Between Two Kings

by Lawrence Ellsworth

  45. THE FRONDE: A number of social and political conflicts combined in France to cause the messy and intermittent rebellion of the Fronde from 1648 to 1652. King Louis XIV, still in his minority, was too young to rule, and the realm was ruled by a queen regent and her foreign-born prime minister, a leadership regarded as weak by the opportunistic Grands of the high nobility.

  46. MAZARINADES: Dumas uses the term mazarinade to describe the cardinal’s political machinations, but it originated ten years earlier, during the Fronde, to describe the scurrilous pamphlets insulting Mazarin illicitly published during that political unrest. The cardinal responded by funding a flurry of opposing pamphlets supporting him, and eventually these became known as mazarinades as well. The pamphlets that publicized the cardinal’s deceits and diplomatic half-truths eventually lent their name to the machinations themselves.

  47. ARMORED IN TRIPLE BRASS, AS HORACE SAYS: In Book Three of Horace’s Odes, he refers to a Tower of Brass, with “locks, and bolts, and iron bars.” This might also be an allusion to Cromwell’s armored cavalry, who were known as the Ironsides.

  48. LOUIS XI: France’s King Louis XI (1423–1483), nicknamed “the Cunning” and “the Universal Spider,” was as renowned for his diplomatic brilliance as he was notorious for his lack of scruples.

  49. MONSIEUR DE BEAUFORT, MONSIEUR DE RETZ, OR MONSIEUR LE PRINCE: The three main leaders of the uprising of the Fronde: François de Vendôme, Duc de Beaufort (1616–1669) was the grandson of King Henri IV and his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées, which made him a Prince of the Blood; Jean-François Paul de Gondy, Cardinal de Retz (1613–1679) was a political and militant churchman (see Note 39); Monsieur le Prince was the Prince de Condé (see Historical Characters).

  50. A BIRETTA OF VELVET: That is, the red velvet beret of a cardinal.

  51. PROUD PROFILE OF AN EAGLE FACING THE SUN: Dumas invokes Louis XIV’s later adoption of the appellation the Sun King.

  52. LIKE A FIGURE FROM CALLOT: Jacques Callot (1592–1635) was an artist, engraver, and printmaker from Lorraine who drew expressive portraits, street scenes of Paris, and images of battles and atrocities from the Thirty Years’ War. Dumas refers here to Callot’s famous sketch of a cavalier with a great plumed hat, which he also references as a description of the swashbuckler Etienne Latil in The Red Sphinx. (The sketch is reproduced in this editor’s edition of that title.)

  53. AN EPIC OF TASSO OR ARIOSTO: Italian authors of 16th-century chivalric romances; Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) wrote Jerusalem Delivered, a knightly epic of the First Crusade, while Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) was the celebrated author of Orlando Furioso, a romantic saga of Charlemagne and his paladins battling the Saracens.

  54. MESSIEURS DE RICHELIEU, DE BUCKINGHAM, DE BEAUFORT, AND DE RETZ: D’Artagnan’s mighty adversaries and allies in the events of The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After: Cardinal Richelieu (see Note 42); George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628); and the Frondeurs the Duc de Beaufort and the Cardinal de Retz (see Note 49).

  55. CAPTAIN OF THE MUSKETEERS: The position d’Artagnan refers to was technically Captain-Lieutenant of the King’s Musketeers since the ultimate rank of “Captain” notionally was held by the king himself. He is right about the prestige and precedent the position commanded at Court due to its propinquity to the Crown, though it was less prestigious as a battlefield rank in times of open warfare.

  56. MONSIEUR DE TRÉVILLE: Jean-Arnaud de Peyrer, Comte de Troisville or Tréville (1598–1672) was Captain-Lieutenant of the King’s Musketeers from 1634 to 1646, the first to hold that position, but had been forcibly retired by Mazarin when the cardinal temporarily disbanded the elite company.

  57. A MORNING LEVER: The lever (rising) was an official morning reception held at the bedside of every adult member of the royal House of France, and by other important members of Court as well. The relative importance of a person could be told by the quantity and quality of those who attended their lever; Louis’s here is described as a “pretense” to indicate that he is, as yet, insignificant in his own Court.

  58. MAY GOD FORGIVE HIS MURDERER: As related in Blood Royal, the king’s executioner was Monsieur Mordaunt, son of Milady de Winter, and his “murderer” was none other than Athos himself.

