44. THE BASTILLE: A fourteenth-century fortress of eight towers linked by curtain walls built at the Porte Saint-Antoine, the eastern entrance to the walled city of Paris. It began to perform its second and more famous function as a political prison starting in the early fifteenth century, and in that capacity it will play an important part later in the Musketeers Cycle, in both Twenty Years After and The Man in the Iron Mask.
45. JEAN MOCQUET: A celebrated French explorer and trader, Mocquet (1575–1617) wrote a six-volume account of his travels and adventures in Africa and the Near East that was published in 1617; Dumas read the edition reprinted in 1831.
46. THE GARDEN AT AMIENS: In 1625, newly crowned King Charles I of England sent his prime minister, the Duke of Buckingham, to Paris to secure a treaty and to escort King Louis’s sister Princess Henriette back to London, to marry Charles. Buckingham failed to get the treaty, but he did conduct an illicit and almost open courtship of Queen Anne. When Buckingham left with Henriette to return to England, Anne and her household accompanied them as far as Amiens, where, in the garden of the bishop’s mansion, Anne and Buckingham took a private walk in the evening. What happened next is unclear, but for a few minutes they were out of sight of their attendants; suddenly Anne cried out, everyone nearby rushed to the scene, and the queen left the garden, flustered. Cardinal Richelieu, who disliked and distrusted Buckingham, used this affair to anger the king against the Englishman.
47. SAINT-SULPICE: This large thirteenth-century Romanesque church in the center of the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bells tolling the hours that could be heard all across the quarter. Later in the seventeenth century it was replaced by an even larger church that still stands, towering over Place Saint-Sulpice.
48. AT WAR IN FLANDERS: In a sidebar to the Thirty Years War, the French and Spanish fought in Flanders, on the northern French border, on and off from 1635 to 1659, so for Dumas to speak of d’Artagnan being on campaign in Flanders in 1626 is an anachronism. D’Artagnan will fight there, but later in his career, as will Athos’s son Raoul in Twenty Years After.
49. RUE DE VAUGIRARD: This long street, originally a country road, ran west from the old walls of Left Bank Paris to the village of Vaugirard, forming the southern boundary of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; along its length were the Luxembourg Palace, the Carmelite convent, and Aramis’s house.
50. THE PRISON AT FOR-I’ÉVÊQUE: Often mistranslated as Fort l’Évêque, the forbidding Bishop’s Forum on Rue Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois was built as an ecclesiastical courthouse and prison in the twelfth century. Its torture chambers were notorious.
51. PONT NEUF: The grand bridge over the Seine that crosses the western point of the Île de la Cité, its construction was begun late in the sixteenth century, but wasn’t really pursued in earnest until the time of King Henri IV, who completed and opened it in 1606. It was lined during daytime with the booths of merchants and entertainers, and was in many ways the center of the city’s social life, serving as a promenade for the wealthy and noble to display themselves, and a place where Parisians of all classes could mingle, hear the latest news, and make their opinions known. It was notorious for its many beggars and its bold thieves.
52. ESTEFANIA: Doña Estephenie de Villaguiran, one of Queen Anne’s Spanish ladies-in-waiting; Anne of Austria had Spanish women in her household, when she was allowed to do so, throughout her life.
53. SUPPORT THE DUC DE NEVERS IN HIS CLAIM TO THE DUCHY OF MANTUA: The Duchy of Mantua in northern Italy included Montferrat to its west and bordered on the Duchy of Savoy to the north. When Duke Vincenzo II died in 1627, he named a French relative, the Duc de Nevers, as his heir. However, the Duke of Savoy and the Duke of Guastalla, a Spanish proxy, also claimed the ducal throne. Cardinal Richelieu persuaded Louis XIII to support the claim of the Duc de Nevers, going to war with Savoy over the matter in 1629 and 1630; the affair forms one of the principal plotlines of the next book in the Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx.
54. MADAME DE LANNOY: Probably Charlotte de Villiers de Saint-Pol, Dame de Lannoy, one of Queen Anne’s maids of honor.
55. MADAME DE FARGIS: Madeleine de Silly, Madame de Fargis (?–1639), was sponsored by Richelieu to join Queen Anne’s household to replace the Duchesse de Chevreuse when she was temporarily exiled after the affair in the garden of Amiens (see note 46). Smart, talented, irreverent, and mischievous, Fargis quickly gained Anne’s trust and transferred her loyalty from the cardinal to the queen. To Richelieu’s displeasure, Fargis soon became almost as troublesome as Madame de Chevreuse. She is an important character in the next book, The Red Sphinx.
