Quite a few years ago now, I bought the collected works of several 19th century writers in ebook form from Delphi Classics and resolved to read them all, starting from the earliest works. I didn’t get very far—read one or two novels by each—before life got in the way of my project and I forgot it. But recently, I thought I would occasionally interject one of those novels into my regular reading, and the first one is Captain Paul by Alexandre Dumas, his second novel.
Now, this novel is quiet peculiar, for Dumas was inspired for it by James Fennimore Cooper’s The Pilot, which is about John Paul Jones. I haven’t read The Pilot, but it seems that Dumas has taken some liberties with Jones’s life if not with Cooper’s book. In particular, while naming his character Paul Jones, as Cooper apparently does in his book, and using some actual episodes from John Paul Jones’s life, he makes him a Frenchman (he was, of course, Scottish-American), and he gives him an entirely fictional but romantic lineage as the illegitimate son of a French count (although JPJ was born on an estate, the son of a gardener, so maybe Dumas was making some sort of assertion about his birth).
In the novel, Captain Paul, unaccountably donning two disguises in the first few pages, takes onboard his ship a prisoner of France that he is supposed to deliver to the prison island of Cayenne. The crew is not supposed to speak to the prisoner, but his conduct during a battle with an English ship leads Captain Paul to ask for the story of the prisoner, Hector de Lusignan.
Six months later, Captain Paul visits Count Emmanuel d’Auray, who originally delivered Lusignan to the ship, to tell him he knows he imprisoned Lusignan unlawfully. Lusignan’s crime was to fall in love, without fortune, with d’Auray’s sister, Marguerite, and have a child with her. While d’Auray got rid of Lusignan, his mother, the Marchioness, removed Marguerite’s child. Now, they are trying to force her to marry a fop who has promised d’Auray a commission. Captain Paul announces his intention to get Lusignan a pardon and remove Marguerite’s child from wherever it is hidden. But when he learns Marguerite still loves Lusignan, he decides to help the lovers.
There are more secrets to come, including Captain Paul’s own identity.
This is a short, fast-moving novel once you get over your bemusement about poor John Paul Jones. It is entertaining, but after all the action is over, Dumas couldn’t resist adding an Epilogue, which tells us how everyone ended up and also contains more of Jones’s real (maybe) exploits. The Epilogue, therefore, is about as long as two or three of the chapters, and everything bogs down tremendously. This is the addition of an inexperienced writer, and we all know he improved.
By the way, I believe that the figure depicted on the cover above (which is not the edition I read) is actually supposed to be Alexandre Dumas’s father, who was a famous general.
