The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - [Full Version] - (ANNOTATED)

by Alexandre Dumas

  WARDES: The Comte de Wardes is based on a later figure, François-René Crespin du Bec, Marquis de Vardes (1621–1688), who under the name “Comte de Wardes” appears in Sandras’s Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan, where Dumas found him. The Marquis de Vardes was a notable historical figure at the court of King Louis XIV; when Dumas needed a foil for Athos’s son Raoul in The Vicomte de Bragelonne, later in the Musketeers Cycle, Dumas invented a son of the Comte de Wardes from The Three Musketeers who inherited his father’s title, a vengeful youth who Dumas assigned the personality and some of the exploits of the historical Marquis de Vardes—thus turning a single real person into two fictional villains! Confusing? Just wait: in 1617 Jacqueline de Bueil, the Comtesse de Moret, married René II Crespin du Bec, Marquis de Vardes, and in 1621 gave birth to our François-René, basis of the novel’s Comte de Wardes. Before that Jacqueline de Bueil had been one of King Henri IV’s mistresses, and had borne him Antoine de Bourbon, the Comte de Moret, in 1607. Which means the Comte de Wardes, villain of The Three Musketeers, was the younger half-brother of the Comte de Moret, hero of The Red Sphinx!

  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 successiv
ely 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 expression that means quitting while you’re ahead, withdrawing from the game with your winnings without giving your opponent a chance to win them back. It may be a reference to the celebrated fact that the Emperor Charlemagne never gave up any land he conquered.

  27. LA VIEUVILLE: Charles I, Marquis de La Vieuville (1583–1653), had been named Surintendant des Finances in 1623 but didn’t hold the position for long, as he was caught peculating the public funds and was disgraced in 1624. He was reappointed to the position in 1651, during the Fronde, and held it until his death two years later.

  28. SAINT-GERMAIN: The Faubourg (district or quarter) of Saint-Germain was the new neighborhood built up on the Left Bank west of and outside the walls of Paris, around the old medieval Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. A number of locations in the novel are in Saint-Germain, including the Hôtel de Tréville, Luxembourg Palace, the Hôtel de La Trémouille, the Carmelite convent, and the homes of d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.

  29. PONTS-DE-CÉ: Tréville’s reference is to the so-called Battle of Ponts-de-Cé in 1620, where Louis XIII’s troops dispersed and humiliated a force of rebels loyal to Marie de Médicis and the fractious Grands, who were trying to stand up to the young king. The remark is thus flattering but with a shade of sarcasm, since it was an easy victory.

  30. TENNIS: The game of volleying a ball back and forth in an enclosed court was invented in France in the twelfth century, originally hitting the ball with one’s open hand (hence its older name, jeu de paume). Rackets were added early in the sixteenth century, and the game became very popular among the nobility of England and France; England’s King Henry VIII was an avid player.

  31. BERNAJOUX: Dumas drew Bernajoux from Courtilz de Sandras’s pseudomemoirs of d’Artagnan, which called him a “gentleman of rank from the Comté de Foix,” and made him a friend of the Cardinal’s Guards Jussac, Biscarat, and Cahusac. He’s not been positively identified with anyone in the actual historical record.

  32. VENTRE-SAINT-GRIS: Literally (and nonsensically), “Sacred gray belly!” Said to have been a favorite exclamation of King Henri IV, it was probably a slight sanitization of Ventre-Dieu! (“God’s guts!”) Many of the French exclamations in Dumas’s dialogue are such cleaned-up oaths, along the lines of the transformation in English of “God’s wounds!” into “Zounds!” (which does not rhyme with sounds, no matter what you’ve heard).

  33. POMME-DE-PIN TAVERN: Legendary watering hole of the Parisian demimonde in the Rue de la Licorne tucked away back in the ancient alleys of the Île de la Cité, the former hangout of the outlaw poet François Villon and the satirical humanist François Rabelais.

  34. PLANCHET: Like his counterparts who serve the three musketeers, d’Artagnan’s doughty lackey will return throughout the novels of the Musketeers Cycle, eventually becoming less servant to the Gascon than friend and partner. Planchet is particularly prominent in Twenty Years After.

  35. MOUSQUETON: As the story reveals, the birth name of Porthos’s Norman lackey was Boniface, but his master renamed him with the more martial French word for musketoon, a large-caliber musket cut down to the length of a carbine.

  36. GRIMAUD: Like the other lackeys, Athos’s servant Grimaud appears throughout the Musketeers Cycle, and eventually one gets the impression that this stoic but caring and utterly reliable man is Dumas’s favorite of the four.

  37. BAZIN: Just as the scheming Aramis is the least sympathetic of the musketeers, his servant, the pompous and selfish Bazin, is the least likeable of the lackeys, mainly serving as a butt for Dumas’s jokes about churchmen.

  38. RUE FÉROU: This short street in the Faubourg Saint-Germain runs parallel to the block of the Rue des Fossoyeurs where d’Artagnan lives, and is just around the corner from Aramis’s place on the Rue de Vaugirard.

  39. THE TIME OF FRANÇOIS I: François I (1494–1547) was the first King of France of the House of Valois, and a great patron of the arts who brought the Renaissance over the Alps from Italy. But Athos’s noble ancestors would have served him in a military capacity, as King François was frequently at war with one or another of the surrounding Hapsburg-ruled kingdoms.

  40. ORDER OF SAINT-ESPRIT: The Ordre du Saint-Esprit, Order of the Holy Spirit, was a knightly order established by King Henri III in 1578 during the Wars of Religion as a counterweight to the Order of the Golden Fleece, whose members largely supported the fractious nobility of the Catholic League
. Only the reigning monarch could induct new members into the Order of Saint-Esprit, and admission was a matter of great honor and prestige.

  41. SOU: The sou was a French coin, one of several denominations in the early seventeenth century that included the following, from least valuable to most: 12 deniers = 1 sou; 20 sous = 1 franc; 3 francs = 1 crown (écu); 3 crowns = 1 pistole. In this period the livre was mostly a “unit of account” rather than a coin, and used for reckoning official finances; it was about equal to a franc, or one-third of a crown.

  42. GARDES FRANÇAISES: The personal regiment of the Kings and Queens of France, established by Charles IX in 1563, and the core of the standing army based in Paris. Membership in the French Guards was prestigious, though the Guards were more numerous and less exclusive than the King’s Musketeers; in times of war there might be as many as thirty companies in the Guards regiment.

  43. THE EPISODE OF THE SARABANDE: According to Court gossip, when Richelieu first left Marie de Médicis to come to Paris to serve Louis XIII, he was enamored of Queen Anne—or pretended to be—and sought ways to please her to curry Her Majesty’s favor. The queen let it be known that she desired to see the new minister appear before her in Turkish attire and perform a sarabande, a sensuous Spanish dance. Richelieu did his awkward best to comply, but soon became aware that Anne and her ladies were mocking him behind their fans, a humiliation for which he never forgave the queen.