The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - [Full Version] - (ANNOTATED)
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98. THE FIRE AT THE PALAIS DE JUSTICE: All of the records pertaining to the assassination of King Henri IV were stored at the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité, but were destroyed when that medieval building mostly burned down in 1618. Conspiracy theorists speculate that it was arson set to protect the identities of King Henri’s assassins.
99. 5 AUGUST 1628: The carte blanche appears three times in the novel, with three different dates: December 3, 1627 (first); December 4, 1627 (second); and August 5, 1628—third, last, and obviously most correct, given that the following fourteen chapters all occur during August of 1628.
100. THE DYKE MONSIEUR LE CARDINAL IS BUILDING: After investing La Rochelle on the landward side, in October 1627 Richelieu moved to cut off the city’s access to the sea by building a dyke, or barrier, across the entrance to the harbor. A jetty was extended by chaining together fifty-six ships of various sizes to stretch across the roadstead, defended from the outside by the nascent French Navy, also pulled together in record time by the cardinal. By January 1628, the dyke was complete.
101. THE MADELONNETTES, OR THE DAUGHTERS OF REPENTANCE: A Parisian convent in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré established in the late 1620s for the dubious purpose of redeeming prostitutes by sentencing them to become Catholic nuns.
102. TYBURN: The notorious series of gallows at the crossroads of Tyburn was where most of London’s condemned criminals were executed from the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries.
103. OUR SOUTHERN COLONIES: A reference to England’s warm-water overseas colonies, most of which did not yet exist in 1628; there were colonies by that date in Virginia, Bermuda, Barbados, Saint Kitts, and Nevis.
104. THE ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S DAY MASSACRE: A horrific incident in the French Wars of Religion when, on the evening of August 23, 1572, the order went out from King Charles IX for the Catholics of Paris to slaughter all the Huguenots (French Protestants), who were in the capital to celebrate the marriage of Princess Margaret to the Protestant Prince Henri, later King Henri IV. The massacre spread from Paris to the provinces, resulting in the deaths of at least 5,000 Huguenots, and possibly many more than that—no one is quite sure of the total. The incident is central to Dumas’s great 1845 novel La Reine Margot (in English, Queen Margot).
105. MARION DELORME: Marion Delorme or de Lorme or de l’Orme (1613–50) was a witty, irreverent, sophisticated, and beautiful French courtesan, renowned for her liaisons with the high and mighty—including, it was rumored, Cardinal Richelieu, albeit at a later date. The reader will meet her in the next book, The Red Sphinx.
106. BÉTHUNE: This French town, southeast of Calais, is very near the 1628 border with what was then the Netherlands and is now Belgium. The convent there is an invention of Dumas, and in the original version was located for several chapters in Stenay, a town a bit farther east.
107. SOME MISERABLE PRISON COLONY: The original text specifies Botany Bay, the Australian prison colony, but that wasn’t established until 1788.
108. TUNNEL THROUGH FLOORS: An echo of The Count of Monte Cristo, which Dumas was already at work upon at the time this chapter was written.
109. LUCRETIA: Latin author Livy’s History (of Rome) tells of how Lucretia, a paragon of modesty, was raped by the Roman Sextus Tarquinius, and thereafter took her own life from shame. The story is also told in Shakespeare’s narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece” (1594).
110. SENT AS AMBASSADOR TO SPAIN: After protracted negotiations between England and Spain, in 1623 King James I sent his favorite Buckingham to Madrid to demand the hand of the Infanta Maria Anna for his son, Charles (later Charles I). The mission was a failure, but on his way to Spain Buckingham passed through Paris, where he first saw Anne of Austria.
111. THE DUC DE SOUBISE: Benjamin de Rohan, Duc de Soubise (1580–1642) was a Huguenot leader, younger brother of the Duc de Rohan, the overall French Protestant leader. A bold naval commander, he commanded the Huguenot fleet during the Siege of La Rochelle.
112. REFUSED YOUR REQUEST TO PROMOTE ME TO CAPTAIN: This is the excuse the historical John Felton gave for assassinating the Duke of Buckingham, that he was a disgruntled officer who had been passed over for promotion, and he went to the grave insisting upon it.
113. THE ORDER OF THE LAZARISTS: The Congregation of the Mission, an austere charitable order known colloquially as the Lazarists, had been founded by Vincent de Paul at the Priory of St. Lazarus in 1624, and then recognized by the Archbishop of Paris in 1626. It’s not an order likely to appeal to Aramis, and indeed, as we’ll see later in the cycle, he becomes a Jesuit.
114. DECEMBER 23RD OF THE SAME YEAR: That is, 1628; the next volume in the Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx, picks up on December 5, 1628.
Acknowledgments
The interior drawings by the great Maurice Leloir, engraved by Jules Huyot, are drawn from the magnificent oversized two-volume edition of Les Trois Mousquetaires published by Calmann-Levy in Paris in 1894. Thanks to Michael Phillips for his help in digitizing and formatting the illustrations selected for this edition.
Thanks also to Philip Turner, literary agent extraordinaire, for his never-failing assistance in guiding me through the twists and turns of the publishing business.
Thanks to Rhiannon Michele Connor for her able and cheerful management of my ever-more-complex website, swashbucklingad venture.net, where our readers are always welcome. Visit early and often!
And many thanks, as ever, to the redoubtable Claiborne Hancock and his crew at Pegasus Books, particularly to Sabrina Plomitallo-González, whose clean and modern designs nonetheless evoke the classic look and feel of the books of a century ago.
–LAWRENCE ELLSWORTH
OTHER TITLES OF INTEREST
FROM PEGASUS BOOKS
THE RED SPHINX
by Alexandre Dumas
(Book Two of the Musketeers Cycle, translated by Lawrence Ellsworth)
THE LAST CAVALIER
by Alexandre Dumas
THE BIG BOOK OF SWASHBUCKLING ADVENTURE
Selected and Introduced by Lawrence Ellsworth
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
Pegasus Books Ltd
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The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, Translated by Lawrence Ellsworth Translation and Original Material Copyright 2018 © by Lawrence Schick Front cover art: detail of “Les Chanteurs” by Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition January 2018
Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Pegasus Books
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ISBN: 978-1-68177-614-9
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