La Rochelle, deprived of succor by the English fleet, and of the reinforcements promised by Buckingham, surrendered after a siege of a year. The capitulation was signed on October 28, 1628.
The king made his entry into Paris on December 23rd of the same year.114 He was received in triumph, as if he came from conquering an enemy and not Frenchmen. He entered via the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, under arches of verdure.
D’Artagnan was confirmed in his new rank. Porthos left the service, and in the course of the following year married Madame Coquenard. The coveted strongbox contained eight hundred thousand livres.
Mousqueton wore a magnificent livery and satisfied his life’s ambition: to ride standing behind a gilded carriage.
Aramis, after a journey into Lorraine, disappeared completely and stopped writing to his friends. It was learned much later from Madame de Chevreuse, who told it to two or three of her lovers, that he had donned the cassock and taken charge of a convent in Nancy. Bazin became a lay brother.
Athos remained a musketeer under the orders of d’Artagnan until 1631, at which time, after a trip into Touraine, he also left the service, under the pretext of having inherited a small estate in Roussillon. Grimaud followed Athos.
D’Artagnan fought three times with Rochefort, and wounded him each time. “I’ll probably kill you on the fourth,” he said, holding out his hand to help Rochefort to his feet.
“Then it would probably be better for both of us if we put an end to this,” said the wounded man. “Corbleu! I’m more your friend than you think, for ever since our first encounter, with just a word to the cardinal, I could have had your throat cut.”
And they embraced, this time sincerely and with no second thoughts.
Planchet obtained from Rochefort the rank of sergeant in the Guards.
Monsieur Bonacieux lived quietly, with no idea as to what had become of his wife, and no urge to find out. One day he had the imprudence to remind the cardinal of his existence. The cardinal sent to inform him that he would be provided for in such a way that he would never again want for anything.
The following day Monsieur Bonacieux left his house at seven in the evening to go to the Louvre, and was never seen again in the Rue des Fossoyeurs. The opinion of those most likely to know was that thereafter he was fed and lodged in some edifice of State by the grace of His Most Munificent Eminence.
Dramatis Personae: Historical Characters
Ancre see CONCINI
ANNE: “Anne d’Autriche,” Anne of Austria, Queen of France (1601–66). Eldest daughter of King Philip III of Spain and sister to King Philip IV, Anne was wed to King Louis XIII of France in a political marriage at the age of fourteen. A Spaniard among the French, unloved by the king, proud but intimidated, and vulnerable to manipulation by her friends, Dumas’s depiction of Anne is, in the main, accurate. Her conflicts with king and cardinal will continue when she appears as a major character in the next novel in the Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx.
ARAMIS: Aramis, Chevalier René d’Herblay, based loosely on Henri, Seigneur d’Aramitz (1620?–1655 or 1674), as filtered through Courtilz de Sandras’s fictionalized Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan. Though Sandras had made Aramis the brother of Athos and Porthos, the historical d’Aramitz was a Gascon petty nobleman, an abbot who spent at least the first half of the 1640s serving under his uncle, Captain de Tréville, in the King’s Musketeers. Sources disagree as to the date of his death.
Artagnan see D’ARTAGNAN
ATHOS: Athos, Comte de La Fère, 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.
BISCARAT: Jacques de Rotondis de Biscarat (?–1641) was a lieutenant in the cardinal’s light horse, and later Governor of Charleville. Though he appears in Richelieu’s Memoirs, Dumas found him in Courtilz de Sandras’s pseudo-Memoirs of d’Artagnan, where he was a member of the Cardinal’s Guard.
BUCKINGHAM: George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628). Favorite of both King James I of England and his son, Charles I, Buckingham was handsome, brilliant, charming, manipulative, politically savvy, an inveterate womanizer, and, thanks to his royal patrons, the most powerful man in the English Court. A narcissist of epic proportions, from 1625 to 1628 he conducted a clandestine and illicit flirtation with Queen Anne of France that infuriated Louis XIII. Buckingham (and thus England) supported the Huguenots of La Rochelle when that city was besieged by Louis and Cardinal Richelieu, and he was on the verge of leading a relief expedition to raise the siege when he was assassinated in Portsmouth on August 23, 1628. Contemporary accounts relate that Anne of Austria was shocked by his death, and genuinely mourned the passing of her chivalrous would-be lover.
CAHUSAC: Jean de Baradat, Sieur de Cahusac, actually was an officer in Richelieu’s Guard; Courtilz de Sandras, where Dumas found him, makes him one of the Cardinal’s Guards who duel d’Artagnan and the musketeers. He was a member of the prolific Baradat/ Baradas family that gave Louis XIII his brief favorite François de Baradas (see note #69 below).
