Twenty Years After

by Alexander Dumas

  CONTI: Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1629–1666). Younger brother of the Prince de Condé and the Duchesse de Longueville, the completely inexperienced Conti was named a leader of the Parisian forces in early 1649 solely because he was the ranking Prince of the Blood among the princes and peers supporting the Fronde. During the Second Fronde he was briefly imprisoned by Mazarin along with his siblings, but Conti was more interested in religion than politics, and after the end of the Fronde he was reconciled with Cardinal Mazarin and ended up marrying one of his nieces.

  CROMWELL: Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth (1599–1658). A towering and divisive figure whose character and deeds are still controversial, Cromwell was a Puritan and member of Parliament who rose to prominence as a commander of the parliamentary forces against King Charles’s supporters early in the English Civil War. He gradually emerged as both a political and military leader, and used the power of his loyal soldiery to enforce the purge of parliament that enabled the trial and execution of the king. Dumas depicts Cromwell as a calculating mastermind in the mold of Richelieu and Mazarin, but his success was probably due more to relentless determination and force of will than to wits and cunning. As Lord Protector he ruled England, Ireland, and Scotland for almost ten years, brutally crushing all opposition. He died of natural causes in 1658, and the Restoration of the monarchy came two (eventful) years later—as we’ll see in Between Two Kings, later in the Musketeers Cycle.

  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 and 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, of course, 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.

  D’Orléans see GASTON

  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 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 the king and cardinal. 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.

  Gondy see COADJUTOR

  GRAMMONT: Antoine III, Duc de Gramont or Grammont, Marshal of France (1604–1678). In 1640, when he was still just the Comte de Guiche, Antoine was the arrogant and lecherous villain we see in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. 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. He served Louis XIV as a diplomat.

  GUICHE: Guy Armand de Gramont, 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; as Raoul de Bragelonne’s closest friend, we’ll be seeing a lot more of him in the subsequent volumes in the Musketeers Cycle. He was only eleven to thirteen years old during the Fronde, and his depiction in Twenty Years After is entirely fictional.

  GUITAUT: François de Pechpeyroux de Comminges, Sieur de Guitaut, captain of the Queen’s Guards (1581–1663). Guitaut, a crusty old relic of the Wars of Religion, was famously loyal to Anne of Austria, and served her for decades.

  HENRI IV: Henri de Bourbon of Navarre, King Henri IV, “Henri the Great” (1553–1610). A complex and towering figure, a warrior king and at the same time a beloved man of the people, Henri IV ended the Wars of Religion, united France, and made it one of the great powers of Europe.

  HENRIETTE: Henriette Marie de Bourbon, Queen of England (1609–1669). Daughter of Henri IV and sister of Louis XIII, Henriette was married by proxy to England’s Charles I shortly after he assumed the throne in 1625. Haughty, entitled, and fiercely Catholic when to be Catholic in England was a major liability, Henriette’s relationship with Charles was stormy at first, but eventually they proved to be well matched, and she bore him nine children. (The youngest, named after her mother, this editor has chosen to call Henrietta to differentiate the two.) During the English Civil War she was forced to flee to France, where she lived in poverty until the Restoration.

  Herblay see ARAMIS

  King see CHARLES I or LOUIS XIII or LOUIS XIV

  La Fère see ATHOS

  LA PORTE: Pierre de La Porte, Cloak-Bearer to the Queen (1603–1680). La Porte entered Queen Anne’s service in 1621 and became one of her most trusted confidential servants, assisting the queen in her petty intrigues and conducting her correspondence with the Duchesse de Chevreuse. Richelieu finally had him thrown in prison in 1637, though he was freed in 1643 after both king and cardinal had died. The 1839 edition of La Porte’s Memoirs was one of Dumas’s primary sources. La Porte will reappear in an important (albeit nonhistorical) role in the final book in the Musketeers Cycle, The Man in the Iron Mask.

  LA RAMÉE: Jacques-Chrysostome La Ramée, Deputy Governor of Vincennes. Contemporary accounts of the escape of the Duc de Beaufort from the Château de Vincennes mention that his primary guard was an Exempt (royal officer) named La Ramée, but that’s all we know. Everything else in the novel about him, including his first names, is an invention of Dumas.

