When the troubles of the world overwhelm, read some Dumas — and the troubles of the past are there to distract you! All the terrible things that happened in the past are there to amuse and/or horrify you as entertainment. Perspective, I guess?

I recently learned that Etteilla turns up as a character in Alexandre Dumas’ One Thousand and One Ghosts so I reserved the copy in the library here and it came in yesterday. I figured it might be like Marie d’Agoult’s encounter with Mademoiselle Lenormand — a brief snapshot of a visit to the fortune teller. No! Etteilla is indeed one of the characters at the house telling ghost (and one vampire!) stories to the young playwright, as he was known then. Yes, not even a roman à clef but straight up this really happened.

Now, this is Dumas so cum grano as always. The book is set in 1831; Etteilla died in 1791. Unless he was a ghost himself telling the tale — and if so, Dumas missed a trick! — the author is stretching the limits of his poetic license. But that’s Dumas anyway, right? Nothing gets in the way of a good story. And these are good; while there are far less than 1001 ghosts, we begin right off the bat with the indelible image of a decapitated head speaking to its murderer. The question of heads living on after decapitation was one which obsessed the French in Dumas’ time and lead to the end of capital punishment. The mayor of the town where this occured, M. Ledru, invited the accidental witness Dumas to his home for a salon with friends that ends up being the framing for these gruesome tales. One of the friends is Etteilla, who is described:

Well, he’s a character from Hoffman. All his life long, he has tried to apply cards and numbers to foretelling the future; everything in his possession ends up being staked in the lottery — first time round, he got a tern [three number draw prize] and he’s never won anything since. He knew Cagliostro and the Count of Saint-Germain: he claims kinship with them, and says that like them, he possesses the secret of the elixir of long life. His real age, if you ask him, is two hundred and seventy five: first he lived for a hundred years, without infirmities, from the reign of Henry II to that of Louis XIV; then, thanks to his secret, although he died in the eyes of ordinary folk, he lived out three other revolutions of fifty years each…He will live on like this — he says so expressly — until the Last Judgment. In the fifteenth century they’d have burnt Alliette, and they’d have been wrong to do so; today they content themselves with feeling sorry for him, and they are just as wrong. Alliette is the happiest man on earth: he talks of nothing but Tarot, cards, spells, the Egyptian sciences of Thoth, and the mysteries of Isis. On all these subjects he publishes little books that nobody ever reads, and yet there is a bookseller, as crazy as he is, who publishes them pseudonymously, or rather under the anagrammatical name Etteilla; his hat is always full of booklets. There, just look at him; he’s holding his hat under his arm, he’s so afraid that somebody might take his precious books from him (28).

Dumas regards the man whom he describes as ‘a plump little man, stocky, with a sphinx-like face’ which seems entirely apropos. When it is the cartonomancier‘s turn to tell a tale (‘The Bracelet of Hair’) he prefaces the story with some remarks about his extraordinary knowledge:

Death does not kill life; death is merely a mode of transformation of the human body; death kills memory, that is all. If memory did not die, each person would remember all the peregrinations of his soul, from the beginning of the world up until now. The philosopher’s stone is nothing other than this secret; it was this secret that Pythagoras discovered, and that was rediscovered by the Count of Saint-Germain and by Cagliostro; it is this secret that I possess in my turn, and which means that my body will die — as I can definitely recall has already happened to it four or five times…and then again, when I say that my body will die, I am wrong: there are certain bodies that do not die, and mine is one of them (109).

He gives the doctor who is there permission to open his tomb after his apparent death. We can only assume Etteilla continues to walk among us!

In the biographical note at the end it mentioned how Dumas was first known for his plays, which I knew but also thought hmmm I haven’t read any of them. Since it mentioned La Tour de Nesle as ‘one of the great masterpieces of French melodrama’ I thought I should at least bookmark it to read later, finding it at once over at Internet Archive.

Reader, I read it. A ripping tale with Gothic styling based on historical events from the fourteenth century — probably misogynist slander to make sure women could never inherit power again in France — but with several twists that only Dumas could imagine. What a read! I want to see a revival immediately. Clues dropped that you assume will come out somehow as events unfold BUT NOT LIKE THAT! Oh my :-O I can see how this play would have made his name.

The fifteenth century legends about what happened in the early fourteenth clearly influenced popular imagination: this incident also became the subject of the first novel in Maurice Druon’s seven-volume series Les Rois maudits which has been turned into two television series and at least one film — and apparently inspired Game of Thrones.

My advice is skip reading the history until after you’ve read the play. But I might see about the 1970s television series…