Artagnan see D’ARTAGNAN
ATHOS: Athos, Comte de La Fère, is based loosely on Armand, Seigneur de Sillègue, d’Athos, et d’Autevielle (c. 1615–1643), as filtered through Courtilz de Sandras’s fictionalized Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan. Though Sandras had made Athos the brother of Aramis and Porthos, the historical d’Athos was a Gascon petty nobleman who joined his cousins, Captain de Tréville and Isaac de Portau (Porthos) in the King’s Musketeers in 1640. Little is known of his life; he was killed in a duel in December 1643. Dumas invented Athos’s character and personality from whole cloth to suit his storytelling purposes.
BERNOUIN: Monsieur Bernouin or Barnouin. Little is known about Mazarin’s premier valet de chambre Bernouin, except that he may have been a Provençal who came north to Paris with his master when Mazarin became a protégé of Richelieu.
BRAGELONNE: Raoul, Vicomte de Bragelonne. The young viscount, son of the musketeer Athos, is almost entirely Dumas’s invention, based solely on a single reference in Madame de La Fayette’s memoir of Henriette d’Angleterre, which mentions that in Louise de La Vallière’s youth in Blois she had once loved a young man named Bragelonne. Raoul embodies all of Athos’s noble virtues, even those unsuited to Louis XIV’s less chivalrous age. His relationship with Louise de La Vallière—and her relationship with King Louis—are central to the final volumes of the Musketeers Cycle.
BUCKINGHAM: George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–1687) was the son and heir of the Buckingham who figured so prominently in The Three Musketeers, and an important secondary character in the later volumes of the Musketeers Cycle. A committed Royalist, he fought for Charles II and supported him during his exile, though Buckingham and Charles had a falling-out before the Restoration. After Charles regained the throne, however, Buckingham was soon restored to favor, but he was smitten with the king’s sister Princess Henrietta, and scandal followed (as we will see in Court of Daggers and thereafter).
CHARLES: King Charles II, Charles Stuart, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1630–1685) was the exiled son of that King Charles I whose 1649 execution was depicted in Blood Royal. Dumas alluded to the intrigues and adventures of Charles II on his long road to Restoration without going into detail, but it was a full ten years of melodrama, reversals, frustration, and hairbreadth escapes. At first Charles had hopes of French support, but when Mazarin allied France with Cromwell in 1655, Charles and his exiled royalists on the continent were driven into the arms of Spain, and he actually led English royalist troops on the side of the Spanish against the French at the Battle of the Dunes in 1658. The 1660 visit to Louis XIV in Between Two Kings is fictional, but the role of General Monck in facilitating Charles’s return and restoration is basically accurate. Dumas portrays Charles as a young Romantic Era melancholy hero, but by contemporary accounts he was more impatient and entitled than tragic and resigned.
COLBERT: Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) was a government administrator in various roles starting in 1649 and was about ten years older than depicted by Dumas in Between Two Kings. He served Mazarin throughout the 1650s, became interested in financial reform, and early on warned the minister that Superintendent Fouquet was peculating the state’s tax money, though Dumas delays the conflict to link it with the rise of Louis XIV. What Dumas got right is that Louis recognized Colbert’s talents and ambition and, mistrusting Fouquet, put Colbert in charge of his financial affairs.
CONDÉ: Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, “Monsieur le Prince,” later “The Grand Condé” (1621–1686). One of the most celebrated military commanders of his time, while he was still the Duc d’Enghien he won two signature victories in the long war against Spain, those of Rocroi in 1643 and Nördlingen in 1644. Upon the death of his father in 1646 Enghien became Prince de Condé, First Prince of the Blood and third in line for the throne, but he continued his role as France’s leading general, further cementing his military reputation with the victory at Lens in 1648. This was followed by his successful leadership of the royal troops in the first half of the Fronde, but then he turned to plotting against Mazarin, who in 1650 had Condé, his brother Conti, and his sister the Duchesse de Longueville arrested, thus triggering the Second Fronde. In the confusion that followed, Anne was forced to release Condé and his siblings, but Monsieur le Prince was by then her sworn enemy, and after the Fronde ended he left France to fight for Spain. Once the long Franco-Spanish war finally concluded in 1659, Condé was rehabilitated by Louis XIV and welcomed back to France, where he served with distinction until his death.