  LA VALLIÈRE: 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 is introduced in Twenty Years After to set up the love triangle between Louise, Raoul de Bragelonne, and the king that is one of the major plot elements of the succeeding volumes of the Musketeers Cycle.

  LONGUEVILLE: Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon Condé, Duchesse de Longueville (1619–1679). Though mostly offstage in Twenty Years After, the sister of the Grand Condé was a key player in the politics of the Fronde, and one of Mazarin’s most determined foes. A child of rebellion, she was born in the dungeon at Vincennes during the imprisonment of her parents, the elder Prince de Condé and Charlotte de Montmorency, who’d been jailed by Queen Marie de Médicis for opposition to her regency during the youth of Louis XIII. Lively, witty, and beautiful, she was an ornament of the salons of Madame de Rambouillet in the 1630s, until she was married in 1642 to the Duc de Longueville, a widower twice her age. It was not a happy marriage, and she turned her energy to love affairs and politics. A friend and ally of Coadjutor de Gondy, she threw herself into the turmoil of the First Fronde, attracting to the cause her younger brother de Conti and even her husband, though she was conducting an open affair at the time with another noble Frondeur, the Prince de Marcillac (see below). After the Parisian Frondeurs were defeated militarily by her other brother, the Prince de Condé, she persuaded him to conspire against Mazarin, and in 1650 he had all three siblings jailed in the prison where Madame de Longueville was born. After the Fronde came to a messy end, she retired from public life and devoted herself to religion, becoming an important patron of the Jansenist movement.

  LOUIS XIII: King Louis XIII, His Most Christian Majesty of France, “Louis the Just” (1601–43). Dumas wrote a great deal about Louis XIII and his reign, most of it quite accurate, in part thanks to the research of his assis
tant Auguste Maquet. Dumas had a good grasp of the melancholy king’s character and portrayed it well, especially in the previous book in the Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx.

  LOUIS XIV: Louis de Bourbon, King of France (1638–1715): The only Frenchman of his century more important than 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. Twenty Years After begins Louis’s relationship with d’Artagnan, which will evolve for the rest of the Musketeers Cycle until it achieves resolution in The Man in the Iron Mask.

  MARCILLAC: François IV de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac or Marsillac, later Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680). The author of the Maxims (1665) was a firebrand in his youth, enticed early into conspiracy against the throne by Madame de Chevreuse, and continued the practice into the Fronde as the lover and co-conspirator of Madame de Longueville. He was seriously wounded twice during actions in the Fronde, first at Lagny in 1649 and then at the battle of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in 1652, after which he retired from cabals and conspiracies. Though Dumas revered the major French literary figures of the 17th century, his admiration did not extend to the cold and calculating La Rochefoucauld, whose arid cynicism was the polar opposite of Dumas’s hearty romanticism.

  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. He 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. We saw the beginning of his career in The Red Sphinx and will see the end of it in Between Two Kings.

  PORTHOS: Porthos, Baron du Vallon, 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.

  Retz see COADJUTOR

  RICHELIEU: Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu (1585–1642), Louis XIII’s incomparable prime minister. One of the two most important Frenchmen of the 17th century, exceeded only by Louis XIV, Richelieu has been the subject of scores of biographies (including one by Dumas), and his life and works have been analyzed in excruciating detail, starting with his own Memoirs. His deeds were momentous, but it was his character and personality that interested Dumas, who loved historical figures who were great but also greatly flawed. After deploying Richelieu in The Three Musketeers as the worthy antagonist of his most enduring heroes, Dumas couldn’t resist revisiting him as a protagonist for The Red Sphinx. Though gone from the Musketeers Cycle after The Red Sphinx, Richelieu nonetheless casts a long shadow over the rest of the series, all the way through The Man in the Iron Mask.

  ROCHEFORT: Comte Charles-César de Rochefort. The dangerous intriguer who appears in The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After is a composite of two of Courtilz de Sandras’s characters, the Comte de Rochefort from the 1689 pseudo-biography Les Mémoires de M.L.C.D.R. (1689), where M.L.C.D.R. stands for Monsieur le Comte de Rochefort, and the villain Rosnay from The Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan, the result then brought to vivid life by Dumas. It’s difficult to identify Dumas’s amoral adventurer with a single historical figure; for one thing, Rochefort is a common place-name in France, and a Comte de Rochefort could have come from any of several noble French families. The agent of Richelieu in Sandras’s story has been speculated to be from the Rocheforts of Saint-Point in Burgundy, and might have been based on Claude de Rochefort d’Ailly, Comte de Saint-Point, who was active in the first half of the 17th century. Another nominee is Henri-Louis d’Aloigny, Marquis de Rochefort (born 1625), who was one of the lieutenants of Marshal Turenne. At this remove, it seems impossible to be sure who he was.

