Lost Classic – Paul Féval and Le Bossu

“Si tu ne viens pas à Lagardère – Lagardère ira à toi!” That apparently incomprehensible warning that, if an unnamed party does not come to someone called Lagardère, he will go to him, enjoys the status of a proverb in France. In fact it is the vengeful leitmotif of the 1857 novel Le Bossu (The Hunchback) by Paul Féval.

Féval was a phenomenon of a kind peculiar to the nineteenth century. Prolific is a wholly inadequate term to describe his literary output. The bibliography of Paul Féval is so immense it could be mistaken for the catalogue of a medium-sized library. It seems impossible that one man in a single lifetime could have produced so large a canon. Even if one assumes that, like Dumas, he had a body of assistants at the height of his career, his productivity is astonishing in the age of the quill pen, requiring constant time-consuming recourse to the inkwell.

One scholar has estimated that Féval wrote ninety-one full novels, besides his other productions, but any assessment is necessarily approximate. It should be borne in mind, too, that many of these novels were extremely long, sometimes multi-volume. His oeuvre also embraced several genres. Although usually remembered as an author of swashbuckling “sword and cape” novels, those represented less than half his canon. He also invented the detective novel and pioneered the vampire horror genre, albeit satirically.

Paul Henri Corentin Féval was born in Brittany in 1816, his native province providing a background for many of his works. By 1836 he had qualified as a lawyer, but he determined to pursue a literary career instead of the law. His writing work spanned exactly half a century: from 1837 until his death in 1887. His first modest success came in 1841 with an adventure novel titled Le Club des phoques. Alongside Alexandre Dumas père and Eugène Sue he became one of France’s leading feuilletonists, publishing his novels in serial form in journals and newspapers. Some critics have taken a patronizing attitude to this form of publishing; if they feel qualified to patronize Balzac, a leading exponent of the feuilleton, then they must indeed have exacting standards.

Charles Dickens, who became a friend of Féval, was similarly an aficionado of publication of his novels in serial form. In one respect, hostile critics have a point: in the case of a prolific author the start/stop process of creation intrinsic to serialisation could disrupt the writer’s concentration and produce a confused text.  Féval, with his prodigious output, was particularly vulnerable to this problem (“If it’s Tuesday it must be Lagardère”) and it shows in many of his works. What saved him was his extraordinary imagination and breadth of subject matter.

In literary terms, it is fair to say he was not the equal of Dumas; but he ran him pretty close. At the height of his success he outsold Balzac. The parallel with Dumas, however, is startling. Both writers owed their success and status as classics (though  Féval’s grip on that title is precarious) to one outstanding novel that seized the public imagination and secured them a permanent following. In the case of Dumas, that breakthrough came with the publication of The Three Musketeers in 1844; for Féval, definitive success came more than a decade later with Le Bossu, in 1857.

Originally, in 1854-55, Féval had been collaborating with Victorien Sardou on a drama entitled Le Bossu, but the project fell through and Féval transformed the material into a novel published two years later. Although the theme of vengeance had been suggested to Féval by Dumas’ The Count of Monte-Cristo, published in 1844-46, he was at pains to make the plot and characterisation very different, so no suggestion of plagiarism attaches to the work.

The novel tells the story of Henri Lagardère, an impoverished but naturally talented swordsman who, in 1699, attempts to penetrate the secret of a lethal sword stroke perfected by the Duc de Nevers, the greatest swordsman in France. In a friendly bout, Nevers toys with him and easily defeats him. The two men become friends and Lagardère tries to help Nevers save his child from the machinations of his cousin the Prince de Gonzague who covets the Nevers fortune. Despite Lagardère’s best efforts Gonzague succeeds in murdering Nevers. In the conflict, Lagardère wounds Gonzague on the hand, leaving an indelible scar, and shouts after the escaping assassin: “If you don’t come to Lagardère, Lagardère will go to you!”

He saves the Duke’s baby daughter Aurore and goes into hiding until she reaches adulthood. Before dying, Nevers has used his seigneurial authority to ennoble him as the Chevalier de Lagardère, but Henri assumes a false identity and plots revenge. The action moves forward to 1717 when a hunchback appears in Paris at the height of the speculative hysteria provoked by the Mississippi Company launched by the Scottish adventurer John Law of Lauriston. The eponymous hunchback is, of course, the heavily disguised Henri de Lagardère, who gains the confidence of Gonzague and brings about his downfall and death.

