History
- "You can imagine my surprise when, among reels and reels of microfilmed archives, I stumbled upon an almost complete serialised novel, entitled The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, and signed by Alexandre Dumas". —Claude Schopp (Bell, 2005)
The novel The Knight of Sainte-Hermine concludes the Sainte-Hermine trilogy, a story started in the 1857 novel The Companions of Jehu (Les Compagnons de Jehu), and continued in the 1867 The Whites and the Blues (Les Blancs et Les Bleus). It was originally serialised from January 1, 1869 to November of the same year in the French newspaper Le Moniteur Universel. The rush to publish in a serialised form resulted in the novel's being published with errors, but the newspaper carried almost the entire work. Only a short section was missing at the end, presumably unfinished due to Dumas' final illness. The author died in December 1870.
The novel was lost until 1990, when the Dumas expert Claude Schopp discovered references to its material and finally the newspaper serial in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Schopp's articles on Dumas' work have been part of a critical reappraisal of the writer, contributing to the government's honoring the author in 2002 by a reinterment ceremony at the Panthéon de Paris.
Schopp kept the find a secret until 2005. He confided only in Jean-Pierre Sicre, his editor, and Christophe Mercier, a literary critic. Schopp received other contributing material from archives in the former Soviet Union after the change in government. During the last 10 years before the announcement, Schopp converted the serialised material to novel form, corrected the many errors, including confused names and places; did other editing, and wrote a final two and a half chapters based on Dumas' notes.
The novel was released on June 3, 2005 by Editions Phébus. Schopp had debated whether to complete the novel, and finally wrote the final two-and-a-half chapters. This section was printed in italic to distinguish it from Dumas' work. The novel, issued with a run of 2,000 copies, immediately became a bestseller in France, quickly selling 60,000 copies. In 2007 Pegasus Books in New York published an English translation entitled The Last Cavalier.
Le Salut de l'Empire, a sequel written by Schopp incorporating additional Dumas materials, was published in French in 2008.
Similarly, in 2002 Reginald Hamel, a Canadian scholar, found Dumas' unpublished five-act play, The Gold Thieves, in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It was published in 2004 in France by Honoré-Champion.
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