Isaac Laquedem (The Prologue)

Isaac Laquedem (1853) is Dumas’s grand reimagining of the Christian legend of the Wandering Jew: a sweeping epic journey through myth and history that follows the adventures of a man, cursed with immortality by Jesus Himself, who is condemned to endlessly wander―an eternal outcast until Christ’s return. For Dumas, Isaac Laquedem was to be his masterpiece, a work that would rival Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid―in his own words, “the capital work of my life.”

Here is the prologue of this great work, which by itself is nearly one hundred pages, and will serve as a tantalizing introduction to the rest of the novel.