The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781681776880
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura histórica

The novel's fast-moving story is set in the royal court of Louis XIII, where the swaggering King's musketeers square off against their rivals: the crimson-clad guards of the dreaded Cardinal Richelieu. The Red Duke rules France with an iron hand in the name of King Louis—and of Queen Anne, who dares a secret love affair with France's enemy, England's Duke of Buckingham. Into this royal intrigue leaps the brash d'Artagnan, a young swordsman from the provinces determined to find fame and fortune in Paris. Bold and clever, in no time the youth finds himself up to his Gascon neck in adventure, while earning the enduring friendship of the greatest comrades in literature, the Three Musketeers: noble Athos, sly Aramis, and the giant, good-hearted Porthos. Now from Lawrence Ellsworth, acclaimed translator of The Red Sphinx, comes a new rendition of The Three Musketeers for a new century, one that captures anew the excitement, humor, and spirit of Alexandre Dumas's greatest novel of historical adventure. Whether you're meeting the musketeers for the first time or discovering them all over again, it's all for one, one for all, in this timeless tale of honor and glory, the flash of dark eyes, and the clash of bright steel.

Notes on the Text of The Three Musketeers

1. GENERAL DUMAS WAS A REMARKABLE MAN: For the full details of the life of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, see the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography The Black Count by Tom Reiss (Crown, 2012). It’s a great and eye-opening read.

2. MEMOIRS OF MONSIEUR D’ARTAGNAN: The pseudo-biography of the Comte d’Artagnan by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras; see the Introduction for Dumas’s use of it as inspiration and source material.

3. THE KING’S MUSKETEERS: A company—later two—of elite soldiers, the musketeers were the personal guard of King Louis XIII and after him Louis XIV. They were founded in 1622 when a carbine-armed company of light horsemen was upgraded and given the new, heavier matchlock muskets as primary arms. Though their function was mainly ceremonial and to serve as royal bodyguards, they were sometimes deployed on the battlefield, where they fought either mounted as cavalry, or dismounted and relying on their muskets. They are often depicted wearing their signature blue tabards with white crosses, but these weren’t adopted until some time in the 1630s. In 1626 the company was captained by a Monsieur de Montalet; Tréville was in the King’s Musketeers serving as a cornet, a mid-grade officer, and would not become captain-lieutenant until 1634.

4. MEMOIRS OF MONSIEUR LE COMTE DE LA FÈRE: Unlike the Memoirs of d’Artag-nan, these memoirs of the Comte de La Fère are completely fictitious, invented by Dumas to add a patina of verisimilitude to his story.

5. ENTRY INTO THE ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE: The Académie Française is the French council of literary heavyweights who make official pronouncements on matters pertaining to the improvement and purity of the French language. Consisting of forty members known as “Immortals,” and appointed for life, it was established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu and continues to this day. When a seat is vacated by death, the surviving Immortals elect a prominent member of the French literati to fill it; Dumas aspired all his life to be elected to the Académie, but never was.

6. 1625: The year should be 1626; an error on Dumas’s part, possibly due to simple carelessness, as he worked very rapidly. But it’s a mistake: every contemporary event referred to in the first half of the novel took place in 1626, not ’25, and the chronology of the second half as it leads into the Siege of La Rochelle also supports this assumption. Nonetheless, it’s such a famous error that this editor has decided to let it stand.

7. GASCON: A Gascon comes from Gascony, Gascogne, the southwestern corner of France, the region south of Bordeaux and west of Toulouse abutting the border with Spain. A land of hills rising up toward the Pyrenees in the south, in Early Modern France it was a poor province of mainly subsistence farmers, with a tradition of sending its unemployed sons north to serve in the French military. Gascons had the reputation of being quarrelsome and boastful.

8. DUELS ARE FORBIDDEN: Honor duels were a scourge of the French nobility in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a widespread practice that took thousands of lives. Though “official” duels had been illegal since 1547, dueling to settle debts of honor was still tacitly accepted until 1626, when Cardinal Richelieu, whose own brother Henri had died in a duel in 1619, persuaded King Louis XIII to outlaw dueling on pain of death.

9. MILADY: In Sandras’s pseudo-memoir, his d’Artagnan has a romance and intrigue with an unnamed Englishwoman known only as Milédi. Dumas liked the sound of that and adopted it for his female antagonist in The Three Musketeers, though he knew the usage of “Milady” on its own was technically improper. As Dumas mentioned in a note on the first chapter of the original version, “Nous savons bien que cette locution de milady n’est usitée qu’autant qu’elle est suivie du nom de famille. Mais nous la trouvons ainsi dans la manuscrit, et nous ne voulons pas prendre sur nous de la changer.” That is, “We’re aware this usage of Milady isn’t correct unless it’s followed by a family name. But that’s how we found it in the manuscript [the purported memoirs of the Comte de La Fère], and we don’t want to take it upon ourselves to change it.”

10. PISTOLES: Pistole was a French word for a gold coin of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, usually Spanish in origin. The leading European states liked to mint their own coins, but gold was hard for them to come by—except for Spain, which flooded Europe with gold from its possessions in the New World, making the Spanish escudo the de facto base currency of European trade for two centuries. When Dumas’s characters refer to pistoles, they are mostly Spanish escudos. One pistole is worth about ten livres or three French crowns (ècus).

11. RUE DES FOSSOYEURS: You can still follow this short street north from the Rue de Vaugirard toward Saint-Sulpice, though it was renamed the Rue Ser-vandoni in the nineteenth century. Aramis’s house is just around the corner, and Athos’s lodgings are in the next street over, Rue Férou. These would have been relatively new, middle-class houses in 1626; most of the Faubourg Saint-Germain had been fields and meadows less than thirty years earlier.

