Three Musketeers (Barnes & Noble Classics Series), Page 2

  Serial publication was not without its constraints, however. There were deadlines to be met and a certain volume of words, lines, or pages to be produced. This frequently led to an emphasis on dialogue, since each speaker’s comments would trigger a new paragraph break and thus a new line, making pages accumulate more quickly and the action seem more fast-paced. Dumas, who was known primarily as a dramatist prior to the publication of The Three Musketeers, was ideally suited to take advantage of such a technique. He knew how to portray characters, reveal conflicts, and describe elements of the decor in dynamic, dramatic exchanges of speech. He understood how to vary pacing, when to present or postpone information, and how to conclude an act or scene so as to promote suspense or heighten emotion. There are numerous examples of the dramatic—if not to say theatrical—nature of serial fiction writing in The Three Musketeers. Take chapters 52—58, which describe the incarceration and eventual escape of the book’s villainess, Milady (de Winter), from a cell in her English brother-in-law’s castle. Replete with references to performance (for example, postures and expressions, lighting, costuming, and setting),4 this series of chapters advances by increments that seem to be more like acts in a play than sections of a novel.5 What is more, each individual chapter in this sequence begins and ends in a way that leaves the reader eager to discover what follows.6 Such a compositional strategy all but insured future newspaper sales and created an avid audience for each episode of the story.

  From his historical dramas like Henri III et sa cour (Henri III and His Court, 1829) and Charles VII chez ses grands vassaux (Charles VII at the Home of his Principal Vassals, 1831), Dumas also learned how to create period flavor through a limited number of precise, colorful details about customs, costumes, and locations, and how to mix real characters and actions with invented or artistically embellished ones. In fact, in the preface to Charles VII, Dumas declared history to be nothing more than a nail ( “un clou ”) on which he hung his dramatic canvas. While not as perfectly suited to The Three Musketeers, such a formula is nonetheless suggestive of some of Dumas’s practices in that book as well. For instance, although the novel features actual historical figures—including King Louis XIII of France; his Queen, Anne of Austria; his prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu; and England’s Duke of Buckingham—and recognizes their importance as catalysts of events, those individuals are relegated to the margins of the plot for much of the time. In the foreground are less historically prominent and partially or wholly imagined personages, including D’Artagnan; the Musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis; and the dangerously seductive Milady. It is they who move the action forward and generally become the focus of our attention. Real events are also part of Dumas’s tale, but are frequently modified or enhanced for narrative effect. Thus, while the siege of the city of La Rochelle, a port on France’s Atlantic coast that was then a Protestant stronghold, and John Felton’s assassination of the Duke of Buckingham are historically attested facts, not all of the details or parameters of those events as they are described in The Three Musketeers are authentic. This mixture of fact and fiction is not unique to Dumas’s work, of course, and is a subject to which we shall return again later.

  If Dumas’s serialized novel quickly attracted a faithful and fervent audience, it was not only because the author proved to be a master storyteller whose writing was vividly alive with emotions and actions, dialogues and duels, but also because it skillfully combined literary genres then popular with readers. By the time Dumas composed The Three Musketeers, Honoré de Balzac and others had already made the novel of initiation, or Bildungsroman, a familiar and successful form of French real ist fiction.7 The Three Musketeers shares many of the characteristics of that genre. Like most such works, Dumas’s story focuses on an inexperienced youth who travels from the provinces to Paris in search of a broader knowledge of the world and in the hope of earning fame or fortune or both.

  In chapter 1 of Dumas’s book, young D‘Artagnan leaves his parents’ home in southwestern France and sets off on the road to Paris, where he hopes to join the corps of the King’s Musketeers. Before D’Artagnan leaves, his father gives him three “gifts”—fifteen crowns; a letter of introduction to Monsieur de Tréville, a fellow Gascon and former comrade-in-arms of D‘Artagnan père and now the captain of the Musketeers; and a horse whose peculiar yellow color and old age significantly detract from the young man’s image as a noble and dashing hero. He also gives the lad his sword. Together with these items, the senior D’Artagnan offers his son three bits of advice: Never sell this horse; do not brook insults or fear duels for, although by law the latter are illegal, “it is by his ... courage alone, that a gentleman can make his way nowadays” (p. 13); and always serve the King and the Cardinal.

