The Bastard of Mauléon: A New Translation

France, the mid-fourteenth century. The war with England has been running for a generation, and in the intervals between campaigns something worse has filled the countryside: the Free Companies, bands of mercenary soldiers with no master and no restraint, taking what they need from whoever cannot stop them. Into this world a man must make his way on the strength of what he can do, because what he was born to - the wrong side of his father's bloodline, the legal nowhere of the bastard son - gives him nothing.

His name is Mauléon. He has his father's blood and none of his father's rights. He has the skills the war has taught him and the intelligence to use them in a world where the rules keep changing. What he does not have, and what the novel traces his attempt to claim, is a place - a legitimate standing in a society that has very precise ideas about what legitimacy means and who gets to have it.

The Bastard of Mauléon is Dumas in the historical period he understood most deeply: the late medieval world where chivalric ideals and brutal realities coexisted without resolution, where loyalty was the highest virtue and betrayal the most common currency, and where a man's worth was determined less by his birth than by what he was willing to do and capable of surviving. Written in the same extraordinary burst of creativity that produced The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, it has the same forward momentum, the same gift for historical atmosphere, and the same understanding that the best adventure stories are also, always, stories about who a person is when the world gives them no easy answers.

One of Dumas' most overlooked novels - and one of his most purely compelling.