The Knight of Sainte-Hermine

The Knight of Sainte-Hermine (published in France in 2005 under the title Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, and translated to English under the title The Last Cavalier) is an unfinished historical novel by Alexandre Dumas, believed to be Dumas' last major work. The novel was lost until the late twentieth century. Dumas scholar Claude Schopp found an almost-complete copy in the form of a newspaper serial. A number of Dumas' previously forgotten works have been found, but this novel is the largest and most complete at 900 pages.

The novel is a swashbuckling tale set during the rise of the Napoleonic Empire. A key scene features the Battle of Trafalgar and the death of British admiral Horatio Nelson. It was translated into English and published in 2007 as The Last Cavalier, and has since been translated into other languages.

The novel The Knight of Sainte-Hermine concludes the Sainte-Hermine trilogy, a story started in the 1857 novel The Companions of Jehu (Les Compagnons de Jehu), and continued in the 1867 The Whites and the Blues (Les Blancs et Les Bleus). It was originally serialised from January 1, 1869 to November of the same year in the French newspaper Le Moniteur Universel. The rush to publish in a serialised form resulted in the novel's being published with errors, but the newspaper carried almost the entire work. Only a short section was missing at the end, presumably unfinished because of Dumas' final illness. The author died in December 1870.

The novel was lost until 1990, when the Dumas expert Claude Schopp discovered references to its material and finally the newspaper serial in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Schopp's articles on Dumas' work have been part of a critical reappraisal of the writer, contributing to the government's honoring the author in 2002 by a reinterment ceremony at the Panthéon de Paris.

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