“I love the name! If they were around today, they’d probably have custom logo T-shirts and a huge Twitter following with their own . . . Hash-tag.” I pause, giving him the chance to appreciate how I crack myself up. “Get it?”
“Is this more American humor?” Alexandre deadpans.
I elbow him. “What? That was a quality quip.”
He laughs lightly, reaching out to tuck a stray wisp of my hair behind my ear. I shiver. He appears unfazed. “They had a real clubhouse. On Île Saint-Louis.”
“That’s where our apartment is,” I answer quickly. “Maybe I’m staying in the Hash Eaters Club headquarters right now. With the ghosts of Dumas and Hugo cringing over my inability to avoid crap and a world where cheese in a can exists.” I draw my hand to my heart and open my mouth in mock horror. “Sacré bleu!”
Alexandre smirks. “Congratulations. You are the first person to utter that phrase on French soil in over two hundred years.”
“I aim to please. Did Dumas do anything else, um, illicit?”
Alexandre gives me a little grin, but I catch something wistful in his eye.
“I do wonder what it must’ve been like back then. All those swashbuckling bon vivant adventurers Dumas wrote about? Some people say he could’ve been one of his own characters.”
“Your family history is definitely a lot more colorful than mine. Famous authors and their affairs, surprise children, missing paintings, a Hash Eaters Club . . .”
Maybe I’m being unfair. It’s true that my family is a little boring comparatively, but then again, I’m a child and grandchild of immigrants—and uprooting yourself and seeking out a new home in a foreign land is pretty damn brave, if you think about it.
“I’m sure there are many exciting secrets in your family’s history. Perhaps even in your life?” Alexandre gently nudges me.
I wish I could come up with a duly flirty response, but the only secret I have is concealing a broken heart over Zaid, and there’s nothing clever or coy about a fresh wound. I pivot the conversation back to Alexandre. “Is it awkward, people knowing things about your family that you haven’t told them? Or having a name that everybody knows?”
“And by people, do you mean you?” He flashes a rakish grin. “Everyone knows Dumas. Everyone studies him in school. The teasing and dumb questions I got in lycée—ridiculous. People actually ask me if The Count of Monte Cristo is based on a true story and if we have some hidden stash of gold on the old Dumas estate. No one believes me when I say I have no idea because the place isn’t even ours anymore. It’s a museum.”
“Really?” My eyes widen. “That sucks.”
I feel a pinch of guilt because when I say that, it’s not only because I feel bad for him. It’s because I wonder if it’s another missed academic opportunity for me, too.
“There’s no family treasure trove, sadly. At least none that we know of. But truthfully, I don’t know if my parents would even—” Alexandre stops short, like he’s said something he shouldn’t. Although it sounded like he was going to complain about his parents, which seems, I don’t know, normal? Then he shrugs. I can’t tell if the gesture is meant for me or for his hidden thoughts. “Besides, it could hardly be based on a true story. Dumas’s main character, Dantès, survived being thrown into the sea in a tied-up sack.”
“Another Giaour connection! I’m not sure how popular sack deaths were during the literature of the 1800s, but Leila, the woman in Byron’s poem that inspired Delacroix’s painting, was drowned in a tied-up sack.” I shudder. If two different authors were writing about that, it must have happened to real people, too.
“Except Dantès planned his as a means to escape a prison fortress and went on to find his fortune hidden in a cave. Dumas had this way of enchanting people, of making them believe in things—romance, passion, adventure—that couldn’t possibly be real. Have you read the book?”
I shake my head. “Dude. It’s, like, a thousand pages. I know the basic story, though.”
“My parents made me read it when I was twelve.”
“Ouch. As a kid of two professors, I feel your pain.”
“It’s obligatoire in our family to know about our most famous ancestor. My dad goes on and on about how it’s our duty to honor the family name. Preserve the cultural legacy of France . . .” His voice hardens. “But it’s all talk. Flowery pronouncements about honor don’t save anything, you know? We’ve already lost so much.”
I blink. “That’s hard-core.”
He relaxes his shoulders. “I love these American idioms. Isn’t that word supposed to be used for pornography?”
My mouth drops open, my cheeks suddenly on fire. The French are direct about sex and nudity. But some cultural norms don’t transfer. They aren’t imprinted on DNA. “I . . . uh . . . I meant that it seems like an intense family burden,” I sputter.
“Ahhh. It’s not that bad. It’s how I learned about the Hash Eaters. From my uncle. He’s the reservoir of family knowledge—the only one trying to salvage what we have left of Dumas. He would probably love to read your essay.”
I ignore his comment because it was devastating enough when Celenia Mondego ripped my essay to shreds, and if an actual Dumas read it . . . Well, I might be the first person to die of impostor syndrome. Still, I can’t deny that it would be amazing to interview his uncle if I manage to come up with a new thesis for my essay—hello, expert source. But I’m not there yet. So I ask, “Who else was in this cannabis club besides your many-greats-grandpa and Victor Hugo?”
“Many renowned artists and writers of the time, including our friend Delacroix. They got the hash from Morocco and apparently wore some kind of vaguely Arabian dress when they met for their hash-inspired hallucinations.”
“Of course they did. It’s a classic colonizer tale: steal or appropriate the interesting stuff; oppress or kill the people who created it.”
Alexandre nods, his face serious. “My sixth-great-grandfather should’ve known better. Dumas’s grandmother was an enslaved woman. He might have been partly, begrudgingly accepted into French society because of noble birth, but he was still subject to ferocious racism. There are incredible stories about Dumas tearing people apart when they insulted his African ancestry. He even wrote a novel called Georges about racism and colonialism. I guess he didn’t think that applied to him and his friends.”
Studying Delacroix’s Giaour series, I came across a lot of writing about the role of Orientalism in his paintings—the prejudiced outsider lens through which the West sees and depicts the East. And especially because of Mom’s academic specialty, we’ve had lots of long dinner conversations and debates about how that worldview still colors how the West sees Islam and the East in general. My mom can draw a road map from Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Egypt to the recent crop of authoritarians who use the rhetoric of Islamophobia and racism to bolster their campaigns. But even though Papa is French, I haven’t thought of my own ancestors in that light; it must feel weird for Alexandre to investigate his family that way. Maybe we all should because the past is complicated, and what is history but the everyday lives of our families?