  Soon after leaving home, D‘Artagnan’s paternally encouraged susceptibility leads him to quarrel with a gentleman whom he will subsequently refer to as “the man from Meung” (the name of the town where they meet and where he also glimpses a beautiful woman addressed as Milady). The encounter does not end well for young D’Artagnan. Not only will he be wounded in the confrontation with the man from Meung; he will also have his letter of introduction taken from him and his sword split in two.8 Later, when he arrives in Paris, D’Artagnan will already be short of funds and will sell his risible and exhausted horse for cash. That sale provides him with the means to procure inexpensive lodgings and to have a new blade made for his sword. This inauspicious beginning is followed by a series of squabbles with three men (the Musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis) he meets shortly after his arrival in the French capital. He agrees to a duel with each and, with the same brash courage that he has already displayed in Meung, schedules those contests back to back.

  D‘Artagnan’s impetuous bravado in these early encounters, along with his ignorance of the codes of behavior and the political rivalries at work in Paris and at the royal court, make it clear that the young man will need more than daring and a certain native intelligence if he is to achieve his goals. He will have to find mentors who can help him understand the complicated relationships, hidden truths, and moral subtleties of modern (that is, seventeenth-century) French life. He finds that help in the form of two surrogate father figures: Monsieur de Tréville, the captain of the King’s Musketeers, and Athos, the oldest of the three Musketeers with whom he has recently quarreled. D’Artagnan also meets Constance Bonacieux, the young and beautiful wife of his Parisian landlord and laundress to Queen Anne.

  Constance will not only offer the young man an opportunity to prove his mettle, but will also win his heart. She tells D‘Artagnan that the King has ordered the Queen to wear the diamond studs he gave her to an upcoming ball. Unfortunately, Anne no longer has those studs in her possession. She has given them, with her affections, to England’s handsome Duke of Buckingham. Cardinal Richelieu, who is in love with the Queen and has been spurned by her, knows this and hopes to take advantage of the difficulty the situation presents. He sends a ruthlessly seductive agent in his employ—Milady—to England to obtain the diamonds from Buckingham. If she succeeds and is able to bring the studs back before the ball, the Cardinal will be able to prove that the Queen has been unfaithful to Louis and to France.9 To save the Queen’s reputation and perhaps even her life, D’Artagnan must also seek out Buckingham and return the studs to Anne instead. He must overcome the obstacles of time and distance and evade the Cardinal’s agents who have been sent out to prevent him from crossing the English Channel. However determined he may be, young D‘Artagnan cannot hope to prevail alone against his cunning and dogged adversaries. He therefore enlists the help of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, who will accompany him on this crucial and dangerous voyage. The journey, the final stages of which the young man completes alone (his friends having been variously rendered hors de combat along the way), lies at the heart of the novel. Success, which he achieves with Buckingham’s help, will earn D’Artagnan the gratitude of the Queen and Constance, but also the animosity of Richelieu and Milady.10

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nbsp; This chivalrous adventure not only marks the first major stage on D’Artagnan’s path to manhood, it also highlights the historical character of Dumas’s fiction. It is thus not surprising that, in The Three Musketeers, Dumas takes full advantage of the popularity of the historical novel, whose vogue in France had been sparked by translations of Walter Scott’s Waverly cycle. Scott’s novels were widely read and admired in France and prompted numerous dramatic, musical, artistic, and literary adaptations and imitations.11 In fact, as a young man, Dumas himself had succumbed to this fashion. One of his earliest literary creations was a three-act melodrama entitled Ivanhoe, which he wrote around 1822 after reading Scott’s novel by that name in a French translation.12

