"ventre de bische!"

And so, all good things must come to an end. Damn it. Despite various diversions, interruptions and other, more pressing demands made on my reading, I've done the last page of The Fort-Five. I did not want the book to end. I could just pull another volume from my shelf of Dumas, and go on, and I will, but not yet. One of the best things about acquiring old books not individually, but in these great, neglected sets: no mater how long one has owns such a thing, no matter how much one has already read, it seems there's always another, and another, and yet another volume as yet unopened, the pages yet to be cut. If used judiciously, my shelf of Dumas, with my shelf of Scott, my shelf of Guy de Maupassant, my shelves of Dickens, etc., should see me through to whatever end I come. Were I to lose every other book I own, and be left with just my sets, -- heaven help me -- I might read away the rest of my days. (I'm greedy though, and wouldn't like to think I might not always add to what I have. I'm inspired by one of our regular customers at the bookstore where I work; an old gentleman, quite bent, who must balance his acquisitions on one frail arm so as to have the other free to use his stick. He shops and buys our used books nearly every week, buying history, and fiction, and whatall by the basket. Just the sight of the dear man gives me hope.)

One can never really come to the end of Alexandre Dumas. Obviously, I'll read The Count of Monte Cristo again, but even if I didn't, there are so many other Dumas novels, and so many I've yet to read, or reread. Whatever else might be said of the old boy, good and bad, there will always be another Dumas. That, of course, is one of the reasons for the failure of his reputation: he wrote too much, or rather, he put his name to too many books, whether he wrote them, in the strictest sense, himself or not. Dumas worked from collaborators outlines, wrote up what others wrote for him first, did not always acknowledge what he used, and so on. Who cares? Matters now only to scholars and fussbudgets, frankly. And Dumas' work can be uneven, tedious at stretches, ridiculously plotted, even sometimes silly. What of it? Is Balzac any less bombastic, any less dependent on coincidence, etc.? Not everything from the pen of either Frenchman's a masterpiece, but then, who else wrote so much so well, and then who wrote only masterpieces? Name one major author without minor work. Besides, I've always been fond of my favorites even in their minor turns. Half a Dumas might yet be better than none, or a whole Scott, in some books, for that matter.

Another reason he came so late into the Pantheon? Dumas wasn't important. Sounds silly, but that argument's been made. Dumas might have given us immortal fiction, his Edmond Dantès and his d'Artagnan might be better known and loved than any other characters in the whole history of French literature after Gargantua and Pantagruel, but Dumas wasn't serious, somehow. Romance was not thought the proper stuff of literature. Dumas wrote only for popularity and money. Dumas' books were the sort of thing read just by boys. It's all been said about Twain, too.

The bones of Alexandre Dumas, now however white, belonged to a man who wasn't, quite. That may well have been another reason they were left so long in a provincial grave.

"The basis of these theories was an idea which in our opinion was quite as good as any other; it was as follows: chance is God's reserve." -- That's Dumas, explaining the philosophy of Chicot, near the conclusion of The Forty Five. Dumas might have smiled to find that more than chance would ultimately determine his place in literature, and in France.

There's not, for me, much to admire about Jacques René Chirac. Had he not done this one noble thing, I don't know that as an American, I would now give the old bastard a thought, but I am grateful to him for what he did for Dumas. On the 30th of November, 2002, the then President of France brought Dumas back to Paris. Calling the great novelist one of France's, "most turbulent children, one of its most talented and one of its most creative geniuses," Chirac presided as Alexandre Dumas was reinterred in the Panthéon of Paris. His coffin draped in a blue velvet cloth on which was written, "tous pour un, un pour tous", -- "One for all, and all for one," carried by an honor guard dressed in the uniform of The Musketeers, Dumas, at last, was laid to rest with Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola...

"With you, it is childhood, hours of reading relished in secret, emotion, passion, adventure and panache that enter the Pantheon. With you we dreamed. With you we still dream," Chirac said, and then bowed to Dumas.

As Dumas père himself famously said, "All generalizations are dangerous, even this one," yet some things are true, no matter who says them, and worth saying, even late.

I add my thanks again, to all the rest.