On the subject of that quote from Richard Pevear's introduction:
Quote:
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[...] Art is cruel but just, as someone once said. Ninety pages of Maquet’s first draft of The Three Musketeers have been preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and are included in the Garnier edition. A comparison with the finished version shows just how important Dumas’s reworking was. Maquet’s Musketeers would have been forgotten at once; Dumas’s touch transformed them into immortals.
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I think this is quite a naive and unfair assessment. Naive because it supposes that we can predict what work is going gain such longevity; we cannot. Unfair because drafts are not finished works; we cannot know what Maquet may have made of this story if left to his own devices. See
this quote I posted from Guy Kavriel Kay about Tolkien that speaks of the possible gulf between draft and finished product.
That Dumas had a prolific talent is not in dispute (it seems to have been a talent for being prolific, which is something distinct), but it's possible that this talent overshadowed others that may have bloomed if not in his shadow ... or not; there's no way to know now. Given the odds and difficulties in earning an income at this work, it is easy to understand that Maquet might be content to ride on the coattails of Dumas rather than risk obscurity on his own. Success breeds success is a truism of long standing (it may have something to do with
luck), so it was probably a good choice on Maquet's part.