  59. BAZIN: Throughout the Musketeers Cycle, Bazin serves as the loyal lackey and assistant of Aramis. 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.

  60. OR DO I MEAN THE VICAR GENERAL?: A vicar general is a bishop’s deputy, so d’Artagnan is joking here about the ambitious Aramis’s ambitions for ecclesiastical rank. But his joke is short of the mark, as he soon finds.

  61. MOUSQUETON: The loyal servant of Porthos throughout the Musketeers Cycle. As related in The Three Musketeers, his birth name 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.

  62. MONSIEUR RACAN: Honorat de Bueil, Seigneur de Racan (1589–1670) was a poet, playwright, and founding member of the Académie Française. The play Les Bergeries (1619) was his first great success. Mousqueton is quite wrong about the author having “died just last month.”

  63. PLANCHET: Like his counterparts who serve the three musketeers, d’Artagnan’s stalwart lackey appears throughout the novels of the Musketeers Cycle, eventually becoming less servant to the Gascon than friend and partner.

  64. USURY: Lending money out at interest was widely considered immoral; it was forbidden by the Church and was strictly controlled by law. Jews, who were outside of Catholic law, could engage in moneylending, but it was a perilous enterprise, as a Christian’s accusation of predatory lending could result in exile or execution.

  65. ENCOUNTERS ON THE BOULEVARD: Duels, in other words. For a Christian, to be accused of predatory usury was a serious matter, and Planchet was defending his reputation as an honest businessman.

  66. YOU NEVER LEFT THE PLACE ROYALE: During the Fronde, Planchet was an officer in the Frondeur militia, and as shown in Blood Royal, commanding a unit during the Battle of Charenton that stayed in Paris and missed all the fighting.

  67. LIKE TWO ATTORNEYS’ CLERKS: As a youth, Dumas had served an apprenticeship as a law clerk, and the experience was the source of many humorous scenes.

  68. MONSIEUR COQUENARD, THE FIRST HUSBAND OF MADAME LA BARONNE DU VALLON: In The Three Musketeers, Porthos’s mistress was Madame Coquenard, the wife of a wealthy, and elderly, Parisian attorney. After Monsieur Coquenard died, Porthos, elevated to the rank of Baron du Vallon, had married the wealthy widow.

  69. PERFIDIOUS ALBION: The French regarding their longtime adversaries the English as treacherous and deceitful is an attitude with a long history, and the phrase la perfide Albion has been attested as far back as the 13th century.

  70. DOUBLE-LOUIS: The louis d’or was a French gold coin introduced into circulation in 1640 by Louis XIII (who put his face and name on it). In size and weight it was an imitation of the Spanish double escudo (or “doubloon”), which was also the pistole so frequently mentioned in the Musketeer novels and the most common gold currency in Europe. A pistole was worth ten or eleven livres, or about three crowns (écus); the louis d’or was worth the same or slightly more. A double-louis, therefore, was a doubloon.

  71. REMINISCENT OF HIS ARRIVAL AT THE INN OF THE JOLLY MILLER IN MEUNG: A reference to Chapter I of The Three Musketeers, and the commotion caused by the young d’Artagnan’s arrival at an inn.

  72. NEPTUNE PRONOUNCING THE QUOS EGO: In Virgil’s Aeneid, Neptune quells the gales of the rebellious Aeolus with this famous curtailed threat, basically Latin for “Why, I ought to…!”

  73. THE PIRATES OF TUNIS: The so-called “Barbary Pirates” of North Africa, who operated out of the ports of Tunis, Tripoli, Rabat, and Algiers, crewed their fast galleys with slaves taken from European ships and shore t
owns.

  74. SAILOR OF THE PONANT: The Ponant was an archaic French term for the Western Sea, i.e., the Atlantic, and was the opposite of the Levant, or Eastern Mediterranean.

  75. WILLIAM II OF NASSAU, STADTHOLDER OF HOLLAND: Dumas has his dates and Dutch rulers wrong here: William II, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of the United Provinces, had died in 1650 and been succeeded by Jan de Witt, who ruled the Dutch Republic until 1672. It is true, however, that Charles II had long been living as an exile on the Dutch coast.

