appendix to Alexandre Dumas, Mes mémoires, 2 vols (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), 2:1333–60. It should be noted that Dumas was also engaged in collaborative projects for which he chose not to be credited: according to Fernande Bassan, he co-authored but did not sign twenty-nine plays: see Fernande Bassan, ‘Le Théâtre d’Alexandre Dumas père,’ in Roman-feuilleton et théâtre: L’Adaptation du roman-feuilleton au théâtre, ed. Florent Montaclair (Besançon: Presses du Centre UNESCO de Besançon, 1998), 17.
6.
Eugène de Mirecourt, Fabrique de romans: Maison Alexandre Dumas et Cie (Paris: 1845), 24, 28.
7.
See ‘M. Alexandre Dumas contre M. Eugène de Mirecourt: Diffamation,’ Gazette des tribunaux, 17 April 1845. Mirecourt continued his attack from prison, publishing a series of articles, entitled ‘Le mie priggioni’ in La Silhouette (8 June–6 July 1845). A decade later, he also published a biography of Dumas in his series of biographies Les Contemporains, which contains a longer list of Dumas’ borrowings and collaborators: see Eugène de Mirecourt, Alexandre Dumas (Paris: Gustave Havard, 1856). See also Pierre Ledru [Lambert Devère], Réponse à l’auteur du pamphlet intitulé Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1845), a pamphlet which, according to Jean-Yves Mollier, was commissioned by Michel Lévy in defence of Dumas: see Jean-Yves Mollier, ‘La Littérature industrielle,’ in Alexandre Dumas: Une lecture de l’histoire, ed. Michel Arrous (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003), 135. Mirecourt’s pamphlet caused Dumas’s practice to become the object of both scrutiny and satire: see, e.g., Louis Jousserandot’s vaudeville, Les Collaborateurs (Paris: N. Tresse, 1847) and the disproportionately long entry devoted to Dumas in Joseph-Marie Quérard, Les Supercheries littéraires dévoilées, 5 vols (Paris: L’Éditeur, 1847–53), 1:414–577. The same accusations and ridicule are renewed after the Dumas–Maquet lawsuit in 1858: see, e.g., the section on Dumas in Charles Monselet, ‘L’Enfer des gens de lettres,’ Le Figaro, 15 April 1858.
8.
See Alexandre Dumas, Mes mémoires, 10 vols (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1863–84), 8:220n1. According to Dumas’s narrative (which was not challenged by Maquet and was espoused by Gustave Simon), it is Dumas who surprised Maquet when he made Melingue announce his name at the end of the first performance. According to Mirecourt, it is Maquet himself who demanded it: see Mirecourt, Alexandre Dumas, 75. On the stage adaptations of the trilogy, see: Fernande Bassan, ‘Le Cycle des Trois Mousquetaires du roman au théâtre,’ Studia Neophilologica 57, no. 2 (1985): 243–49; Michel Autrand, ‘Les Trois Mousquetaires au théâtre: La Jeunesse des Mousquetaires,’ in Les Trois Mousquetaires, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo: Cent cinquante ans après, ed. Fernande Bassan and Claude Schopp (Marly-le-Roi: Éditions Champflour, 1995), 9–20; J.-C. Yon, ‘Du roman-feuilleton à la scène: Les Cas de Dumas et de Scribe,’ in Bassan and Schopp, Les Trois Mousquetaires, 61–65; Anne Marie Callet-Bianco, ‘Dumas et ses “reliefs de festins”: Les Mousquetaires du roman à la scène,’ in Montaclair, Roman-feuilleton et théâtre, 35–45.
9.
Mirecourt, Alexandre Dumas, 99–100.
10.
See F. W. J. Hemmings, ‘Co-authorship in French Plays of the Nineteenth Century,’ French Studies 41, no. 1 (1987): 37–51. According to Hemmings, collaborative authorship was also genre-specific: tragedies were normally written by a single author while vaudevilles were predominantly written by two or more authors: between 1816 and 1861, the percentage of co-authored vaudevilles never fell below 60 percent while it sometimes rose to 88 percent (ibid., 42). What has to be factored into these numbers is the fact that there were collaborators who were often not credited: young playwrights could serve as uncredited apprentices for some time and, in the case of more established authors, they were very often not particularly keen to admit that they had employed collaborators. For a humorous account of collaboration in the theatre, see Louis Couailhac, Physiologie du théâtre, à Paris et en province (Paris: Lavigne, 1842), 58–63.
11.
For the failed negotiations that led to the lawsuit, see Daniel Zimmermann, Alexandre Dumas le grand (Paris: Julliard, 1993), 479.
12.
‘M. Auguste Maquet contre M. Alexandre Dumas,’ Gazette des tribunaux, 4 February 1858. On Dumas’s professional relations with Maquet after the lawsuit, see Fernande Bassan, ‘La Dame de Monsoreau de Dumas père: Du roman au théâtre,’ in Montaclair, Roman-feuilleton et théâtre, 23–27.
