Henry Llewellyn Williams
translated many works of Alexandre Dumas during
the late 19th century, including the sole published English translation of
Comte de Moret.
Around the end of the 19th century, when Dumas developed
an immense posthumous popularity, he hit on the clever expedient of
converting some of Dumas' successful plays into novels, using Dumas'
dialogue and converting the stage directions into exposition. Williams
constructed at least three such novelizations, based on
Henri III et sa cour,
Catherine Howard, and
Kean.
About 1900, he wrote
D'Artagnan the King-Maker, advertised by the
publisher as a novelization of a Dumas play (a sequel to
Les Trois Mousquetaires)
that never actually existed. Given Dumas' immense oeuvre, it is
hard to prove that no such play ever existed, but the internal evidence of
the book itself is decisive.
Williams is no Dumas. While Dumas' writing was often hasty and
occasionally sloppy, he had wonderful gifts as a novelistic craftsman. His
prose was almost always simple, direct, clear, and vivid; his dialogue so
witty and entertaining that readers almost never notice its implausibility;
and he had a kind of genius for expositional mechanics. Dumas could breath
life into a character in three sentences. If the plot requires that the
character go to a certain place and receive a certain piece of information,
Dumas could arrange the trip and the message for his character is
half-a-page or less, without the reader noticing anything untoward. Dumas
made all of these considerable accomplishments look easy
Mr. Williams had none of these gifts. His plot is one of which Dumas might
have made something: In 1640, Cardinal Richelieu dispatches D'Artagnan and
Porthos to Portugal, then a dependency of the Spanish crown, in order to
organize a revolution in favor of the Duke of Braganza, a Spanish courtier
whom the King has just tried to assassinate. D'Artagnan arranges an
immense loan from one of the last Jewish bankers to survive the
inquisition, recruits the semi-piratical "Brotherhood of the Coast" to the
Duke's cause, and infiltrates besieged Lisbon while carrying on a romance
with one of the Duchess' ladies-in-waiting.
The writing, however, is dreadful, filled with pedantic English word-play,
as boring as it is implausible. For example, Porthos, talking to
D'Artagnan.
"Faith, this poet, I think, has drunk full from Parnassus' pump,"
commented Porthos. "I take back any accusation that there were thieves
here, or the Don Sebastian spirit--it was just a sapper who---"
"Bless us and preserve us! A sapper for Sappho! Porthos, a sapper is
one who carries on his boring with pick and spade, while a Sappho---"
And so, on for 300 pages. Notwithstanding the original publisher's claim,
this dialogue doesn't sound anything like the work of Alexandre Dumas.
This book has nothing to recommend it to the modern reader, neither those
who enjoyed
Les Trois Mousquetaires, nor those who have enjoyed Dumas' other
works.
The circa 1901 Street & Smith edition of this book was reprinted in 1989 by
Amereon, Ltd. and is
currently available through Amazon.com
as "by Alexandre Dumas."
