lection

joseph balsamo

4 september 2024

Joseph Balsamo (1853) was a well-known novel in its day, part of the Dumas père stable of properties. I wondered why it was taking me so long to creep through the book on my Kindle. I then found the novel in my library - in five hefty blue-bound volumes, sumptuously produced by publisher Louis Conard in 1939. It runs at least 1,700 pages. No wonder I'd sit up well into the night and then have my Kindle tell me I'd only read one percent of the text.

Eight years after the success of Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, Dumas and his team decided to do a prequel of sorts set in the "Maison-Rouge" universe. The earlier novel featured the execution of Marie Antoinette; the prequel shows her newly arrived in France, acquiring allies in the form of a decayed aristocratic family once called Maison-Rouge and now going by the humbler-sounding name Tavernay.

Who is Joseph Balsamo, then? To back up to the start of the novel, he is a mysterious sage from the East who appears in France c1770, keen to help a sinister international organization of freemasonish types. Balsamo, if that is his real name, asks for 20 years to end the French monarchy forever. Most supervillains would set about pushing some economic levers or corrupting the military. Instead, Balsamo sets a number of heartthrobby romantic complications afoot, while doing some parlor tricks for show and issuing Cassandric prophecies.

Dumas, or Dumas + Auguste Maquet, or whoever, tell the reader that

Les grands événements de l'histoire sont pour le romancier ce que sont les montagnes gigantesques pour le voyageur. Il les regarde, il tourne autour d'elles, il les salue en passant, mais il ne les franchit pas. (Chapter 64, Volume 3, p. 122)

The great events of history are, for the novelist, what enormous mountains are for the traveller. He gazes at them; he goes around them, he waves to them as he passes, but he doesn't get into them.

But the authors constantly violate their own method. We might suppose we'd see the various fictional characters front and center: Andrée de Taverney, the stuck-up aristocratic maiden; Gilbert, the aspiring doctor who is infatuated with her; Philippe, Andrée's brother, whose Enlightenment principles belie his noble birth; Lorenza, the fiery Italian beauty who can't break free from Balsamo's spell.

And we do see a lot of them. But we see just as much of Louis XV, his dauphin grandson, the dauphin's bride Marie Antoinette, and the king's mistress Mme. du Barry. Gilbert is a huge fan of the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So naturally, the first person that Gilbert meets when he arrives in Paris is Jean-Jacques Rousseau; randomly, a bit later, Rousseau runs into Jean-Paul Marat. This is fun but it's not exactly skirting the mountains of French history.

About halfway through, we lose sight of most of the lesser personages, and get caught up in the court-and-cabinet scheming whereby the Duc de Richelieu removes the Duc de Choiseul from the ministry and replaces him with the Duc d'Aiguillon (Richelieu's nephew). This is briskly handled, but the reader doesn't care about these dukes, and has to spend hundreds of pages with them as the characters s/he has come to care about languish offstage.

I eventually ran aground about 2/3 of the way through this novel. The minutiae of 18th-century French politics had taken over, with any attractive dramatic narrative peeping through the fog very intermittently. It seems absurd to give up now, but partway through four volumes of a five-volume novel should count as the several books it physically is. And I just gotta read something else at this point.

Dumas, Alexandre. Joseph Balsamo. ["Mémoires d'un médecin."] 1853. Illustrated by Fred-Money. Paris: Louis Conard, 1939.

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