9. Monsieur de Bouillon… the same scaffold as Cinq-Mars… if not in law: Henri Coeffier Ruzé d’ Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, was leader of a group of noblemen in a plot against Richelieu, the subject of a novel (Cinq-Mars, 1826) by Alfred de Vigny and an opera of the same name by Charles Gounod (1818–93), which was first performed in 1877. Cinq-Mars was executed in 1642. Among the main supporters of his conspiracy was Frédéric Maurice de La Tour d’Auvergne, Duke de Bouillon (1605–52). Bouillon came from the Protestant family that ruled the independent principality of Sedan. When Bouillon was arrested after the Cinq-Mars conspiracy, his wife threatened to allow the Spanish Army to occupy Sedan, a strategic point on the border between France and Belgium. Bouillon was pardoned, but obliged to hand over Sedan to the French government.
10. Guitaut: See note 3, Book II.
11. He rode along proudly… the campaigns of King Louis XIII and the prowess of the late cardinal: I.e. Richelieu (see note 33, Book I).
12. I acted as Coriolanus… the tents of the Volsci: After being unjustly treated by his own people and banished from Rome in the fifth century BC, the general Gaius Martius Coriolanus joined the army of the Volsci, one of Rome’s enemies. The Greek biographer Plutarch (AD c. 46–c.120), wrote an account of Coriolanus’s life in his Parallel Lives (AD 75), which provided the material for the play Coriolanus (1607) by William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
13. He was one of those steadfast souls… the popular heroes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Dumas is thinking particularly of those who took part in the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
14. I lost my command of Sedan… The Cinq-Mars conspiracy: See note 9, Book III.
15. it would do on a small scale what the Paris Commune did on 2 September: Not, of course, the more famous Commune of 1871, but the revolutionary Commune set up in 1789, which, from 2–7 September 1792, under Robespierre, initiated a bloody repression of counter-revolutionaries, during which some 1,200 political prisoners were taken from their prisons and massacred, after at best a summary trial.
16. I am just now debating the matter with my reason: Dumas recalls La Rochefoucauld’s ‘heartless’ remark about compassion, which he quoted earlier (Book II, chapter XI). See also note 25, Book II.
17. Only a Jew would set free Barabbas and crucify Jesus: Christians long blamed the Jewish people for the death of Jesus because, when Pilate offered them a choice between the robber Barabbas and Jesus, the Jewish leaders chose to spare Barabbas and have Jesus crucified (see John 18:40, Mark 15:7, Luke 23:19, Matthew 27:16–26 and Acts 3:14). Dumas and his contemporaries would not have felt it was unjust or reprehensible to attribute the guilt for this to the Jewish people as a whole. See also note 20, Book II.
18. Esplanade: The Esplanade des Quinconces in Bordeaux is a huge open space overlooking the river Garonne.
19. the little Judas window: A Judas window is a small peephole in a door, so called because it can betray the secrets of those who are being spied on through it.
20. I have heard that they sometimes… as Cesare Borgia did for Don Ramiro d’Orco: Cesare Borgia appointed Don Ramiro Governor of Romagna, where Don Ramiro distinguished himself by his cruelty and suppressed all dissent in the region. But, once the province was pacified, Cesare decided that such energetic measures were no longer expedient and that he might have made himself unpopular as a result of Don Ramiro’s actions, so he had him put to death and cut into pieces, which were then exhibited in the market square in Cesena (see Niccolò Machiavelli’s (1469– 1527) The Prince, Chapter VII).
BOOK IV
THE ABBEY OF PESSAC
1. As for the duke… Orgon and Géronte: Orgon and Géronte are foolish and easily deluded old men in two comedies by Molière: Tartuffe (1664) and Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671).
2. Because I’m a Huguenot: As a Protestant, Canolles would not need the last rites from a priest.
3. There are those who love me… that it is possible to love: One of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims says that love is like the apparition of spirits – much spoken of, but seldom seen.
4. So it is true… hearts that are generous for the pleasure of being so: Another of Rochefoucauld’s maxims is that generosity is the studious exercise of disinterestedness, the better to achieve some greater interest. Cauvignac, though superficially as cynical as the duke, proves in the end to be a sort of anti-Rochefoucauld – a cynic with heart.
5. He opened the letter: The original text says: ‘unsealed the letter’, Dumas presumably having forgotten his earlier statement that the princess left the letter unsealed.
6. Although normally fever dries up tears… like that of the sublime Virgin by Rubens: Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) painted several pictures of the Virgin Mary. The one referred to here could be the Virgin in Adoration Before the Christ Child in the Louvre.
THE ABBESS OF SAINTE-RADEGONDE DE PESSAC
1. the discipline, the dungeon and the in pace: The discipline was a knotted cord which those in a religious order used for whipping themselves, the in pace a form of solitary confinement. As we can see from the whole of this chapter, Dumas was not an admirer of the monastic system. Compare Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), Chapter 2.
BROTHER AND SISTER
1. Gigery: On the Barbary Coast, on the Mediterranean shores of North Africa, the target of a French expedition in 1664.
* Dumas’s note: Those who like reading speeches can find this one in full in the Memoirs of Pierre Lenet. We, for our part share the opinion of Henri IV, who claimed that being forced to listen to long speeches was what had turned his hair grey.
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