In addition to the Bildungsroman and the historical novel, there is yet another literary genre, the Gothic novel, whose popularity Dumas exploited in composing The Three Musketeers. The Gothic novel first appeared in England, where Horace Walpole (Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis (The Monk, 1796), and Charles Robert Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer, 1821), helped to shape its form and content. Their works, which were immediately translated into French, were widely read and served as models for similar texts composed by French authors. Gothic tales are typically sensationalist in nature and often involve the persecution of a young woman whose virtue, if not her very life, is put in grave danger. Such stories are frequently set in isolated castles notable for their subterranean or elevated spaces (prisons, dungeons, or cells) and are populated by cruel and/or lubricious men. Dumas was quite familiar with the conventions of this genre and could use them to good effect, as one of his early novels, Pauline (1838), clearly shows.19 When incorporated into The Three Musketeers, however, instead of functioning in a straightforward manner, Gothic codes are deployed as clichés and subverted by parody.
In The Three Musketeers, the fact that the story of Milady’s imprisonment and escape (chapters 49 and 50 and 52—58) is set in England seems at first to be unproblematic. In retrospect, however, this nod in the direction of the birthplace of Gothic fiction can be read as a sign of the parodic nature of the account of Milady’s arrest and detention by her brother-in-law, Lord de Winter. Abducted from a ship, carried off in a closed carriage, then locked in a well-guarded cell in an isolated castle, Milady is immediately positioned on what the (sophisticated) reader will easily recognize as a standard Gothic narrative trajectory.20 What is more, the better to seduce her prison guard, John Felton, Milady will soon spin out a stereotypical tale of sexual and religious victimization by Buckingham in which she portrays herself as the virginal heroine/martyr. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Still, her mastery of the Gothic genre makes Milady’s story so convincing that, as she had hoped, Felton obligingly casts himself in the role of rescuer and redresseur de torts (righter of wrongs). Like Felton, naive readers may accept at face value this interpolated tale and the (historically incorrect) explanation it offers for Felton’s assassination of the Duke of Buckingham. More experienced readers will enjoy the way this episode ironically lays bare the commonplaces of Gothic fictions.
As this example of generic subversion clearly shows, wit is an important feature of The Three Musketeers. Whether subtle, as it is here, or overt, as it is on other occasions, humor contributes to our reading pleasure as well as to our understanding of certain characters and events in the novel.21 There are times, for example, when the narrator’s comic barbs are directed at D‘Artagnan. We have already quoted (in note 8 below) the mock-heroic scene at the Jolly Miller inn where an irate D’Artagnan attempts to skewer the host of that hostelry, only to discover that he has nothing more than the stub of a sword in his hand. The scene is, of course, laughable, but also carries with it the suggestion of emasculation—the sword being a well-known phallic symbol. The “joke” is further emphasized by the fact that the host has previously taken the other, larger part of the lengthy blade to use as a larding needle. Such a use plays upon the double linguistic register (cooking and sword fighting) in which the verb embrocher, “to skewer,” can be employed and transforms the sword into something less than a noble instrument of valor and power. As a result, the reader is afforded an opportunity to laugh at D’Artagnan’s youthful (and therefore impotent) rage and to verify the pertinence of the narrator’s earlier comparison of the book’s hero to Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
This scene is followed by a similar event much later in the novel. In chapter 35, D‘Artagnan, assuming the identity of the Comte de Wardes, spends several hours alone with Milady in a darkened room late at night. The next day, Athos—who believes he recognizes the sapphire ring “De Wardes” received as a token of affection from Milady—warns D’Artagnan to stay away from this woman who could prove to be a dangerous enemy. Writing as De Wardes, D‘Artagnan decides to send Milady an insulting letter. Incensed by its contents, Milady soon summons D’Artagnan (as himself) to her home and, feigning love for him, asks him to punish De Wardes for her. She also invites D‘Artagnan to an assignation later that night. D’Artagnan thinks about not returning but changes his mind, believing that, now aware of Milady’s duplicitous character, he will not be deceived by her wiles. However, once under Milady’s sexual spell, the young man loses his head and imprudently confesses that he had earlier taken De Wardes’s place. Milady is outraged and in the struggle that ensues, her nightdress is torn and the fleur de lis branded on her shoulder is revealed. The discovery of this mark of her past crimes, which she had heretofore managed to keep secret, further infuriates Milady and, to avoid being stabbed by her, D‘Artagnan “almost unconsciously [draws his sword] from [its] scabbard” (p. 417). Maneuvering his way out of her bedroom and into her maid’s chamber next door, D’Artagnan barely manages to escape Milady’s wrath.
There is much that is psychologically insightful in this scene, which at once shows Milady’s transformation from siren to fury and D‘Artagnan’s evolution from wary lover to incautious naif and then dazed quarry. What follows, though, is comical. While Milady repeatedly thrusts her dagger at the bolted door behind which D’Artagnan has managed to barricade himself, the young man appeals to her maid.