  At the same time as Scott’s popularity moved many to attempt various types of historical fictions, men like Augustin Thierry and François Guizot were transforming the science of history. Basing their writings on the study of chronicles, memoirs, and other historical documents, they claimed for their works a greater degree of accuracy than had previously been achieved and seemed to convey a more vivid sense of the drama and dynamics of past eras than their predecessors had. Like these historians, Dumas, too, often turned to earlier records of past events when composing his works. He had, for example, been inspired by passages from Louis-Pierre d‘Anquetil’s L’Esprit de la Ligue (The Spirit of the League, 1767) and Pierre de L‘Estoile’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France (Memoirs Intended to Serve as the Basis for the History of France, 1719), when he wrote his play about a sixteenth-century French monarch, Henri III, in 1829. Dumas also wrote vulgarized histories that made the past more accessible to the general public. One of these, an account of Louis XIV et son siecle (Louis XIV and His Century) was published in Le Siècle from March 9 to November 8, 1844—that is to say, more or less simultaneously with The Three Musketeers.

  In their research for Louis XIV and The Three Musketeers, Dumas and his collaborator, Auguste Maquet, a history teacher and middling writer, consulted real and apocryphal memoirs from the reign of Louis XIII. Claude Schopp, the foremost specialist on Dumas’s life and works, has suggested that among the many documents the two men read, the Mémoires inédits de Louis-Henri de Loménie, comte de Brienne, secrétaire d‘État sous Louis XIV (Unpublished Memoirs of Louis-Henri de Loménie, Count of Brienne, Secretary of State under Louis XIV) , edited and published by François Barrière in 1828, is deserving of special attention. 13 According to Schopp, the Essai sur les mœurs et sur les usages (Essay on Manners and Customs) that prefaces that volume contains a brief account of the Queen’s gift of two diamond studs to Buckingham. Schopp sees this as the primary source of inspiration for the central episode in Dumas’s novel. Another of the novel’s principal sources is the Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan (Memoirs of M. d‘Artagnan), a work of fiction written by Courtilz de Sandras in 1700. Dumas borrowed that book from a library in Marseilles in June 1843 and apparently never returned it. From this work Dumas drew the name of his hero—D’Artagnan, a real person who is remembered today not so much for his own exploits as for those of the fictional character given his name. These pseudo-memoirs were also the source of the names of the Musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The name of Dumas’s villainess, Milady, likewise appears to be derived from a woman named Miledi *** in Courtilz’s pseudo-memoirs of D’Artagnan.

  From these and other sources, Dumas, aided by Maquet, composed what is nonetheless a uniquely original tale. Their novel is neither a complete and accurate record of historical events14 nor an archaeological reconstruction of the past filled with detailed descriptions of places, manners, and dress. Instead, in The Three Musketeers, the boundary between fact and fiction is deliberately blurred. Here, for example, is how the narrator of the novel explains the reaction of the men and women of Meung who raced toward the site of a commotion that took place in their town on the first Monday in April 1625:

  In those times panics were common, and few days passed without some city or other registering in its archives an event of this kind. There were nobles, who made war against each other; there was the king, who made war against the cardinal; there was Spain, which made war against the king. Then, in addition to these concealed or public, secret or open wars, there were robbers, mendicants, Huguenots, wolves, and scoundrels, who made war upon everybody. The citizens always took up arms readily against thieves, wolves, or scoundrels, often against nobles or Huguenots, sometimes against the king, but never against the cardinal or Spain. It resulted, then, from this habit that ... the citizens, on hearing the clamor, and seeing neither the red-and-yellow standard [that is, the flag of Spain] nor the livery of the [Cardinal-] Duc de Richelieu, rushed toward the hostel of the Jolly Miller (p. 11).

  The seemingly objective, reportorial tone that the narrator adopts in this passage—the exact date and place are given in the previous paragraph—lends an air of truth to his invented account of the populace’s response to the mayhem occurring at the Jolly Miller inn. So, too, do the narrator’s allusions to city archives and to the historically genuine threats posed in those times by thieves, wolves, and domestic and foreign political conflicts. Concrete details about the event that has sent the people of Meung dashing toward the inn are not immediately forthcoming, however. Instead, the expected explanation is aborted as soon as it has begun (see the sentence fragment: “A young man—” [p. 11 ]). In place of an explanation, we find a multi-page description of the youth whose existence has just been mentioned and an account of the circumstances that have brought him to this place. The postponement is, of course, part of a deliberate strategy.15 By the time the narrator returns to the specific event with which his tale began, “facts” and fictions have been so convincingly intertwined that readers, like the citizens of Meung, are carried along by their curiosity and are eager to discover just what is going on.