  76. GENERAL LAMBERT: John Lambert (1619–1684) was an officer in the Parliamentary army under Oliver Cromwell who rose to the rank of general. Following the victory at Worcester, he was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland and thereafter was a prominent politician, leading the military wing of the Protectorate, often in rivalry with Cromwell. After Cromwell’s death he led the faction that forced Cromwell’s son, Richard, to step down, outplayed all his competitors, shut the members out of parliament, and assumed the rank of Major-General of the Armies. He then set out north with his troops to challenge his only remaining rival, General Monck.

  77. AT COLDSTREAM, ON THE TWEED: Dumas makes it sound like Newcastle and Coldstream are next to each other when in fact they’re fifty miles apart, but the advance elements of the two armies were close enough for near encounters.

  78. NEWCASTLE ABBEY: This abbey, and its very convenient location, are Dumas’s inventions.

  79. THE MUSKETEERS’ FORMER HOST: Dumas named him in Blood Royal as Señor Perez, though without giving his inn a name, which he calls the Hartshorn here. Dumas wrote quickly in his rush to get chapters out for weekly publication, and in sequels didn’t always take the time to look back at what he’d written before.

  80. THE MEMOIRS OF D’AUBIGNÉ: Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552–1630) was a Huguenot supporter of King Henri IV who wrote a memoir published in 1729 with which Dumas was doubtless familiar. Agrippa was the grandfather of Françoise d’Aubigné who appears in Twenty Years After and went on to become Madame Scarron and then Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s final mistress and secret wife.

  81. LUYNES, BELLEGARDE, AND BASSOMPIERRE: Favorites of Louis XIII who were rewarded with position and privilege, though Athos’s compliment in comparing d’Artagnan to them has perhaps an unintended sting to it, as all three ended their lives out of favor and in disgrace.

  82. EXCEPT FOR MONTROSE: See Note 37.

  83. KNIGHT OF THE GARTER: The Most Noble Order of the Garter was an English knightly order founded in 1348 by Edward III; it was highly prestigious, and only the monarch could induct new members into its ranks.

  84. CHEVALIER DU SAINT-ESPRIT: The Ordre du Saint-Esprit, Order of the Holy Spirit, was a French 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.

  85. ORDER OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE: A Catholic knightly order established in 1430 by Philippe III, Duke of Burgundy, and later adopted by the Hapsburg dynasty of Spain and Austria as their highest order of chivalry. There could never be more than fifty living members of the order at a time.

  86. THE KING OF FRANCE… ON THE OCCASION OF HIS RECENT MARRIAGE: Dumas had his dates slightly off: Charles II entered London on May 29, 1660, and Louis XIV married the Spanish Infanta Maria Teresa shortly thereafter in France, on June 9, 1660.

  87. VICEROY OF IRELAND AND SCOTLAND: Dumas overreaches a bit; Monck was named Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (but not Scotland) in August 1660.

  88. FABRICIUS: Gaius Fabricius Luscinus was a Roman patrician of the 3rd century B.C.E. who was renowned for his frugality and incorruptibility.

  89. THE SECRET WIFE OF MONSIEUR DE MAZARIN: It was widely rumored that Queen Anne and Cardinal Mazarin had been secretly married in a private service, but there is no solid historical confirmation of this.

  90. THIS PREPARATION FOR COMBAT, WHICH THE ROMANS CALLED ACCINCTION: in Latin, accinctio means to gird on one’s weapons, to arm up.

  91. THE QUALITIES OF FABIUS AND HANNIBAL: That is, the complementary skills of two opponents, Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca (247–182 B.C.E.), a wily aggressor, and Roman general Fabius Cunctator (280–203 B.C.E.), who resisted Hannibal’s advance with innovative delaying tactics.

  92. IRUS: In The Odyssey, Irus (Latin) or Arnaeus (Greek) is a poor Ithacan beggar who makes the mistake of challenging another beggar who’s new in town, and who unfortunately for Irus is Odysseus in disguise. This ends badly for Irus.

  93. THE POSTILION: The post horse system was a way of hiring horses by stages, turning in a rented horse at a “post” and hiring another one, if necessary, for the next stage. Packhorses, carriages, and wagons could also be rented by post, usually coming with a hired driver who rode the lead horse and was called the postilion.

  94. THAT GOOD OLD WINE OF ANJOU THAT ONE DAY NEARLY COST US SO DEARLY: A reference to Chapter XLII of The Three Musketeers, “The Anjou Wine,” in which Milady de Winter sent d’Artagnan an entire case of the vintage—all poisoned.