Cardinal see RICHELIEU
CAVOIS, CAPTAIN: François d’Ogier, Sieur de Cavois, Captain of the Cardinal’s Guards (?–1641). Cavois was indeed Captain of the Cardinal’s Guard, though not until 1634. A gentleman of the petty nobility, the stolid Cavois’s loyal service to Richelieu was the making of his fortune, so much so that one of his sons became a Marshal of France. Cavois died fighting the Spanish at the Siege of Bapaume in Flanders. Curiously, Dumas refers to him as “de Cavois” in The Three Musketeers, but denies him the nobiliary particle in The Red Sphinx, possibly to emphasize the cardinal’s willingness to promote men of low rank if they showed talent and loyalty.
CHALAIS: Henri de Talleyrand-Périgord, Comte de Chalais (1599–1626). Chalais, one of Louis’s handsome young favorites and the Master of the King’s Wardrobe, came under the influence of the Duchesse de Chevreuse and joined one of Prince Gaston’s early conspiracies against Richelieu and the king. When the cabal was discovered and broken up, the high-ranking plotters mostly escaped punishment; Chalais, a mere tool, was made the scapegoat, and was executed in a spectacularly bungled beheading that took the amateur headsman hired for the job over thirty blows to complete.
CHEVREUSE: Marie-Aimée de Rohan-Montbazon, Duchesse de Chevreuse, “Marie Michon,” “Camille de Bois-Tracy” (1600–79). One of the most remarkable women in a century full of remarkable women, Marie de Rohan was a vector of chaos who challenged every social convention of her time with wit, cheer, charm, and unshakable self-confidence. Throughout the reign of Louis XIII she was a steadfast friend and ally to Anne of Austria when the queen had few of either. Brilliant, beautiful, free-spirited, mischievous, adored and adorable, she had a long list of lovers on both sides of the English Channel, many of whom ended up dead or in prison thanks to her habit of involving them in plots and conspiracies against the French Crown. She first came to prominence in 1617 when she married Albert de Luynes, Louis’s former falconer and first favorite, whom the king elevated to the rank of duke and Constable of the French Armies. When Luynes fell from favor in 1621 and died of a convenient bout of purple fever, Marie avoided obscurity by quickly marrying the Duc de Chevreuse, a wealthy Lorraine noble and perennial ornament of the French Court. Marie and her second husband had what nowadays would be called an “open marriage,” leaving Madame de Chevreuse free to pursue her own interests, which were romance and treason in equal measure, mixing the two whenever possible. She was involved in every notable conspiracy of the reign of Louis XIII, was an inveterate enemy of Cardinal Richelieu, and will play a prominent part in The Red Sphinx, the next novel in Dumas’s Musketeers cyc
le.
CONCINI: Concino Concini, Maréchal d’Ancre (1575–1617). Concini 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, including the Marquisate of Ancre, governorships of numerous provinces and cities, and the baton of a marshal, though he had no military experience. He lorded it over the French nobility, and they cordially hated him for it, no one more than young King Louis XIII, whose mother made him defer to Lord Concini. Luynes, the young king’s favorite, engineered Louis’s rise to power (and his own) when he orchestrated Concini’s public assassination in 1617.
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. The historical d’Artagnan would have been around fifteen years old in 1626, too young to be the d’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers, though not by much—less than five years. (Dumas was never reluctant to shift a good character forward or back a few years in order to fit them into his story; he shaved about ten years off the ages of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.) 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.
DES ESSARTS: François de Guillon, Sieur des Essarts, Baron de Sautour, Captain of the King’s Guards (?–1645). Des Essarts was a commander of a guards regiment, though no earlier than the 1630s; he married Tréville’s sister in 1637, becoming the Musketeer Captain’s brother-in-law. Dumas found him in Sandras’s Memoirs of d’Artagnan, and appropriated him for The Three Musketeers. He died in 1645 at the Siege of La Motte.
FELTON: Lieutenant John Felton (1595–1628): The English officer who assassinated the first Duke of Buckingham on August 23, 1628; he was apparently a discontented soldier who acted on his own. There’s nothing in the historical record to suggest he was a Puritan; Dumas’s Felton is entirely the author’s invention.
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 coconspirators in return for immunity from consequences—because as the healthy heir to a chronically unhealthy king, he knew his life was sacrosanct. He will play a larger role in the next book in the series, The Red Sphinx.
