XIX. Our last Dinner at M.
d’Asterac’s Table—Conversation
of M.
Jerome
Coignard and M. d’Asterac—A Message
from Home—Catherine
in
the Spittel—We are wanted for Murder-Our
Flight—Jahel
causes
me much Misery—Account of the Journey-The
Abbe Coignard
on
Towns—Jahel’s Midnight Visit—We
are followed—The Accident
—M.
Jerome Coignard is stabbed
XX. Illness of M. Jerome
Coignard
XXI. Death of M. Jerome Coignard
XXII. Funeral and Epitaph
XXIII. Farewell to Jahel—Dispersal
of the Party.
XXIV. I am pardoned and return to
Paris—Again at the Queen
Pedauque—I
go as Assistant to M. Blaizot—Burning of
the
Castle
of Sablons—Death of Mosaide and of M. d’Asterac.
XXV. I become a Bookseller—I
have many learned and witty
Customers
but none to equal the Abbe Jerome Coignard, D.D., M.
A
What one first notes about The Queen Pedauque
is the fact that in this ironic and subtle book is
presented a story which, curiously enough, is remarkable
for its entire innocence of subtlety and irony.
Abridge the “plot” into a synopsis, and
you will find your digest to be what is manifestly
the outline of a straightforward, plumed romance by
the elder Dumas.
Indeed, Dumas would have handled the “strange
surprising adventures” of Jacques Tournebroche
to a nicety, if only Dumas had ever thought to have
his collaborators write this brisk tale, wherein d’Astarac
and Tournebroche and Mosaide display, even now, a noticeable
something in common with the Balsamo and Gilbert and
Althotas of the Memoires d’un Medecin.
One foresees, to be sure, that, with the twin-girthed
Creole for guide, M. Jerome Coignard would have waddled
into immortality not quite as we know him, but with
somewhat more of a fraternal resemblance to the Dom
Gorenflot of La Dame de Monsoreau; and that
the blood of the abbe’s death-wound could never
have bedewed the book’s final pages, in the teeth
of Dumas’ economic unwillingness ever to despatch
any character who was “good for” a sequel.
And one thinks rather kindlily of The Queen Pedauque
as Dumas would have equipped it... Yes, in reading
here, it is the most facile and least avoidable of
mental exercises to prefigure how excellently Dumas
would have contrived this book,—somewhat
as in the reading of Mr. Joseph Conrad’s novels
a many of us are haunted by the sense that the Conrad
“story” is, in its essential beams and
stanchions, the sort of thing which W. Clark Russell
used to put together, in a rather different way, for
our illicit perusal. Whereby I only mean that
such seafaring was illicit in those aureate days when,
Cleveland being consul for the second time, your geography
figured as the screen of fictive reading-matter during
school-hours.
