The Story:
At the beginning of 1793, after the death of King Louis XVI on the guillotine, France is menaced at its borders by practically all of Europe. Internally, the political leadership is torn apart by dissensions between the Montagnards and the Girondins. One night in March, Maurice Lindey, a lieutenant in the Civic Guard, meets a group of enlisted volunteers who are taking a woman to the guardhouse because she has no pass permitting her to be out at that time. The woman implores the officer for his protection against these men, who show the effects of having drunk many toasts to their future victories. He decides to conduct her to the guardhouse himself, but she talks him into escorting her to her home.
Louis Lorin, Maurice’s friend, tries to persuade the lieutenant to avoid involving himself with an unknown woman who is so afraid of the guardhouse and who might well be a ci-devant, an aristocrat. Maurice, however, is already in love with her; he is afraid only that she is returning from a lovers’ tryst. He escorts her home, but she refuses to tell him her name. Once they arrive in the old Rue Saint Jacques, in the center of the tanneries with their horrible smell, she orders him to close his eyes, gives him a kiss, and, leaving a ring between his lips, disappears. The next morning, he receives a short note in which the woman gives him her thanks for his gallant conduct and says good-bye to him forever. He treasures this note with the ring.
Now that he has the lovely unknown woman on his mind he is not too upset to learn that the same night the Chevalier of the Maison Rouge, back in Paris, attempted a new conspiracy to free Marie Antoinette. The immediate consequence is that the Dauphin is taken away from the apartment where he is imprisoned with his mother, sister, and aunt. The boy is given to Simon, a shoemaker, to receive a so-called republican education.
On another evening, Maurice goes back to the same spot where the beautiful stranger vanished. When he begins reading all the names on the doors in the hope that love will prompt him to identify the right one, he is suddenly surrounded by seven men and thrown into an enclosed space with his hands tied and his eyes blindfolded. Behind the door he can hear the men deliberating to determine whether he is a spy and whether they should kill him. The name of Madame Dixmer is also mentioned. Maurice gathers from their talk that she is the wife of one of the men, apparently the manager of a large tannery. The men continue talking, emphasizing that Madame Dixmer must know nothing of this happening. Maurice wonders why a tanner would want to assassinate him.
Meanwhile, he succeeds in freeing himself from his bonds, and when the door is opened he jumps out, only to find himself in an enclosed garden where he finds no visible means of escape. He leaps through a window and finds himself in a room where a woman is reading. Dixmer follows him and orders the woman to step aside so that he can shoot the intruder. Instead, she stretches out her arms to protect him. Geneviève Dixmer is the unknown woman of his previous encounter. Dixmer offers his apologies, explaining that he is using prohibited acids in his tannery business and that his smugglers were afraid that Maurice is an informer. Maurice is asked to stay for dinner, where he meets Dixmer’s business partner, Morand. At the end of the evening, he is invited to return.
One day in May, Maurice is on duty at the Temple—the apartment where Marie Antoinette is held—when Héloïse Tison comes to visit her mother, the prisoner’s keeper. She is accompanied by a friend who is allowed to go upstairs. After they leave, a letter is discovered in Marie Antoinette’s pocket, a note confirming the death of a friend. The handwriting is familiar to Maurice, and he wonders how Geneviève can have anything to do with the queen. The next day, Marie Antoinette asks to go to the top of the tower for a walk. After a while, turning to the east, she receives signals from a window. Maurice thinks he recognizes Geneviève and immediately goes to the Rue Saint Jacques, where he finds everyone very busy with a new dye. He is amused at his own suspicions.
While he believes that Geneviève feels esteem rather than real love for her husband, Maurice is growing more and more jealous of Morand, whom for no reason at all he suspects of being in love with her. One day he voices his jealousy; Geneviève pleads with him to remain her friend. On the following day, he receives a note from her asking him to send a letter to her husband giving any reason he might think of for stopping his visits. Once more he complies with her wish.
His action greatly upsets Dixmer and Morand, whose tannery business is only a cover to hide their conspiracies. Morand is the Chevalier of the Maison Rouge. After Geneviève refuses to write to Maurice or to invite him back to their home, Dixmer himself goes to see him. True to his promise, Maurice refuses to return. He becomes so lovesick that he cannot do anything until he receives a letter from Geneviève, in which, at her husband’s insistence, she invites him to call once more. He has no suspicion that the conspirators have great need of him. They buy a house close to the Temple and work all night to connect its caves with a trapdoor leading into the prison yard.
