Twenty Years After
Page 1
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Twenty Years After
Book Three of the Musketeers Cycle
EDITED AND TRANSLATED
BY LAWRENCE ELLSWORTH
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
CONTENTS
Introduction
I Richelieu’s Ghost
II A Night Patrol
III Two Old Enemies
IV Anne of Austria at Age Forty-Six
V Gascon and Italian
VI D’Artagnan at Age Forty
VII In Which d’Artagnan Is Confounded, but Receives Aid from an Unexpected Quarter
VIII The Differing Effects of a Half-Pistole When Bestowed upon a Beadle and a Choirboy
IX In Which D’Artagnan, Seeking Aramis, Finds Him on Planchet’s Crupper
X The Abbé d’Herblay
XI Pas de Deux
XII Monsieur Porthos du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds
XIII In Which d’Artagnan Finds Porthos, and Learns That Money Can’t Buy Happiness
XIV In Which We Find That, If Porthos Was Unhappy with His Situation, Mousqueton Was Not
XV Angelic Youth
XVI The Château de Bragelonne
XVII The Diplomacy of Athos
XVIII Monsieur de Beaufort
XIX How the Duc de Beaufort Amused Himself in the Dungeon of Vincennes
XX Grimaud Assumes His Post
XXI What Was Hidden in the Pies of Père Marteau’s Successor
XXII An Adventure of Marie Michon
XXIII The Abbé Scarron
XXIV Saint-Denis
XXV One of the Duc de Beaufort’s Forty Methods of Escape
XXVI A Timely Arrival and a Hasty Departure
XXVII The King’s Highway
XXVIII Encounter
XXIX Good Councilor Broussel
XXX Four Old Friends Prepare for a Council
XXXI The Place Royale
XXXII The Oise Ferry
XXXIII Skirmish
XXXIV The Monk
XXXV The Absolution
XXXVI Grimaud Speaks
XXXVII The Eve of Battle
XXXVIII A Dinner as of Old
XXXIX The Letter from Charles I
XL The Letter from Cromwell
XLI Mazarin and Queen Henriette
XLII How Those in Need Sometimes Mistake Blind Luck for God’s Will
XLII The Uncle and the Nephew
XLIV Paternity
XLv Once More the Queen Asks for Aid
XLVI In Which It Is Shown That the First Impulse Is Always the Right One
Dramatis Personae
Notes on the Text of Twenty Years After
Acknowledgments
Introduction
by Lawrence Ellsworth
In 1844 Alexandre Dumas, then age forty-one, had been a successful writer for almost a decade and a half, having made his mark first in the theater with sensational contemporary and historical melodramas. The rise of the feuilletons, French weekly newspapers that published episodic novels in serial form, gave him the opportunity to turn the lessons he’d learned crafting crowd-pleasing plays to popular prose. Dumas’s gifts were for engaging characters in plot-driven stories depicted with vivid scenes and crackling dialogue. More than that, he had a genuine feel for French history, and a knack for bringing it to life for his readers.
These virtues all came together in March 1844, when the first chapters of The Three Musketeers began appearing in the pages of Le Siècle, a Parisian weekly. The story was a runaway success, and the paper soon had to increase print runs to keep up with the demand. Once published in book form, The Three Musketeers was a global sensation, and Dumas was elevated from a mere successful writer to the ranks of history’s greatest storytellers.
At that time a great many serial novels were being published on both sides of the English Channel. What was it about Dumas’s novel that struck a chord with such a broad national, and then international, audience? For one thing, its fast-paced and sweeping drama took maximum advantage of Dumas’s strengths as a writer, mentioned above. But beyond that, its quartet of quirky and charismatic heroes were immediately beloved by readers everywhere. Each musketeer expressed an aspect of Dumas’s own outsized personality, his boundless enthusiasm for life, romance, and adventure: the bold and clever d’Artagnan, noble Athos, jovial Porthos, and sly Aramis were vivid and engaging incarnations of archetypal adventure heroes, familiar yet uniquely and individually themselves.
