Lost novel of Dumas resurrects mystery of Nelson's death

Lord Admiral Horation Nelson is a historic hero of mine; Alexandre Dumas one of my favorite novelists. Now their paths cross. From The Australian:

A QUARREL about who killed Admiral Horatio Nelson is about to be revived with the first publication of the lost final novel of Alexandre Dumas.

The French marksman who shot the British commander at Trafalgar is the hero of Le Chevalier de Saint Hermine, a 900-page work Dumas was turning out for serial publication in the months before his death in 1870.

The imminent appearance of the lost Dumas, the product of eight years of detective work by Claude Schopp, a Dumas expert, had been kept secret and has taken the literary world by surprise.

Mr Schopp gathered the text from newspapers of the period and other places, including a library in Prague.

Britain has always doubted French claims that Sergeant Robert Guillemard, a Provencal fusilier, shot Nelson from the mizzenmast of Le Redoutable and survived to tell the tale.

Midshipman John Pollard was credited by Captain Thomas Hardy, commander of HMS Victory, with killing the sniper, who was described as an anonymous infantryman.

As an older man, the then Commander Pollard wrote to The Times in 1863 to complain that another former midshipman, Edward Collingwood, was trying to take the credit.

Dumas appears to have exploited uncertainty over the identity of the marksmen to put his hero's finger on the trigger. By weaving historic fact with swashbuckling fiction, the author of The Three Musketeers was pursuing his life's mission of bringing French history to the masses through fiction.

St Hermine is the long-missing third part of a trilogy about a band of aristocratic adventurers set during the revolutionary terror and the Napoleonic empire. Hector de St Hermine appears briefly in the previous two parts, Les Blancs et les Bleus and Les Compagnons de Jehu.