D’ARTAGNAN: Charles de Batz de Castelmore, Chevalier (later Comte) d’Artagnan (c. 1611–1673). The historical d’Artagnan was a cadet (younger son) of a family of the minor nobility from the town of Lupiac in Gascony. Like so many other younger sons of Gascony, he followed his neighbor Monsieur de Tréville to Paris to make his fortune, and by 1633 was in the King’s Musketeers at a time when Tréville was a lieutenant. D’Artagnan spent the rest of his life in the musketeers, except for the periods when the company was briefly disbanded, when he soldiered with the Gardes Françaises. He gradually rose through the ranks until he became Captain-Lieutenant (in effect, Captain) of the Musketeers in 1667. During the Franco-Dutch War of 1673 he was killed at the Battle of Maastricht. Dumas famously borrowed d’Artagnan from Courtilz de Sandras’s highly fictionalized biography, The Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan, but his personality and character in the novels of the Musketeers Cycle are entirely the product of the genius of Dumas.
DE GUICHE: Guy Armand de Gramont or Grammont, Comte de Guiche (1637–1673). Armand de Guiche, son of the Duc de Gramont, was one of the leading playboys of the Court of Louis XIV and a frequent favorite of both the king and his brother Monsieur. Dumas portrays him as a romantic cavalier with a touch of melancholy and makes him Raoul de Bragelonne’s closest friend. A lover of both men and women, the historical de Guiche was one of Monsieur’s leading bedmates before he was supplanted by the Chevalier de Lorraine, after which he took up with Monsieur’s wife Madame. (This Comte de Guiche, by the way, is the same historical personage who serves as the villain in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.)
Du Vallon see PORTHOS
FOUQUET: Nicolas Fouquet, Marquis de Belle-Île, Vicomte de Melun et Vaux (1615–1680) was a Parisian of the political class, precocious enough to join the Parliament of Paris as an avocat at age thirteen. At age twenty-five he married a wealthy heiress, who died a year later, and by twenty-seven he was a financial intendant in the province of Dauphiné. When Mazarin became Queen Anne’s prime minister, Fouquet attached himself to the new regime, serving the cardinal ably throughout the 1640s. During Mazarin’s brief exile near the end of the Fronde, Fouquet looked after his interests in Paris, and as a reward the cardinal made Fouquet Superintendent of Finance. Dumas portrays him as a gallant cavalier, dashing and magnanimous, and Fouquet certainly spared no expense to convey that impression. He could well afford to do so: as a finance minister, he was at least as corrupt as Colbert makes him out to be in Between Two Kings.
GASTON: Prince Gaston de Bourbon, Duc d’Orléans, “Monsieur” (1608–1660). Younger brother to Louis XIII and first heir to the throne, favorite son of Queen Marie de Médicis, Gaston seems to have had no redeeming characteristics whatsoever. Proud, greedy, ambitious for the throne but an arrant coward, he was the figurehead in one conspiracy after another against Louis XIII and Richelieu. These plots failed every time, after which Gaston invariably betrayed his co-conspirators in return for immunity from consequences—because as the healthy heir to a chronically unhealthy king, he knew his life was sacrosanct. Banished to internal exile in Blois in 1652, he lived out the remainder of his life in luxurious boredom.
GUÉNAUD: François Guénaud or Guénault (1590?–1667) was Queen Anne’s chief physician and an object of mockery by the young wits at the French Court. In Molière’s play L’Amour Médecin (1665) he’s represented by Monsieur Macroton, one of the five foolish doctors who present contradictory diagnose
s and ridiculous treatments.
Guiche see DE GUICHE
HENRIETTA: Princess Henrietta-Maria Stuart, Henrietta of England (1644–1670), the youngest child of King Charles I and Queen Henriette-Marie, was born during the English Civil War and raised in exile in France, where she and her mother lived for many years in poverty. Though bright and observant, she was disregarded as a child, one royal orphan too many, and it wasn’t until after the Restoration of her brother Charles II that she was suddenly recognized as someone who mattered. In 1660 she was wed in a political marriage to Philippe de Bourbon, younger brother of Louis XIV, and became one of the leading ornaments of the French Court. Vivacious and beautiful, Henrietta was loved, or at least desired, by both Buckingham and de Guiche, but she set her romantic sights higher than that, as we’ll see in the next volume, Court of Daggers.