HENRI: 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. His life and death overshadow every aspect of the reign of Louis XIII.
JOSEPH: François Leclerc du Tremblay, “Father Joseph,” Richelieu’s “Eminence Grise” (1577–1638). Capuchin monk, Christian mystic, politician, diplomat, and spymaster, Père Joseph was one of the most fascinating men of his age. The phrase eminence grise, for a shadowy adviser, derives from his role: he was the Gray Eminence to the cardinal’s Red Eminence. Though he was undeniably effective, in person many found the intensity of his presence disquieting, even repellent.
JUSSAC: Claude de Jussac, Governor (chief retainer) of the Duc de Vendôme (1620–1690). Jussac was one of the cardinal’s men dueled by d’Artagnan and his friends in chapter I of Sandras’s Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan, which is where Dumas found him. Though seen in his hotheaded twenties in the Memoirs, he later became settled and respectable.
King see LOUIS
LA CHESNAYE: Charles d’Esmé, Sieur de la Chesnaye, Premier Valet de Chambre du Roi, “Monsieur le Premier. ” La Chesnaye was a trusted servant to the king, until he wasn’t—in 1640 he was dismissed from Court, according to Tallemant des Réaux for spying for the cardinal on the king and/or the disloyal favorite Cinq-Mars.
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 have an important (albeit nonhistorical) role in the final book in the Musketeers Cycle, The Man in the Iron Mask.
LA TRÉMOUILLE: Henri de La Trémouille, Comte de Thouars, later Duc de La Trémouille (1599–1674). A Huguenot noble whose Paris hôtel was, in fact, right across from the tennis courts near the Luxembourg, he converted to Catholicism after the fall of La Rochelle in 1628.
LOUIS: 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 assistant Auguste Maquet. Dumas had a good grasp of the melancholy king’s character and portrayed it well, especially in the next book in the Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx.
LUYNES: Charles d’Albert, Duc de Luynes (1578–1621). The young King Louis’s falconer and first favorite, Luynes engineered the assassination of Concini that ended Queen Marie’s regency and put Louis XIII on the throne. The king rewarded Luynes by making him first a duke and then Constable of France. Luynes was the first husband of Marie de Rohan, later Duchesse de Chevreuse.
MÉDICIS: Queen Mother Marie de Médicis (1575–1642). Marie was the second queen to France’s King Henri IV, who married her in 1600 in a desperate search for an heir after the infertile Queen Marguerite was set aside. A nasty piece of work, Marie inherited all the ambition, pride, greed, and ruthlessness of the Medici, but none of their brains or finesse. However, she did give King Henri the royal heirs he wanted, including Louis XIII, whom Marie dominated but never liked much, and the worthless Prince Gaston, on whom she doted. The plot of The Red Sphinx turns, in part, upon the question of her complicity in the assassination of King Henri IV.
“Monsieur” see GASTON
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.
RICHELIEU: Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, “Monsieur le Cardinal” (1585–1642), Louis XlII’s incomparable prime minister. One of the two most important Frenchmen of the seventeenth 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, from Twenty Years After all the way through The Man in the Iron Mask.
ROCHEFORT: Comte Charles-César de Rochefort. The Man of Meung who appears in The Three Musketeers 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., 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 the “demon familiar” of Cardinal Richelieu 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 seventeenth century. Another nominee is Henri-Louis d’Aloigny, Marquis de Rochefort (born 1625), who was one of the lieutenants of Marshal Turenne. To muddy the waters even further, in the text Tréville refers to Rochefort as a cousin of the Comte de Wardes! At this remove, it seems impossible to be sure who he was.
SÉGUIER: Pierre Séguier, Keeper of the Seals (1588–1672). Séguier didn’t become Keeper of the Seals until 1633 (and then Chancellor in 1635), but Dumas moved his service to 1626 so he could recount some juicy (though probably unreliable) anecdotes about the man he found in Tallemant des Réaux’s Historiettes.
TRÉVILLE: Jean-Arnaud de Peyrer, Comte de Troisville or Tréville, Captain of the King’s Musketeers (1598–1672). Dumas’s portrayal of the poor Gascon who came to Paris to find success as leader of the King’s Musketeers, part soldier, part courtier, is in the main accurate—though Dumas slipped his career forward a few years for the purposes of his story. In 1626 Tréville was still a cornet or sub-lieutenant in the musketeers, and didn’t become the elite unit’s Captain-Lieutenant (because technically the captain was His Majesty) until 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, and he received the Order of Saint-Esprit in 1658.
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