When Geneviève expresses a desire to see the queen, Maurice asks her to come to the Temple on the following Thursday. He also invites Morand. When a flower seller offers them some carnations, Maurice buys a bouquet for Geneviève. Later, as the queen walks by on her way to the top of the tower, she admires the flowers, and Geneviève offers her the bouquet.
Simon, who hates Lorin and Maurice because they protect the Dauphin against his cruelty, picks up a flower that falls from the bouquet and discovers a note hidden inside; but the note is blown away by the wind. After Simon gives the affair great publicity, the flower seller is found, tried, and condemned to death. The Chevalier of the Maison Rouge is unsuccessful in his efforts to rescue her; she is executed immediately. The flower seller was Héloïse Tison. Her mother contributed to her doom by further substantiating Simon’s accusations.
When the day set for the queen’s escape arrives, Marie Antoinette asks to go into the yard for a walk. She is to sit by the trapdoor, then pretend to faint; during the confusion, she and her daughter and sister-in-law can be carried away through the tunnel. However, as they are entering the yard, the queen’s little black dog jumps forward and barks toward the concealed tunnel. The conspirators are forced to retreat. The plot confirms Simon’s earlier charge, so he becomes the man of the day. Maurice falls under suspicion, together with his friend Lorin.
Determined to save his friend, Lorin insists that he join the expedition that is to arrest the man who bought the house to which the tunnel leads. Maurice accepts, only to learn that Dixmer is the man. He realizes that he is a mere instrument in the hands of his alleged friends. When he arrives at the house, Geneviève says that she truly loves him, and she promises to be his if he will let the Chevalier go free. He reveals the password to them, and the conspirators escape. The house is burned down. As Maurice runs everywhere desperately calling for Geneviève, Lorin realizes the woman’s identity. He follows his friend through the city on a fruitless search for his love and finally takes him home after he has become completely exhausted. There they find Geneviève waiting for Maurice.
Maurice decides to leave France to take Geneviève away. She is left alone to pack her few belongings while Maurice goes to see Lorin. During his absence, her husband comes after her and forces her to go away with him.
In the meantime, Marie Antoinette is transferred to the Conciergerie. The Chevalier manages to be hired as a turnkey there, replacing the former turnkey, whom he bribed. Dixmer also has a plan for the queen’s escape. His design is to introduce himself in the Conciergerie as a registrar. He hopes to get into Marie Antoinette’s room with Geneviève and kill the two keepers. Geneviève will then persuade the queen to change clothes with her and leave with Dixmer.
The Chevalier of the Maison Rouge brings a small file into the queen’s room with which she is supposed to cut the bars of her window. Meanwhile, he will keep the jailers busy at the other window. Unfortunately, the two attempts, taking place simultaneously, work against each other, and Geneviève is arrested.
After having searched all of Paris to find Geneviève again, Maurice goes to live with Lorin after narrowly missing arrest in his own quarters. He and Lorin are definitely marked as suspects.
It is not until Marie Antoinette’s trial, at which he meets the Chevalier, that Maurice learns what has happened to Geneviève. He goes to the Revolutionary Tribunal every day in the hope of finding her there. Finally she is brought in, and Maurice is surprised to see Lorin brought in as well. The commissary who came to arrest Maurice arrested Lorin instead when Maurice was not to be found. Geneviève and Lorin are sentenced to death.
Maurice sees Dixmer in the audience. After the trial, he follows him and kills him during a quarrel. He takes a pass that Dixmer, to harass his wife and accuse her of adultery, secured for the purpose of entering the room where the prisoners are kept. Maurice runs to the waiting room and, handing the pass to Lorin, tells him he, Lorin, is now free. Lorin, however, refuses his friend’s offer. Maurice is seized, and all three die on the scaffold.
Critical Evaluation:
The Chevalier de Maison-Rouge takes as its subject matter the so-called carnation conspiracy, the attempt by the Chevalier de Rougeville to rescue Marie Antoinette from prison following the French Revolution. As a novel, it is an excellent example of the ability of Alexandre Dumas, père, to interest and enthrall his readers when the ultimate result of the action is a foregone conclusion. The title of the novel is taken from La Maison Rouge which, under the monarchy of pre-Revolutionary times, was one of the companies of the King’s Household Guard, so named because of the brilliant red cloak that was part of the uniform.