13.
See Lawrence R. Schehr, ‘Rhyparographers: Les Frères Goncourt and Monstrous Writing,’ in Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, ed. Seth Whidden (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 153–66. Cf. the term ‘heterotextuality’ used in the introduction to Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship, ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
14.
For instance, Claude Schopp believes that the chapters of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne which may in all probability have been written by Maquet alone, ‘ce ne sont pas les meilleurs’ [are not the best ones]: see Claude Schopp’s preface to TM, lvii.
15.
Parisis [Émile Blavet], La Vie parisienne (1888) (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1889), 22–23.
16.
A transcription of the surviving pages from Maquet’s manuscript of Les Trois Mousquetaires was published by Charles Samaran as an appendix to Alexandre Dumas, Les Trois Mousquetaires, ed. Charles Samaran (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1959), 795–858; it has also been reprinted in TM, 1285–336.
17.
See entry ‘Maquet’ in Claude Schopp, Dictionnaire Al. Dumas (Paris: CNRS, 2010), 356.
18.
Joseph Goizet, Histoire anecdotique de la collaboration au théâtre (Paris: Au bureau du Dictionnaire du théâtre, 1867), 2.
19.
Ibid., 8.
20.
Ibid., 40.
21.
Ibid., 8.
22.
Ibid., 44.
23.
Ibid., 70.
24.
Ibid., 73, 99, 133.
25.
Gazette des tribunaux, 21 January 1858.
26.
Dumas, Mes mémoires, 8:220n1.
27.
Mirecourt, Fabrique, 45. Maquet denied this in a letter to Dumas: see Gustave Simon, Histoire d’une collaboration (Paris: G. Crès, 1919), 92–94.
28.
‘M. Auguste Maquet contre M. Alexandre Dumas: Collaboration,’ Gazette des tribunaux, 28 January 1858.
29.
‘Demande de M. Maquet contre M. Dumas père en paiement de droits de collaboration littéraire,’ Gazette des tribunaux, 16 November 1859.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Gazette des tribunaux, 21 January 1858.
32.
Letter dated 17 February 1845, cited in Simon, Histoire, 88.
33.
Mirecourt, Fabrique, 32–33.
34.
Gazette des tribunaux, 22 January 1858.
35.
Gazette des tribunaux, 22 January 1858. In his review of Louis Jousserandot’s Les Collaborateurs, which was inspired by and parodied the relationship between Dumas and Maquet, Gautier, despite his opinion on collaboration I quoted earlier, justified the fact that Dumas had recourse to collaborators , by arguing that authors in high demand are forced to employ collaborators ‘qui fassent les recherches, qui prennent les notes, qui élucident un plan confus, et comblent les lacunes par ces lieux communs qui ne font jamais défaut à la médiocrité’ [who do research, who take notes, who clarify a vague outline and fill the gaps with those commonplaces that mediocre minds are never short of] and who were therefore not worthy of signing the works. See Théophile Gautier , Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans, 6 vols (Paris: Hetzel, 1858–59), 5:53.
36.
‘M. Alexandre Dumas père contre M. Auguste Maquet,’ Gazette des tribunaux, 9 May 1869.
37.
Mirecourt, Alexandre Dumas, 76; Mirecourt, Fabrique, 40, 23. On Dumas as a vampire and on ‘literary vampirism’ in general, see Daniel Sangsue, ‘Les Vampires littéraires,’ Littérature, no. 75 (1989): 92–111.
38.
Mirecourt, Fabrique, 22.
39.
Quérard, Les Supercheries littéraires, 1:415.
40.
On the name of the author as a trademark or brand, see Jane C. Ginsburg, ‘The Author’s Name as a Trademark: A Perverse Perspective on the Moral Right of “Paternity”?,’ Carsozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 23, no. 2 (2005): 379–89. For a more comprehensive account of the relations between authorship and the notion of trademark in a twentieth-century American context, see Greg Lastowka, ‘The Trademark Function of Authorship,’ Boston University Law Review 85, no. 4 (2005): 1171–241.
41.
Ledru, Réponse, 6. As Jean-Yves Mollier has pointed out, it is interesting that while Dumas repudiates the accusation of industrialism in the Mirecourt affair, he presents himself, when he runs in the 1848 elections, not only as an indefatigable worker but also as someone who has offered work to hundreds of people. See Mollier, ‘La Littérature industrielle,’ 143.
42.
On Maquet as re-using characters co-created by him and Dumas in the novels he wrote after the end of their collaboration as a way of claiming them as his own, see Thomas Conrad, ‘Reconnaître un personnage méconnaissable: Enjeux de la transfictionnalité entre Dumas et Maquet,’ Poétique, no. 171 (2012–13): 307–20.
43.
Simon, Histoire, 7.
44.
VA, 915.
45.
