Lost Dumas adventure reflects a fading genius

The Last Cavalier. By Alexandre Dumas, 4th Estate, €11

Perhaps it is fitting that this, Alexandre Dumas’s final work, was found the way it was. Discovered by chance in a Parisian archive in the 1980s, it had, like so many of Dumas’s heroes, come back from the dead and into the lives of an unsuspecting public.

This is an epic, in terms of length, at least. Close to 800 pages long, abandoned abruptly ...