INFANTA: Marie-Thérèse of Austria, Infanta of Spain and Portugal, Queen of France (1638–1683), was wed to her cousin King Louis XIV in 1660 in a marriage that sealed the end of the long war between France and Spain. Raised in the rigid and insular Spanish Court, timid and retiring, she had little worldly experience before her marriage and would have been lost and alone in Paris if her mother-in-law, Queen Anne—herself a Spanish princess married young to a French king—hadn’t taken her under her wing. She adored her new husband Louis and was happy while he was faithful to her, a period of almost a year.
La Fère see ATHOS
La Vallière see LOUISE
LORRAINE: Chevalier Philippe de Lorraine (1643–1702), a young nobleman of the House of Guise, was a courtier who was the friend, favorite, and lover of Prince Philippe, the younger brother of King Louis XIV. Handsome, clever, jealous, and vindictive, by age sixteen he had the young prince wrapped around his finger, where he kept him for decades.
LOUIS XIV: Louis de Bourbon, King of France (1638–1715): The only Frenchman of his century more important than Cardinal Richelieu, the Sun King consolidated all power in France under royal control, thus ending centuries of civil strife, but creating a political structure so rigid it made the French Revolution almost inevitable. Dumas and his assistants did considerable research into the life of Louis XIV, and his depiction of the king’s character and personality is mostly spot on. The final volumes of the Musketeers Cycle chart Louis’s rise to maturity and power through the eyes of the Four Musketeers, Dumas’s most enduring characters.
LOUISE: Françoise-Louise de la Baume Le Blanc de La Vallière (1644–1710). Louise de La Vallière was raised in Blois at the Court of Prince Gaston, and after coming to Versailles in 1661 became the first long-term mistress of King Louis XIV. Louise was introduced in Twenty Years After as a girl of age seven and returns here briefly as a young woman of seventeen. As the love of Raoul’s life, she will be a central character in the next three volumes, Court of Daggers, Devil’s Dance and Shadow of the Bastille.
MALICORNE: Germain Texier, Comte d’Hautefeuille, Baron de Malicorne (1626–1694), an ambitious courtier and the lover of Mademoiselle de Montalais, is still largely offstage in this volume, though he will come to the fore in the next book, Court of Daggers. Though the historical Malicorne was a petty nobleman, Dumas makes him a bourgeois, an aspiring lawyer, to add the drama of class difference to his romance with Montalais.
MARIE DE MANCINI: Marie de Mancini; Anna Maria Mancini (1639–1715) was the middle-born of the five nieces of Cardinal Mazarin that he brought over from Italy to find them politically advantageous marriages in France. Though not the most conventionally pretty of the sisters, Marie was by all accounts the liveliest and most intelligent, and when they were teenagers, she became the first real love (of many) of Louis XIV. He explored the idea of making her his wife but was forcefully dissuaded by the queen and cardinal. Unlike her sisters, who were found influential French husbands, Marie was married off to an Italian, Prince Lorenzo Colonna, possibly to put her farther away from Louis.
Mancini see MARIE DE MANCINI
Marie-Thérèse see INFANTA
MAZARIN: Cardinal Jules Mazarin, born Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino or Mazarini (1602–1661). In 1634 the Italian-born diplomat became a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu and in 1639 was naturalized French and entered the king’s service. Through Richelieu’s influence he was made a cardinal in 1641 and brought onto the King’s Council. After Richelieu and Louis XIII died, Mazarin made himself indispensable to the regent, Anne of Austria, and basically stepped into Richelieu’s shoes to become France’s prime minister. He was probably intimate with Queen Anne and functioned as her co-ruler until Louis XIV attained his majority. Mazarin was an extremely able diplomat, negotiating an end to the Thirty Years’ War, maintaining royal authority through the chaotic years of the Fronde, striking an alliance with Cromwell, and maneuvering the fractious French nobility back into compliance with the crown in time to hand an intact and flourishing state over to King Louis XIV. He was widely disliked for being a foreigner and arriviste who presumed to place himself above the native nobility, feelings basically endorsed by Dumas, who preferred men of heart to men of mind.