The carnation conspiracy is a relatively little-known incident that occurred in September, 1793, while the French queen Marie Antoinette was in prison awaiting execution. An officer in the Household Guard, the Chevalier de Rougeville, entered the queen’s cell in disguise, escorted by a municipal officer named Michonis. De Rougeville caught the queen’s attention and then dropped a carnation behind a stove in the room. The flower contained a note that detailed the plans for a conspiracy to rescue her from captivity. Unfortunately for the plotters, the action was observed by a gendarme, Gilbert, assigned to watch the queen. The incident was reported, and the revolutionary government, under the impression that there was a widespread plot in Paris to rescue the queen, took severe protective measures, including the arrest and imprisonment of everyone deemed by the officials to have had a part in the conspiracy. The queen’s guard was replaced by a new and more numerous force, and a number of the people around her were placed in prison themselves. The harsh measures were effective and, as every student knows, the queen went to her execution as planned.
This footnote to history constitutes the framework on which Dumas chose to hang his plot. The author of a historical novel is certain to be somewhat hampered in his pattern making by the stubbornness of facts and events well-known to the reader and by the discrepancies of time and place. Yet in The Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, Dumas demonstrates small care for historical accuracy and the constraints of fact. At the same time, however, he exhibits a tremendous faculty for seizing the characters and situations that best render historical atmosphere. To write a good adventure story, an author must have rich materials with which he is naturally, and also by education, in sympathy. That these materials have been processed by other authors and are based on fact is of little consequence because adventure, not history, is the author’s prime concern. In this novel, history provided the skeleton that depended on Dumas for life and development.
Dumas takes the reader into the open air of an extremely realistic world. His characters are active, not reflective. Their morality is that of the camp and field. Dumas never gloats over evil and shows no curiosity regarding vice and corruption. His heroes, Maurice Lindey and Louis Lorin, are moved by strong passions, their motives are universal and, as a rule, brave and honorable. Friendship, honor, and love are the trinity that governs their movements. In many respects, these two characters, like most of Dumas’s protagonists, represent extensions of the author’s own personality. Maurice is the romanticist and lover, an embodiment of the author, who goes from mistress to mistress, frequents the society of actresses, and tends to pattern himself upon the flamboyance of the romantic author Lord Byron. Lorin is the perfect gentleman and, like Dumas, the proponent of the virtues commonly found in aristocratic society.
Dumas’s characterization, however, represents the most serious problem in the novel. Dumas was essentially aristocratic in temperament, and these qualities, when projected into the personalities of his protagonists—who ostensibly represent the post-Revolutionary common people—cause a serious contradiction in character delineation. Dumas’s readers may wish simply to overlook such inconsistencies, concentrating instead on the action and adventure of the narrative.
The action and adventure of the narrative constitute the strength of Dumas’s style in this as in the majority of his novels. The illusion of vitality comes across strongly to the reader. The author—a physically active man—reveled in his own physical exuberance and reveals this personal trait in the novel, especially in the two characters that are Dumas in disguise. In the era depicted in The Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, there was much material of a gruesome and painful character that could have found its way into Dumas’s novel. The author, however, never dwells on the horrors of the torture chamber. He is all for the courage shown, not for the pain and cruelty inflicted and endured.
Accordingly, although his action scenes are not historical, Dumas is a master in depicting a duel or battle. The quarrel between Maurice and Dixmer, resulting in the mortal wound to Dixmer near the end of this novel, is an indication of that ability. The gusto of the novel’s action scenes, however, is matched by the simplicity and yet the grandeur of his epic diction. Only such language is capable of portraying the enthusiasm of the protagonists, their loyalty, their courage, and the zest with which they approach a mystery or a beautiful woman.
On the other hand, The Chevalier de Maison-Rouge is not flawless, especially in terms of plot. The structure of the novel occasionally tends to be loose, and there are a number of inconsistencies in characterization. Yet, if judged in terms of the readers’ reactions rather than according to codified mechanics, Dumas’s novel has much unity and coherence.