And with these four characters, Dumas had created a tight-knit team of disparate personalities that was durable, flexible, and expansive enough to enable him to address, through their exploits, what he saw as life’s central challenge: how to find the courage to adhere to a personal code of honor despite the conflicting dictates of society and authority. How, in short, to do right.
The spectacular first Musketeers novel established Dumas’s core characters and their all-important interrelationship, that comradeship and commitment that made the Inseparables a byword for devoted loyalty. “All for one and one for all.” But the four musketeers were no Knights of the Round Table, no paragons of chivalry, they were recognizably real people with flaws as well as virtues, and when Dumas pitted them against the soldiers and assassins of repressive authority, the reader felt they were in genuine danger, at risk not just of failure, but of death. Against such enemies they had only their courage, their wits, and each other—and somehow, that had to be enough.
The serialization of The Three Musketeers concluded in July 1844, and was published in book form before the end of the year in both Brussels and Paris. By then readers and publishers were already clamoring for a sequel, and Dumas, after discussing it with his assistant Auguste Maquet, was ready to provide one. But when the first chapters of Twenty Years After began to appear in January 1845, it wasn’t quite what anyone had expected.
The Three Musketeers, in which the heroes are all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, is profoundly a novel of youth, its protagonists exuberant, passionate, and energetic, overcoming obstacles by sheer audacity. Dumas could have written a second book set right after the first, simply expanding upon the formula of youthful heroics, but the author, by then approaching his mid-forties, was more interested in how his most popular characters would face life’s complexities once they were past the simple moral clarity of youth. How would his heroes cope when confronted by the ambiguities and compromises of maturity? Excited by this idea, Dumas planned out what we would now call a character arc for each of his four archetypal heroes, a long saga set against the events of one of the most dramatic periods in French history, the rise of King Louis XIV. Twenty Years After was the first installment of this grand story, a tale that would run to over a million words, culminating at last in The Man in the Iron Mask. It was a bold and ambitious undertaking that took several years to complete, but pardieu! He pulled it off.
Back to the work at hand: at the end of The Three Musketeers, d’Artagnan has achieved his dream, an officer’s rank in the elite company of the King’s Musketeers—but he’s also suffered tragedy by his failure to protect the woman he loved, who was murdered by his enemies, and this shadows his achievement. When his comrades one by one leave the musketeers to go their separate ways, d’Artagnan falls into the immemorial routines of the career military officer, and the years pass by. Though he serves with bravery, even distinction, so long as Monsieur de Tréville is still captain-lieutenant of the King’s Musketeers, there’s no path for d’Artagnan to advance without leaving the company, which to him is unthinkable. So, he marks time for twenty years, a trusty weapon going to rust, until the events of Twenty Years After rouse him from his daze and propel him back into action.
What has
changed? For one thing, old Tréville has finally retired, leaving a vacancy at the head of his company. For another, the stable regime established by Cardinal Richelieu and enforced by him on the fractious French has been steadily unraveling since his death, and the dire inequities and long-suppressed rivalries in the fraying social order have erupted into a seething low-grade civil war, the Fronde. D’Artagnan’s commonplace skills, those of a mid-level military officer, are little valued during ordinary times, but now opportunity knocks; it’s only in times of trouble, when extraordinary measures are called for, that d’Artagnan can find expression for his unique talent for bold and unorthodox stratagems.
So as the factions arm for battle, d’Artagnan once again has the opportunity to perform extraordinary services for the queen, for her son the young king—and, of course, for himself. But the resources of the orthodox military he’s served in for twenty years are of no use to him here, for he’s at his best acting outside of hierarchy and unrestrained by convention. D’Artagnan summons up his all old energy and audacity and hurls himself at the complex challenges of the new regime.