  95. PALAIS ROYAL: Cardinal Richelieu started building his Palais Cardinal in 1633 and completed it in 1639. When Richelieu died in 1642, he willed his grand Paris residence to the king, and it was renamed the Palais Royal. Upon the death of Louis XIII, Queen Anne moved her family—including Cardinal Mazarin—from the Louvre into the more modern Palais Royal.

  96. THE COMTESSE DE SOISSONS: The cardinal’s niece, Olympe de Mancini (1638–1708), Marie’s elder sister, had been a countess of high rank since marrying the near-royal Comte de Soissons in 1657.

  97. HE, WHO NEVER PREVENTED ANYONE FROM SINGING, PROVIDING THEY PAID: A reference to a famous remark Mazarin is said to have made during the Fronde about the satirical songs of the Frondeurs, quoted by Dumas in Twenty Years After: “If they sing the song, they’ll pay the piper.”

  98. MY FATHER: The Comte de Guiche’s father was Antoine III, Duc de Gramont or Grammont (1604–1678). A capable military commander, he was made a marshal in 1641, and for his victories—and because he was married to one of Richelieu’s nieces—he was elevated to the peerage and became Duc de Gramont in 1643.

  99. THE DAYS WHEN MONSIEUR CROMWELL WAS SENDING US CUTTHROATS AS ENVOYS: Mazarin refers to the events of Twenty Years After in which Cromwell sent the murderous Mordaunt, the son of Milady de Winter, to Mazarin as a diplomatic messenger.

  100. THE PLACE DE GRÈVE: In Paris, the broad square on the Right Bank of the Seine in front of the Hôtel de Ville where convicted criminals were publicly tortured and executed, commoners by hanging and nobles by decapitation.

  101. BOILEAU’S SATIRES: Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) was a French satirist and critic of poetry; he mocked Guénaud for supposedly poisoning his patients with antimony in his Satire IV (1664).

  102. HE TREATED THE PATIENT AS A TURK TREATS A MOOR: In other words, without any special consideration for his status. In Don Quixote Cervantes complained that the Turks treated the Spanish Moors as badly as they treated Christians.

  103. I’M BARELY FIFTY-TWO: Mazarin shades his age downward; born in 1602, the minister was fifty-eight.

  104. HE WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLDER THAN LOUIS XIV: Colbert was nearly twenty years older than the king, but Dumas often played fast and loose with the ages of historical characters to suit his dramatic purposes; here he made Colbert slightly younger to match his depiction as ambitious and aspiring.

  105. THE CHTELET: A medieval keep in central Paris on the Right Bank at the Pont au Change, the Grand Châtelet contained the offices of the Provost of Paris and the city’s civil and criminal courts.

  106. MICHEL LE TELLIER, THE SECRETARY OF STATE: Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Barbezieux (1603–1685) was a protégé of Mazarin who served as Secretary of State for War from 1643 until the minister’s death. He made the transition to continue to serve under Louis XIV and was appointed Chancellor in 1677.

  107. THE THEATINE FATHER: The Theatines were a monastic order dedic
ated to reform and austerity founded in Italy in the 16th century. Cardinal Mazarin sponsored their expansion in France, and in 1644 gave them permission to build a Theatine church across from the Louvre.

  108. AS THE SON OF A FISHERMAN: It was a common slander that Mazarin was a mere son of a fisherman, but though the cardinal plays along with the joke, it was just exaggerated wordplay on the fact that his family came from Piscina.

  109. ALL FOUND IN THE CHRONICLE OF HAOLANDER: Mazarin did make overblown claims about his ancestors, but the Chronicle of Haolander is an invention of Dumas.

  110. CASALE: The Siege of Casale in northern Italy was one of the key episodes in the War of Mantuan Succession, fought between France and Spain on the territory of Savoy. Mazarin first made his mark there as a negotiator and envoy for Rome, and you’ll find the entire affair described in detail in Dumas’s The Red Sphinx.

  111. MONSIEUR DE BEAUFORT, WHOM I TREATED SO HARSHLY IN THE DUNGEONS OF VINCENNES: Mazarin’s relations with the Duc de Beaufort, and the duke’s escape from Vincennes, are recounted in Twenty Years After.

  112. TO ATTEND HIS COUCHER: The coucher was an official evening reception held at the bedside of every adult member of the royal House of France. Like the morning lever, the relative importance of a person could be told by the quantity and quality of those who attended their coucher.