The Queen Pedauque

The Queen Pedauque

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 dAstarac and Tournebroche and Mosaide display, even now, a noticeable something in common with the Balsamo and Gilbert and Althotas of the Memoires dun 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 abbes death-wound could never have bedewed the books 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 Conrads 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. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 6571
Author: France, Anatole
Release Date: Sep 1, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Stritzko, Jos. A. V.