  Among the real conflicts the narrator evokes in the passage cited above are the ongoing tensions between French Protestants (known as Huguenots) and Catholics. A minority of the French population, the Huguenots were often the victims of religious persecution by the Catholic majority during the period in which Dumas’s story takes place. Louis XIII’s father, King Henri IV, had been born into a Protestant family but converted to Catholicism in order to ascend the French throne. The Edict of Nantes Henri promulgated in 1598 sought to provide his former coreligionists freedom of worship and a limited number of (geographical) safe havens but did not always fully afford them the protections it was intended to guarantee. Although doctrinal differences were part of what prompted the tensions between Catholics and Huguenots, issues of royal authority and national sovereignty also came into play. French Protestants could and occasionally did request the intervention of countries like England and Holland when under attack. The siege of La Rochelle, which is described at some length in The Three Musketeers, is one example of a time when English military forces came to the aid of the Huguenots and hence into direct confrontation with Louis XIII and Richelieu. Dumas ties Buckingham’s role in that event not only to English political and religious interests, but also to his amorous rivalry with and feelings of personal animosity for the King and the Cardinal—a subject introduced earlier by means of the diamond-stud incident.16

  Dumas places D’Artagnan and his Musketeer friends at the siege of La Rochelle. Their presence there is entirely plausible given what we know of the history of that battle. However, some of the specific episodes in which they are involved—such as their alfresco breakfast in a battlefield bastion and their discovery of the collusion between Richelieu and Milady—are pure invention. Those incidents acquire verisimilitude both because they are embedded in an account of historically attested events and because they serve as a further illustration of the character and appetites the novel has already established for the book’s protagonists.

  In the midst of the battlefield breakfast, for example, we are not surprised to see D’Artagnan and his friends display the kind of skill, determination, and panache needed to defeat an e
nemy who greatly outnumbers them. They have found themselves in similar circumstances on other occasions (see the duel against the Cardinal’s Guards in chapter 5), and have triumphed often enough for us to believe in their aplomb, courage, clever stratagems, and “glorious” retreat here. Neither do we find it astonishing that the four men, accompanied by their valets, are again sharing food and wine. Such communal meals are frequent in the novel (though usually taken at inns) and testify to the men’s friendship and their (realistic) need for sustenance and for opportunities to plan future undertakings. 17 The scene also allows Dumas to indulge, through his fiction, in his passion for cuisine. Both a gourmet and a gourmand, Dumas often entertained friends at his home and frequently included recipes for exotic foods, such as bear steak, in his travel narratives. Later, he would even write a Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, which was published posthumously in 1873.18

  History confirms Cardinal Richelieu’s critical role at the siege of La Rochelle and paintings from the time record his presence there dressed in battle armor. We know, too, that his hatred of Buckingham was real. It is therefore plausible that the Cardinal would plot to have the Duke assassinated. What is less plausible historically, though narratively convincing given Buckingham’s apparent penchant for women and the vengeful character the novel attributes to Milady, is that she would become the instrument of such an act. Even less likely is the discovery of the Cardinal’s plot by Athos, who overhears the prelate’s conversation with Milady thanks to a stovepipe that sends the sound of their voices into the very room where he, Porthos, and Aramis have been told to wait (chapter 44). In the course of that overheard conversation, Athos, whose anti-English sentiments might otherwise leave him indifferent to Buckingham’s fate, learns two things that move him to act. First, he recognizes the voice of Milady as that of his wife—a malicious woman whom he long believed to be dead but now discovers to be alive. Then, he learns of Milady’s intention to wreak vengeance on Madame Bonacieux and D’Artagnan and of the Cardinal’s willingness to draft a letter providing her immunity from prosecution should she succeed. This eavesdropping scene is later followed by a direct confrontation between Athos and his wife that leaves him in possession of the document granting her carte blanche to act as she sees fit “for the good of the state.” That text will play a vital, if unanticipated, role at the end of the novel.