Lately I have been reading about a literary flap going on in France, about a new film starring Gerard Depardieu as – guess! – a ghostwriter! It’s called L’Autre Dumas (The Other Dumas), and explores the 150-year old theory that Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, used a ghostwriter named Auguste Maquet to write his famous stories for him. Despite my degree in Literature, I had never heard about this controversy that has not yet been resolved. I still don’t know what the truth is, although I’m pretty sure it’s less dramatic than the movie portrays. Some scholars claim Maquet was simply a researcher, nothing more. Others claim Maquet was the unsung genius behind a flamboyant bon vivant who was too busy spending money to actually work. The facts that no one seems to dispute are: Dumas was a writer who loved high drama in fiction – and also in life. He had a hedonistic lifestyle and enormous flair for living large – and little or no m...