On Dumas’s sources, see Charles Samaran’s introduction to Les Trois Mousquetaires, ed. Charles Samaran, xi–xx; Richard Parker, ‘Additional Sources of Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires,’ Modern Philology 42, no. 1 (1944): 34–40. On the real d’Artagnan, see Charles Samaran, D’Artagnan, capitaine des mousquetaires du roi: Histoire véridique d’un héros de roman (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1912). On the episodes and characters drawn from Courtilz, see Samaran’s notes in his edition of Les Trois Mousquetaires.
46.
Alexandre Dumas, ‘Les Mousquetaires,’ D’Artagnan, 29 February 1868.
47.
On d’Artagnan as combining the functions of action and narration in a privileged way in the novel, see David Baguley, ‘L’Hypernarrativité dumasienne: À propos des Trois Mousquetaires,’ in Bassan and Schopp, Les Trois Mousquetaires, 75–81.
48.
On D’Artagnan’s heroism as self-interested, see Michael Hohmann, ‘Le Sens du héros dans la trilogie des Mousquetaires,’ in Bassan and Schopp, Les Trois Mousquetaires, 37–43.
49.
Roxane Petit-Rasselle has also noted the shift from d’Artagnan to Athos but sees this as an indication of the fact that the novel, rather than having a single ‘hero’, has ‘un héros quadricéphal’: see Roxane Petit-Rasselle, ‘Le Problème du héros dans Les Trois Mousquetaires,’ The French Review 84, no. 5 (2011): 978–90.
50.
There is some evidence that d’Artagnan may have played a more important role in Maquet’s manuscript. The first idea coming from another member of the group in the final version of the novel (Aramis’s suggestion to warn the queen that Buckingham is in danger) belongs to d’Artagnan in the extracts of Maquet’s manuscripts that have survived: see TM, 1293.
51.
This sentiment is also echoed by Athos (VA, 1033).
52.
See, e.g., Louis Coquelin’s review of Gustave Simon’s account of the collaboration between Dumas and Maquet: ‘On dit: ni la Belle Gabrielle, ni la Maison du baigneur ne valent les Trois Mousquetaires; par conséquent, Maquet ne pouvait se passer de Dumas. Soit! mais ne peut-on pas dire aussi bien avec Gustave Simon: avant d’avoir Maquet comme collaborateur, Dumas était surtout célèbre comme auteur dramatique et n’avait encore écrit, comme romancier, que le Capitaine Paul, Acté, les Aventures de John Davys, le Capitaine Pamphile, Maître Adam le Calabrais et Othon l’Archer, et, après avoir perdu Maquet, il n’a publié aucune œuvre comparable à celles qu’il avait écrites en collaboration avec lui. Par conséquent, Maquet ne lui était pas moins indispensable’ [They say that neither La Belle Gabrielle nor La Maison du baigneur are worthy of Les Trois Mousquetaires; consequently, Maquet could not do without Dumas. So be it! But could not one equally say, with Gustave Simon, that before he collaborated with Maquet, Dumas was mostly famous as a playwright and he had only written, as a novelist, Le Capitaine Paul, Acté, Aventures de John Davys, Le Capitaine Pamphile, Maître Adam le Calabrais, and Othon l’archer and, after losing Maquet, he did not publish any work comparable to those he had written in collaboration with him. Consequently, Maquet was not less indispensable to him]. See Louis Coquelin, ‘Histoire d’une collaboration […], par Gustave Simon,’ Larousse mensuel illustré 5, no. 155 (1920): 11–12.
53.
On the role of fathers, mothers, and sons in the trilogy, see Jeanne Bem, ‘D’Artagnan et après: Lecture symbolique et historique de la “trilogie” de Dumas,’ Littérature, no. 22 (1976): 13–29.
54.
A. M. Callet-Bianco argues that, in Les Trois Mousquetaires, there is already a conflict between an expiring courtly ideal (represented by the queen) and a more modern ethics associated with the centralised power of the king: see A. M. Callet-Bianco, ‘Du service de la Reine à celui du Roi: L’Itinéraire de d’Artagnan dans Les Trois Mousquetaires,’ in Bassan and Schopp, Les Trois Mousquetaires, 31–35.
55.
VB, 1:234–35; 2:678–79.
56.
VB, 2:542–43, 600.
57.
VB, 2:672.
58.
VB, 2:576–78.
59.
Simon, Histoire, 195. Simon also draws a parallel between Maquet and the man in the iron mask: ‘Mais il était l’homme ignoré, l’homme masqué, l’homme au masque de fer’ [But he was the ignored man, the masked man, the man in the iron mask] (ibid., 64).
60.
See Samaran’s introduction to Les Trois Mousquetaires, xxv, n2.

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Sotirios Paraschas

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Paraschas, S. (2018). ‘Tous pour un, un pour tous’: Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet, and the Musketeers Trilogy. In: Reappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69290-6_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69290-6_5
Published: 20 April 2018
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