And . . . he fails. D’Artagnan fails, because times are not what they were, and the virtues of youth, no matter how skillfully deployed, are no longer enough to master the situation. Life has become complicated, and simple solutions cannot succeed.
However, d’Artagnan knows the solution, or at least part of it: to find his old comrades, the Inseparables, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and reforge the bonds of comradeship and loyalty they formed when they were all youths. But they have grown apart from each other with the passing years, even as each one has grown to be more indelibly himself in the process. And they are on different sides in the French civil war of the Fronde. Pride, ambition, and sheer time have opened gaps between the old musketeers, and d’Artagnan will find it no easy thing to bridge those gaps and draw them back together.
And even if he does—for how long?
A Note on the Translation: The public appetite for a sequel to The Three Musketeers was so great that the first volumes of Twenty Years After were rushed into book publication before the serial had even finished running in Le Siècle. The first (and unauthorized) edition, published in Brussels in early 1845, was cobbled together by collecting the installments published in Paris and was so hastily compiled that it omitted an entire chapter: that of XXIX, “Good Councilor Broussel” (“Le Bonhomme Broussel”). This error was perpetuated in some later editions published in Paris, and as it was one of those editions that was used as the basis of the first English translations, that chapter has been absent from nearly every British and American version of the novel ever since. Though the four musketeers don’t really appear in the “missing” chapter, it provides solid entertainment and context for the character and personalities of the leaders of the Fronde. It’s good stuff, and we’re pleased to restore it to the novel’s continuity.
As the above example illustrates, the sources of the original French version of Twenty Years After are a jumble. Where there were inconsistencies, this editor usually relied on the Pléiade version edited by Gilbert Sigaux in 1962, as well as the edition compiled and annotated by Charles Samaran that same year for Éditions Garnier. (Note that the “Good Councilor Broussel” chapter appears in neither of these “definitive” editions.)
The original 1846 English translation by William Robson was solid work and has proved so durable that there hasn’t been a significant new version for readers of English in over a century—until now. The foremost original translators, Robson and William Barrow, did their work well, but they were writing for a Victorian-era audience that was uncomfortable with frank depictions of violence and sexuality. Moreover, they employed a style of elevated diction that was deemed appropriate for historical novels of the 19th century, but seems stiff, long-winded, and passive to today’s readers. It also does a disservice to Dumas’s writing style, which was quite dynamic for its time, fast paced and with sharp, naturalistic dialogue. This editor’s new version attempts to restore Dumas’s edge, aiming as well to recapture some of the bawdy humor lost in previous translations.
As noted above, Twenty Years After was the first long installment in Dumas’s final million-word-plus character arc recounting the lives of his Four Musketeers. It’s a big novel, considerably longer than the already-large Three Musketeers, big enough to be awkward and unwieldy in a single volume, and in fact, in the Victorian era it was often published in two parts. We have chosen to follow that tradition, dividing it into Twenty Years After (the current volume) and its conclusion, The Son of Milady. This will make reading it more manageable and convenient, and also acknowledges the realities of modern publishing and distribution, which cannot easily handle a novel the size of this one in a single volume. (Dumas’s epic continuation, the titanic Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, which is three times the size of Twenty Years After, will appear in four volumes.)
Twenty Years After is a truly great novel, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to prepare a modern version that honors the author’s original intentions, and which I hope will help it find a new audience in the 21st century. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Historical Character Note: The first time a notable character from history is mentioned in the text, their name is marked with an asterisk.* A brief paragraph describing that person appears in the Historical Characters appendix at the end of the book.
Twenty Years After
I
Richelieu’s Ghost
In a chamber of the Palais Cardinal, or Palais Royal1 as it was now known, near a vermeil-gilded table stacked with books and papers, sat a man with his head resting on his hands.
Behind him was a vast fireplace, glowing with heat, with flaming embers crackling over large gilded andirons. The glow from the fireplace lit the dreamer’s magnificent robes from behind, as the flickering light from a grand candelabra illuminated the front.
