Julian Barnes

Dumas would ride his horse into a stable, seize an overhead beam, grasp the horse tightly with his legs, and lift it off the ground.  He also claimed to have 365 illegitimate children scattered round the world: one for every day of the year.  The energy made you wince.  

From his first novel, Metroland, which was published in 1980.

The "Dumas" referred to here is the famous French novelist, Alexandre Dumas, père, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.   Alexandre Dumas, fils -- who was a very successful dramatist -- was one of his illegitimate children.  

But most historians attribute the lift-the-horse feat not to Dumas, père, but to his father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas -- a general in Napoleon's army who was himself the illegitimate son of a French officer and a Haitian woman.

I don't know what to say about all this, except that it makes a good "French-day the 13th" subject.

General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

Julian Barnes

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind . . . Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him.  He wasn't sure what this might mean -- except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

From his 2011 short story, "Homage to Hemingway."  Barnes, an English novelist whose best-known book is Flaubert's Parrot (1984), is a Francophile, and his books have been very successful in France -- but we won't hold that against him.

In this story, a novelist talks about the Ernest Hemingway story, "Homage to Switzerland," with three different groups of students at three different times.  The Barnes story resembles the Hemingway story it discusses in certain ways, and the protagonist of the Barnes story has certain similarities to Barnes himself. 

Is this a case of life imitating art?  Art imitating life?  Art imitating art?  None of the above?

Julian Barnes