12. RUE DU VIEUX-COLOMBIER: One of the oldest streets in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, named after the Old Dovecot at the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; however, Tréville’s hôtel was actually on a neighboring street, the Rue de Tournon. As we will see later, Porthos’s lodgings are also on the Rue du Vieux-Colombier, farther down the street.

13. CATHOLIC LEAGUE: In the previous century, during the French Wars of Religion (roughly 1562–1598), the hardline Catholic members of the nobility, who wanted to crush the Protestant, or Huguenot, faction, were often held in check by the more moderate Catholics, or Politiques, who were usually allied to the then-current Valois king. In 1576 a powerful hardline Catholic, Henri I, Duc de Guise, founded the Catholic League to organize opposition to the Huguenots and to King Henri III, who was regarded as too conciliatory toward the Protestants. The League was heavily armed, and more than a few battles were fought before Henri III had the Duc de Guise assassinated in 1588.

14. A BESME, A MAUREVERS, A POLTROT DE MÉRÉ, OR A VITRY: Four famous French hatchet men for their kings: Besme and Maurevers assassinated the Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny for King Charles IX in 1572 on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; Jean de Poltrot de Méré slew the Duc de Guise for King Henri III in 1588; and Baron Nicolas de Vitry, Captain of the King’s Guard, killed Concino Concini, the Maréchal d’Ancre, in 1617 at the behest of Louis XIII and his favorite, Luynes.

15. CARDINAL’S GUARDS: In emulation of the king, in 1623 Cardinal Richelieu was given permission to form his own company of royal horse guards, known informally ever after as the Cardinal’s Guards. Unlike the King’s Musketeers, which recruited its members solely from the ranks of the nobility, the Cardinal’s Guards admitted soldiers of any social rank, selected for their martial skills rather than their quality of birth.

16. BASSOMPIERRE: Maréchal François de Bassompierre (1579–1646) was a gentleman of Lorraine, a suave and adaptable chevalier successively a favorite of Henri IV, Queen-Regent Marie de Médicis, and Louis XIII, and one of the leading ornaments of their Courts—especially by his own estimation. As a general, a lover, a diplomat, and above all a courtier, he cut a swath, but delved too deep into intrigue and spent the last years of his life in the Bastille. His lively memoirs of the period are among Dumas’s primary sources.

17. MADAME DE COMBALET: Marie Madeleine de Vignerot du Pont de Courlay, Madame de Combalet (1604–75), was one of Cardinal Richelieu’s several nieces, and of them certainly his favorite. She was a habitué of the Rambouillet salons, a patron of the arts and artists, and very probably Richelieu’s mistress. In 1638 she was made Duchesse d’Aiguillon, and in fact Dumas refers to her in the novel several times by that name, occurrences that for clarity have all been rectified to Madame de Combalet. Her relationship with Richelieu is explored in the next novel in the Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx.

18. MONSIEUR DE LAIGUES: Geoffroy, Marquis de Laigues or Laigue (1614–1674), was a former officer in the Gardes Françaises who became a conspirator and one of the Duchesse de Chevreuse’s lovers during the Fronde civil war of Queen Anne’s regency; Porthos’s remark refers to an incident in 1648 in which someone named “Rochefort” also appears.

19. MONSIEUR HIS BROTHER: By tradition at the French Court, the younger brother of the king and heir to the throne was always referred to as “Monsieur.” At this time “Monsieur” is Prince Gaston, the Duc d’Orléans (see entry under Dramatis Personae).

20. GILDED BALDRIC: Dumas drew this incident from an anecdote in Sandras’s Memoirs of d’Artagnan, though there the wearer of the baldric wasn’t Porthos, but another musketeer named Besmaux, and the exposer of the fraud was a guardsman named Mainvilliers.

21. THE LUXEMBOURG: Queen Mother Marie de Médicis’s luxurious palace, on the Rue de Vaugirard in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was constructed in the style of the great houses of Florence, starting in 1615 when Marie was still queen regent, and no expense was spared. Today it houses the French Senate.

22. THE CARMES-DESCHAUX: The Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, or the Carmelites, was founded on Mount Carmel in the Crusader-occupied Holy Land in the twelfth century. The Barefoot Carmelites, or Carmes Déchaussés, were a “reformed” group determined to return to the austere poverty of the order’s founders. Their Paris convent was on the Rue de Vaugirard, west of the Luxembourg Palace—and still is.

23. THE SAMARITAINE: This refers to the great pump house built on the northwest side of the Pont Neuf to draw water from the Seine for use near the Louvre on the Right Bank. The pump house had a large astronomical clock mounted on its upper front façade, a clock that loudly tolled the hours and was crowned by a bas-relief of the Woman of Samaria drawing water for Jesus—so the pump building and clock were known as La Samaritaine.

24. THE CODE DUELLO: The code of behavior tacitly acknowledged by European nobility to govern duels of honor, though the term code duello may not actually have arisen before the eighteenth century.

25. THE LOUVRE: The ancient palace of the Kings of France in Paris; first built as a medieval fortress in the twelfth century, it was enlarged and modernized each generation if the reigning monarch could afford it. In Louis XIII’s time it was mainly the four three-story halls that surround the square Cour Carrée, the easternmost portion of the modern Louvre. The king, queen, Prince Gaston, and queen mother all had suites of rooms in the Louvre, though Marie de Médicis also had her own Luxembourg Palace across the river.

26. “TO MAKE CHARLEMAGNE”: An old gaming expressio...