  SCARRON: Abbé Paul Scarron (1610–1660). A prolific author, renowned for his wit, Scarron was a Man of the Robe (his father was a member of the Parlement of Paris) who spent the early part of his life in Le Mans. In his late twenties he was stricken with a painful wasting disease, most likely polio, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He moved to Paris in 1640 and established himself as a presence among the literati. During the Fronde he wrote essays opposing Mazarin, but other than cutting off his pension there wasn’t much revenge the cardinal could take on an invalid. In 1652 Scarron married the brilliant and beautiful Françoise d’Aubigné, who in later years, as the widow Madame de Maintenon, became Louis XIV’s final mistress and secret second wife.

  TREMBLAY: Charles Le Clerc, Marquis du Tremblay, Governor of the Bastille (1584–1671). Charles du Tremblay was the brother of François du Tremblay, known better under the name Father Joseph, the confidant and spymaster of Cardinal Richelieu, and Charles owed his appointment as governor of the Bastille to this connection. He was relieved of the position when the Parlement of Paris took control of the fortress in 1649, and thereafter retired.

  TRÉVILLE: Jean-Arnaud de Peyrer, Comte de Troisville or Tréville, Captain of the King’s Musketeers (1598–1672). The archetypal poor Gascon who came to Paris to find success by joining the King’s Musketeers, he worked his way up through the ranks, finally becoming captain-lieutenant in 1634. He was certainly present at both the Siege of La Rochelle, depicted in The Three Musketeers, and the Battle of Susa Pass recounted in The Red Sphinx. He was associated with (but not complicit in) the Cinq-Mars conspiracy of 1642 and was briefly exiled, and then restored to favor when Queen Anne assumed the regency. She elevated him to the rank of count in 1643, but he didn’t get along with Mazarin, who forced his retirement in 1646 by temporarily disbanding his company of musketeers. He was reconciled to the Court in the 1660s, possibly due to the influence of the historical d’Artagnan with the young Louis XIV.

  Vallon see PORTHOS

  Notes on the Text of Twenty Years After

  1. THE PALAIS CARDINAL, OR PALAIS ROYAL: As early as 1629, Louis XIII’s prime minister Cardinal Richelieu began planning a grand palace on Rue Saint-Honoré not far from the Louvre. Construction on the Palais Cardinal started in 1633 and was completed in 1639. When Richelieu died in 1642 he willed his 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.

  2. ASSASSINATED AND DISMEMBERED CONCINI: Concino Concini, Maréchal d’Ancre (1575–1617), was a handsome Italian courtier who was a favorite of Queen Marie de Médicis. During Marie’s regency after her husband King Henri IV was assassinated, the arrogant Concini was showered with posts and preferment; he lorded it over the French nobility, and they cordially hated him for it, no one more than the youthful King Louis XIII. Luynes, the young king’s favorite, engineered Louis’s rise to power (and his own) when he orchestrated Concini’s public assassinati
on in 1617.

  3. THE EARL OF ESSEX: Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex (1565–1601), was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I and was rumored to have had a romantic relationship with her. Ambitious and dissatisfied with taking second place, he staged an abortive coup and was executed.

  4. RING CONSECRATED BY A VOW IN THE PALAIS ROYAL CHAPEL: 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.

  5. PARLIAMENT: Unlike in England, where the Parliament was a house of representative legislators, in France the parlements were deliberative bodies of magistrates and legal officials, the so-called Men of the Robe, whose positions were largely passed down from one generation of attorneys to the next. Local parliaments ratified decrees and ordinances, settled legal conflicts, and decided issues of boundaries and privilege. The Parliament of Paris, because it ratified royal decrees that affected the entire realm, was the most important of these bodies, and the présidents of the Parisian Parliament considered themselves on par with the Grands of the nobility. (The nobility disagreed.)