56. NUMBER 25: Dumas’s use of street numbers for Parisian addresses is an anachronism, albeit a harmless one; house numbering didn’t come to Paris until the mid-eighteenth century.
57. VITRAY: Possibly Antoine Vitray or Vitré (1595–1673), a Parisian bookseller and publisher whom Richelieu sometimes employed as an envoy on domestic affairs.
58. MADAME DE LONGUEVILLE, AND THE CONDÉS: Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, Madame de Longueville (1619–1679), and her parents, Henri II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé (1588–1646), and Charlotte de Montmorency, Princess de Condé (1594–1650). All were involved in cabals against the crown at one point or another, though not in the 1620s.
59. CONCINI’S WIFE: Leonora Dori Galigaï (1571–1617) was married to Queen Regent Marie de Médicis’s favorite Concino Concini, and was a favorite of Marie as well. After Concini was assassinated at the behest of the young King Louis XIII, his wife Leonora was arrested, accused of using black magic to bewitch Queen Marie, and beheaded.
60. MONSIEUR DE GUITAUT: François de Pechpeyroux de Comminges, Sieur de Guitaut (1581–1663), the captain of Queen Anne’s guards, was famously loyal to Anne of Austria, and served her for decades.
61. MONSIEUR DE LAFFEMAS: Master of Requests Isaac de Laffemas (1584–1687) was a poet and playwright whose day job was as a solicitor and magistrate. A loyal aide to Richelieu, in 1632 the cardinal made him a Lieutenant of Justice and assigned him to try and sentence the conspirators in the latest of Gaston’s plots against the throne; it was there that he acquired the sobriquet of “Richelieu’s Executioner.”
62. THE MEMOIRS OF MADAME DE MOTTEVILLE: Françoise Bertaut, Madame de Motteville (1621–1689), longtime maid of honor to Anne of Austria, wrote several volumes of memoirs after the queen’s death in 1666, which were republished in 1823 and 1838; they were among Dumas’s primary sources about internal affairs at the French Court.
63. A RING OF GREAT VALUE: Curiously, the ring Queen Anne gives to Constance in Chapter XVII to finance the journey to England is never mentioned again, another continuity error best attributed to Dumas’s haste and overcommitment.
64. IN THE DIRECTION OF THE RUE DU BAC: That is, north toward the ferry (bac) over the Seine toward the Louvre.
65. THE KING’S FAVORITE BALLET, LA MERLAISON: Not just a simple ball where ladies danced with gentlemen, in this period a court ballet was a musical spectacle that told a story through singing, acting, and dance. And La Merlaison was the king’s favorite because Louis XIII wrote it himself—no, really, he did. Its inclusion here is another of Dumas’s anachronisms, as it wasn’t performed for the first time until 1635. The ballet has been reconstructed, and you can find some pretty fabulous excerpts of performances online.
66. HÔTEL DE VILLE: The Hôtel de Ville is the building Americans would call City Hall; Paris’s Hôtel de Ville stands on the Right Bank in central Paris facing a large riverfront plaza, the Place de Grève. A grand and imposing edifice, it was rebuilt from scratch to plans approved by King François I starting in 1533, but it took more than fifty years to get it substantially complete, and indeed it wasn’t fully finished until 1628, a year after the ball in the novel.
67. THE COMTE DE SOISSONS: Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Soissons (1604–1641) was the son of King Henri IV and Anne de Montafié, and a Prince of the Blood in line for the throne behind Gaston and his half-brothers the Vendômes. He was referred to
at Court as “Monsieur le Comte.”
68. THE GRAND PRIOR: Alexandre de Bourbon, Chevalier de Vendôme (1598–1629), was Grand Prior of the French members of the Knights of Malta; the second son of Henri IV and his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées, he and his elder brother César de Bourbon, Duc de Vendôme (1594–1665) were acknowledged bastards, with a claim on the throne just behind that of the legitimate princes, Louis and Gaston. The Grand Prior’s inclusion at the ball is a mistake, as he was imprisoned at Vincennes throughout the period of the novel for his involvement in the Chalais conspiracy.
69. MONSIEUR DE BARADAS: Chevalier François de Baradas, royal equerry and king’s favorite in 1628–29; the handsome but shallow Baradas will play a pivotal role in The Red Sphinx.