The Lagardère canon is complicated by the fact that Féval’s son, sensing an insatiable appetite among the French public for ever more Lagardère, penned an indecent number of sequels. In the original novel the two features that caught the public imagination were the ritual warning “If you don’t come to Lagardère…” and the secret sword thrust, the “botte de Nevers”.

This implausibly resulted in the sword point entering the opponent’s skull exactly between the eyes, where there was supposedly a weakness making it more penetrable to the blade. One might have asked, since the objective was to kill an opponent instantly by piercing his brain, whether the same result might have been obtained, less elaborately, simply by aiming at one eye. The elaboration, of course, was the whole point, to add to the drama and mystification. In reality, Féval knew nothing about the science of   the sword and the botte de Nevers provoked much derision among fencing aficionados. As a dramatic literary device, however, it was hugely effective.

Féval never enjoyed the popularity of Dumas in the anglophone world, as his novels were not translated into English until recently. His vampire trilogy (Vampire City, Knightshade, and The Vampire Countess), written long before Sheridan Le Fanu or Bram Stoker composed their classics, has been translated by the science fiction author Brian Stableford (of Warhammer fame). What most addicts of Gothic fiction did not realise was that Féval was ruthlessly satirising the genre, as Jane Austen did in Northanger Abbey, but more extravagantly. He cast Ann Radcliffe, author of the Gothic classic The Mysteries of Udolpho, as his heroine, turning her into what some contemporary commentators have called a prototype of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Féval’s most original contribution to literature was his effective invention of the detective novel, starting with Jean Diable, published in 1862, in the infancy of a genre whose popularity endures today. Mafia-style secret societies and criminal conspiracies flowed from Féval’s fecund pen. His eleven-volume epic of criminal intrigue Les habits noirs is hailed by some as his greatest achievement, but it is Le Bossu that endures in the imagination of French readers.

Féval had a notable fascination with the British Isles and his first significant success, Les mystères de Londres, inspired by the high sales of Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris, was written under the pseudonym Sir Francis Trollop (there is no record of what the chronicler of Barsetshire thought about this). The hero of his Adventures of an Emigré moves from Paris, in 1794, to London and finally to Glasgow. Due to the influence of Sir Walter Scott, nineteenth-century French novelists had a penchant for Scotland (one of Dumas’ less enduring plays was entitled Le Laird de Dumbicky). Ireland was another focus of Féval’s interest; one of his novels was set in Galway and titles such as Les Molly-Maguires reflect his attraction to the Irish nationalist cause.

Le Bossu is available today in English translation and, along with Féval’s more enduring novels, is still in print in France. It has long exercised a fascination, second only to Dumas’ Musketeer series, for French film and television directors. The most distinguished translation of Lagardère to the screen was the 1997 version (distributed in America as On Guard!) starring Daniel Auteuil as the hero and directed by the appropriately named Philippe de Broca de Ferrussac. It achieved an often lyrical effect, featuring unusual French landscapes and, as one would expect of so fine a director as Broca, represented cinema of a high order.

Shortly after completing the seventh volume of Les habits noirs in 1875, Féval lost most of his hard-earned money in a financial scandal. The scale of his loss, 800,000 francs – around £1.7 million in today’s money – shows how lucrative his writing had been. Rather than yielding to bitterness, Féval underwent a profound religious conversion, becoming a devout Catholic. Many of his later works are religious in tone and in 1880 he wrote a polemical book entitled Pas de divorce! in response to La Question du divorce by Alexandre Dumas fils.

Féval was again impoverished in 1882 by falling victim to an embezzler. His health failed and due to paralysis he was unable to write. His wife’s death in 1884 was a further blow to the stricken author. He continued, however, to find consolation in his religious faith and was looked after by the Brothers of St John of God in their hospice until his death on 8 March, 1887. It was, in human terms, a sad ending to a brilliant career; but Féval clearly saw his plight in a different perspective – the release from wealth and worldly distractions preparing him more adequately for salvation, in an imminent eternity.

In the pantheon of writers of swashbuckling fiction Paul Féval stands high, one of that fraternity headed by Dumas who, with a few strokes of the pen, could evoke an atmosphere of high adventure and low intrigue, of boots and spurs, of the wind billowing the cloaks of cavaliers galloping on missions of life or death, always accompanied by the clash of steel, joyous laughter and a passion for justice. “Si tu ne viens pas à Lagardère – Lagardère ira à toi!”