MONCK: General George Monck or Monk, 1st Duke of Albemarle (1608–1670) was a career soldier who worked his way up through the ranks, fighting on the Continent, the Scottish border, and against the Irish in the rebellion of 1641. When the English Civil War broke out, he served as an officer on the Royalist side, but was captured and imprisoned for two years, and then released to command troops for the Parliamentarians. He became one of Oliver Cromwell’s most trusted commanders and proved to be as canny at political strategy as he was at warfare. After Cromwell’s death, he consolidated his position in the north of Britain and began a waiting game, biding his time to see how matters would play out. When Richard Cromwell and John Lambert both showed themselves too weak to govern effectively, he finally threw his support behind Charles II and was instrumental in the Restoration that put the Stuarts back on the throne. He was rewarded with a peerage and, eventually, the admiralty.
Monsieur see GASTON or PHILIPPE
Monsieur le Cardinal see MAZARIN
Monsieur le Prince see CONDÉ
MONTALAIS: Aure (actually Nicole-Anne Constance) de Montalais (c. 1641–?). Mademoiselle de Montalais was a maid of honor at the Court of Prince Gaston, and later dame d’honneur to Princess Henrietta in Paris, where she helped arrange an affair between the princess and the Comte de Guiche. Though she is said to have had a taste for intrigue, little else is known about her, and her personality is largely an invention of Dumas.
Orléans see GASTON
PHILIPPE: Prince Philippe de Bourbon, Duc d’Anjou, later Duc d’Orléans, “Petit Monsieur,” “Monsieur” (1640–1701), was the younger brother of Louis XIV, but to keep him from assuming the fractious role his uncle Prince Gaston had taken under his brother Louis XIII, Philippe was never trained to rule or consider himself entitled to assume the throne. He was openly homosexual but did his duty to the dynasty and married twice, producing six children. Though he was a capable military commander, his first concern was always luxury and ease, which he pursued without stint.
PORTHOS: Porthos, Baron du Vallon, is based loosely on Isaac de Porthau (1617–1712), as filtered through Courtilz de Sandras’s fictionalized Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan. Though Sandras had made Porthos the brother of Aramis and Athos, the historical de Porthau was a minor Gascon nobleman who joined his cousins, Captain de Tréville and Armand d’Athos, in the King’s Musketeers in 1642. When his father died in 1654, he left the musketeers and returned to Béarn, where he served as a parliamentarian and local magistrate until his death in 1712. His character and personality in the Musketeers novels are entirely the invention of Dumas.
Queen Anne see ANNE OF AUSTRIA
Queen Marie-Thérèse see INFANTA
Queen Mother see ANNE OF AUSTRIA
Raoul see BRAGELONNE
ROCHESTER: John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) was an accomplished poet and one of the leading playboys of the Restoration Court of Charles II
. His father, Henry, who had supported Charles during his exile, had been created 1st Earl of Rochester in 1658 and died shortly thereafter, passing the title to his son. At the time of Between Two Kings the young Rochester was still a student at Oxford, but Dumas, who loved aristocratic writers, backdated him a few years to fit him into his story.
SAINT-RÉMY, MADAME: Françoise Le Prévôt de la Coutelaye, Madame de Saint-Rémy was an oft-married lady of the Touraine who was the wife of Laurent de la Baume le Blanc when she gave birth, in 1644, to Louise de La Vallière. Her third husband, the Marquis de Saint-Rémy, was First Chamberlain to Prince Gaston in Blois.
SAINT-RÉMY, MONSIEUR: Jacques de Couravel, Marquis de Saint-Rémy, was First Chamberlain to Prince Gaston during his internal exile in Blois, and stepfather to Louise de La Vallière. After Gaston’s death he moved to Paris and performed the same function for the new “Monsieur,” Prince Philippe.
Vallon see PORTHOS
Acknowledgments
The cover painting is “The Arrival of d’Artagnan” by the 19th century Belgian painter Alex de Andreis. The interior illustrations are by Alphonse de Neuville, Frank T. Merrill, E. Van Muyden, Edmund H. Garrett, Félix Oudart, and Iain Lang; many thanks to John Armstrong for digitizing and formatting these old engravings.
Thanks also to my literary agent Philip Turner, the good shepherd who has guided this series to publication.
And many thanks, once again, to Claiborne Hancock, Maria Fernandez, and Victoria Wenzel at Pegasus Books for another handsome edition in the Musketeers Cycle. They make these books look so proud on the shelf!
Between Two Kings Page 39