70. A PHYSIOGNOMIST: By which Planchet means that he can read men’s personalities from their faces and expressions. Physiognomy was an ancient pseudoscience that was revived in 1643 by the English physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682). He also brought the word “caricature” into the English language, which should give some indication of physiognomy’s lack of subtlety and nuance.
71. LANSQUENET: A gambling card game of almost pure luck in which players bet as to whether their card will beat the dealer’s as cards are turned up from the deck. Invented in the sixteenth century, it was popular for about 150 years, and was simple enough it could be played even by drunken soldiers—indeed, its name derives from Landsknecht, a name for German mercenary troops.
72. A PROSECUTOR OF THE CHTELET: The Grand Châtelet was a medieval keep in central Paris on the Right Bank at the Pont au Change; it contained the offices of the Provost of Paris and the city’s civil and criminal courts. The Châtelet’s dungeons, which were below river level, were notorious for their unhealthy dampness.
73. THE GARDENS OF ARMIDA: The sixteenth-century epic poem “Jerusalem Delivered” by Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) is a chivalric fantasy set during the First Crusade; in it the witch Armida abducts Rinaldo, mightiest of the Christian knights, and imprisons him in her gardens.
74. THE AUGUSTINUS OF THE HERESIARCH JANSENIUS: The Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) published his influential Augustinus in 1640, which propounded a doctrine derived from St. Augustine that stated that original sin and human wickedness can be overcome only by “divine grace” and not by human works. Jansenism was controversial, and was eventually declared heretical in 1713.
75. MONSIEUR VOITURE: Vincent Voiture (1597–1648) was the most popular poet among the habitués of the influential salon of Madame de Rambouillet, a favorite of the ladies of the Court, and an intimate crony of Prince Gaston.
76. THE SIEGE OF ARRAS: Either Aramis or Dumas is mistaken; the town of Arras, on the border between France and the Netherlands, was taken by Spanish troops from a force of Dutch rebels in 1578, and then in 1640 the French took the town from the Spanish in the best-known Siege of Arras—but Aramis’s father can’t have died at either of those battles.
77. A DANDOLO OR A MONTMORENCY: Two families with ancient noble histories: the Dandolo were patricians of Venice who produced several doges; the French House of Montmorency dated back to at least the tenth century, and were known for their military acumen. Henri II, Duc de Montmorency (1595–1632) plays an important role in The Red Sphinx.
78. MONSIEUR DE CRÉQUY: Charles I de Blanchefort, Marquis de Créquy or Créqui (1578–1638) was a Marshal of France whose high opinion of himself was not matched by that of Louis XIII or Cardinal Richelieu, with whom he was often at odds.
79. LIKE SISTER ANNE: A reference to the Bluebeard story in Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose tales in which Bluebeard’s seventh wife, imprisoned in a tower with her sister Anne, keeps asking Anne, at the window, if she sees her expected rescuers coming at last.
80. OPEN THE NEXT MILITARY CAMPAIGN ON MAY FIRST: The campaign referred to is the Siege of La Rochelle, which actually began in June of 1627 after Buckingham’s forces seized the nearby island of Ré. French royal forces began to surround the walled city of La Rochelle in August.
81. THE CHURCH OF SAINT-LEU: The medieval church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles had stood on Rue Saint-Denis since 1235, but it had just been expanded and renovated in 1611 and raised to the rank of parish church in 1617. If that had made it newly fashionable, it might explain why Milady de Winter would come all the way from her residence in the Place Royale to worship at Saint-Leu—but it was more likely just Dumas employing the heavy hand of coincidence to move his plot forward.
82. TO SAINT-GERMAIN: Not Saint-Germain-des-Près, the Left Bank quarter where the musketeers all lived, but Saint-Germain-en-Laye, an affluent suburb eight or ten miles northwest of Paris.
83. LORD WINTER, BARON OF SHEFFIELD: Though there was a Baron Sheffield in Yorkshire in 1627, this isn’t him: Lord Winter is an invention of Dumas. By habit, the French characters all add the nobiliary particle to his name, referring to him as “Lord de Winter.”
84. LADY CLARICE: Dumas gives Milady de Winter’s first name as Clarick, which might have sounded English to Dumas, but looks and sounds awkward to English speakers, so it’s rendered here as Clarice. Where did Dumas get Clarickl? It might be a variation on Lady Carlisle, the name of the noble English intriguer who actually stole the queen’s diamond studs from Buckingham. Dumas found that story in the memoirs of François de La Rochefoucauld, which is its only attribution, so we don’t know if it’s true, but based on her career of intrigue during the English Civil War, Lucy Hay, the Countess of Carlisle (1599–1660) was certainly capable of it.