To see this crimson robe edged with intricate lace, this pale forehead bent in meditation in the solitude of his study, to hear the silence of its antechambers and the measured tread of the guards outside on the landing, one might have thought the shadow of Cardinal Richelieu* still haunted this room.
Alas! It was no more than the shadow of that great man. France badly weakened, the authority of the king disregarded, the Great Nobles once more strong and defiant, foreign enemies menacing the borders—all testified that Richelieu was no more.
But more than anything, the proof that this red-robed form was not that of the former cardinal was his isolation, which seemed, as we’ve said, more like that of a ghost than a living man. It was the halls devoid of courtiers; the courtyard bristling with guards; the air of disdain and derision blowing in through the windows from the streets, the breath of a whole city united against this minister; and finally, from near and far, the rattling of gunfire, not, fortunately, aimed with intent to injure, so much as to show the guards—the Swiss, the musketeers, and the soldiers stationed around the Palais Royal—that the people, too, had arms.
This ghost of Richelieu was Cardinal Mazarin.*
But Mazarin now stood alone and knew his weakness.
“Foreigner!” he muttered. “Italian! These are the words they use as curses. With these same words they assassinated and dismembered Concini2—and if I let them, they’d do the same to me, tear me limb from limb, though I’ve never done anything worse than just squeeze them a little. Fools! Unable to see that their enemy isn’t this Italian who speaks poor French, but rather those lords who feed them fine words in a pure Parisian accent.
“Yes, yes,” continued the minister, pale lips smiling a subtle and incongruous smile. “Yes, you tell yourselves that the fortunes of favorites are precarious—but you should know I’m no ordinary favorite! Though the Earl of Essex3 wore a splendid diamond-crusted ring given him by his royal mistress, and I wear only a simple ring engraved with a number and a date, my ring has been consecrated by a vow in the Palais Royal chapel.4 They won’t break me to their will! Let t
hem join their eternal call of ‘Down with Mazarin!’ to cries of ‘Long live Monsieur de Beaufort!’ or ‘Long live Monsieur le Prince!’ or even ‘Long live the Parliament!’ Well—Monsieur de Beaufort* is locked up in Vincennes, the Prince de Condé* may join him any day, and as for parliament . . .”5
Here the cardinal’s smile twisted into an expression of hatred more virulent than seemed possible on such a mild face. “Well, as to parliament . . . parliament, too, will get what’s coming to it. We have the royal strongholds of Orléans and Montargis. We have time. In time, all those who today shout, ‘Down with Mazarin’ will in their turn shout, ‘Down with the princes.’ Richelieu, whom they hated while he lived, but can’t stop talking about now that he’s dead—he had worse days than this, when he feared he’d be dismissed, or seemed actually forced out. But Queen Anne* will never dismiss me—and if the people force me out, she will go with me. Then we’ll see how the rebels like having neither a king nor a queen! Oh, if only I wasn’t a foreigner! If only I were French, and a nobleman!”
He fell back into his reverie.
Indeed, the situation was dire, and the day that had just ended had made it more complicated still. Mazarin, always driven by sordid avarice, was crushing the people with taxes. In the words of Advocate General Talon, the people had been left with nothing but their souls, and still had those only because they couldn’t be sold at auction. The people had been advised to be patient, as great victories were in the offing, but since glory couldn’t feed empty mouths, the people used their mouths for muttering their discontent.
But that wasn’t all, because when it’s only the people who complain, the Royal Court, insulated by the bourgeoisie and the gentry, doesn’t hear it. However, Mazarin had been so reckless as to offend the magistrates! He had created offices for twelve newly made Judges of Requests and sold them, and as the existing judges had paid high prices for their positions, and the addition of twelve new colleagues could only dilute their value, the magistrates had united against him. They’d sworn on the Gospels to oppose these appointments and to resist all encroachments from the Court, promising each other that any member who lost his office by this rebellion would be reimbursed by the others.