85. THE PLACE ROYALE: The Place Royale, constructed during the reign of king Henri IV, was one of the first planned squares in Europe, with four equal sides of matching row houses built over a covered arcade. It was a fashionable and expensive address, and shows that Milady de Winter was aiming at inclusion in the highest of high society. Cardinal Richelieu also occupied one of the houses in the Place Royale, the site of several key chapters in the next book in the Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx. During the French Revolution the square was renamed the Place des Vosges, but even today it still looks much as it did in 1627.
86. BASSET, HAZARD, AND LANSQUENET: Simple gambling games popular with soldiers and young wastrels squandering their family fortunes. Basset was an early beat-the-dealer card game that was slanted toward the bank but had attractively high payouts for certain combinations. Hazard was played with two standard dice, and is an ancestor of craps; the caster specified a main, a number between five and nine that they’d try to roll before being knocked out by rolling too high or too low. Lansquenet is a card game of almost pure luck described in note #71, above.
87. A FINE DINNER IS IMMINENT: Dumas was a notable gourmet who wrote one of the first cookbooks in the French language, the 1,100-page Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, and a well-run kitchen was dear to his heart. He spent his teenage years as a clerk in a provincial law office, so the episode of the dinner at the prosecutor’s that follows has the ring of truth.
88. THE ROLE OF HARPAGON: Molière’s The Miser was first published in 1668; Harpagon was the name of the eponymous miser.
89. DUC DE CHAULNES: Honoré d’Albert, Duc de Chaulnes (1581–1649) owed his noble title to having been a brother of King Louis’s first favorite, the Duc de Luynes. De Chaulnes turned out to have military talents, and served the king successfully as a Marshal of France until 1640.
90. LA HOUDINIÈRE: The name of La Houdinière as an officer of the Cardinal’s Guard appears in both Sandras’s pseudo-memoirs of Rochefort and in the genuine memoirs of La Porte, so there’s likely some historicity to it, though we have no other record of the individual.
91. MIRAME, A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS: The tragicomedy Mirame, attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, was actually written almost entirely by his “collaborator,” Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin (1595–1676). It was first performed in 1641.
92. DUC DE GUISE: François II de Lorraine, Duc de Guise (1519–1563) was a cousin to King Henri II and one of France’s leading si
xteenth-century generals, capturing Calais back from its long English occupation in 1558.
93. MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ: Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626–1696) was renowned for her witty, insightful, and prolific letter-writing. Her letters were widely copied and passed around among the French aristocracy, were collected after her death, and have never been out of print since.
94. DUC D’ANGOULÊME: Charles de Valois, Duc d’Angoulême (1573–1650) was an acknowledged royal bastard, the son of King Charles IX and Marie Touchet. In his youth he engaged in pro-Spanish intrigues against King Henri IV, was arrested, and spent eleven years in the Bastille. During the regency of Marie de Médicis he was released and rehabilitated, and thereafter served the throne loyally; he was one of Louis XIII’s leading commanders at the Siege of La Rochelle.
95. CLAUDE DE SAINT-SIMON: Claude de Rouvroy, Sieur de Saint-Simon (1607–93) was First Equerry to Louis XIII, a king’s favorite who was sufficiently clever and deferential to stay in favor long enough to be made a duke; we’ll see more of him in The Red Sphinx. His son Louis, one of the Sun King’s courtiers, would write one of the leading memoirs of the seventeenth century, and appears in a prominent role in The Vicomte de Bragelonne later in the Musketeers Cycle.
96. COLOMBIER-ROUGE: A small hamlet just northwest of La Rochelle, Colombier-Rouge was in the debatable land between the walls of the city and the fortifications built by the royal army to surround it.
97. BOIS-ROBERT AND THE MARQUIS DE BAUTRU: Two of Richelieu’s associates who served him as aides and agents on occasion: François Le Métel de Boisrobert (1592–1662) was a poet and Court gadfly who helped found the Académie Française; Guillaume Bautru, Comte de Serrant (1588–1685) was a courtier, wit, diplomat, and one of Richelieu’s trusted envoys. Both appear in The Red Sphinx.
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - [Full Version] - (ANNOTATED) Page 74