“Quick, Kitty, quick!” said D’Artagnan, in a low voice.... “let me get out of the hotel; for if we leave her time to turn round, she will have me killed by the servants.”
“But you can’t go out so,” said Kitty; “you are naked.”
“That’s true,” said D’Artagnan ... “that’s true. But dress me as well as you are able, only make haste; think, my dear girl, it’s life and death!”
Kitty was but too well aware of that. In a turn of the hand she muffled him up in a flowered robe, a large hood, and a cloak.
She gave him some slippers, in which he placed his naked feet, and then conducted him down the stairs. It was time (p. 418).
Fleeing Milady’s residence in a disguise that leaves him “unmanned” (he wears neither pants nor boots), D’Artagnan is first briefly pursued by a police patrol and then hooted at by passersby on their way to work (it is almost dawn) . He does not stop in his mad dash across Paris until he arrives at Athos’s door. When a sleepy Grimaud, Athos’s usually silent valet, comes to see who is pounding at the door, he is stunned into speech.
“Holloa, there!” cried he; “what do you want, you strumpet? What’s your business here, you hussy?”
D’Artagnan threw off his hood, and disengaged his hands from the folds of the cloak. At sight of the mustaches and the naked sword, the poor devil perceived he had to deal with a man. He concluded it must be an assassin.
“Help! murder! help!” cried he. “Hold your tongue, you stupid fellow!” said the young man; “I am D’Artagnan; don’t you know me?...”
“You, Monsieur d’Artagnan!” cried Grimaud, “impossible” (p.419).
This scene is almost pure farce.22 At first, Grimaud brashly scolds the visitor whom, judging by “her” dress, he sees as a woman of loose morals. He then trembles at the sight of “his” mustaches and naked sword (a symbolic display of genitalia), which cause the valet to fear for his life. In any event, Grimaud cannot—or will not—recognize the (confusingly gendered) individual at the door.
Awakened by all this noise, Athos soon appears. His reaction is rather different from his valet’s, but in its own way is just as atypical as Grimaud’s unusual loquacity was of him.
Athos recognized his comrade, and phlegmatic as he was, he burst into a laugh which was quite excused by the strange masquerade before his eyes—petticoats falling over his shoes, sleeves tucked up, and mustaches stiff with agitation. (p. 420)
After Athos has bolted the door to his rooms and D‘Artagnan has shed h
is “female garments” for a man’s dressing gown—the change of clothes restores his equanimity and stiffens his masculine resolve—the young man tells the Musketeer of his “terrible adventure” (p. 420). Framed between a pair of securely fastened doors (at Milady’s and at Athos’s), this account of D’Artagnan’s flight gives the reader another opportunity to laugh at the novel’s hero, although the clash with Milady will later prove to have serious and far-ranging consequences. Appearing as it does near the middle of the book, the episode suggests both how far D’Artagnan has come since his adventure in Meung—this time he at least has a real sword—and how far he still has to go before he can lay claim to the wisdom that is usually a sign of maturity and experience.
Other characters in the novel are similarly subject to the narrator’s comic barbs. There are, for instance, numerous examples of Porthos’s vainglory and gargantuan appetite, which his purse is never full enough to satisfy. One might not always expect this to be funny, and yet there is something undeniably humorous in the discomfiture Porthos feels when his expectations of gustatory pleasure and satiety come face to face with the reality of the dinner he is served at the procurator’s home (chapter 32 )23 or when he is offered D’Artagnan’s old yellow horse instead of the noble steed he had expected to receive (chapter 34) .
There are times, too, when Aramis’s religious vocation, casuistic language, and expressions of Christian meekness and piety are set at odds with his aggressive behavior as a Musketeer. This brings a delicious touch of comic dissonance to the text. Consider, for example, the following scene in which Aramis explains to Cardinal Richelieu the role he played in a quarrel that has just taken place at the Red Dovecot inn:
Monseigneur [he says, addressing Richelieu], being of a very mild disposition, and being, likewise, of which Monseigneur perhaps is not aware, about to enter into [holy] orders, I endeavored to appease my comrades, when one of these wretches gave me a wound with a sword, treacherously, across my left arm. Then I admit my patience failed me; I drew my sword in my turn, and as he came back to the charge, I fancied I felt that in throwing himself upon me, he let it pass through his body. I only know for a certainty that he fell; and it seemed to me that he was borne away with his two companions (p. 473).
The contrition Aramis expresses here and his seeming denial of active responsibility for the injury of his opponent appear to be designed to elicit absolution for an act that is both illegal (dueling) and immoral (killing) 24 The reader may well smile at this, but the Cardinal—who is both the author of a ban on dueling and a prelate—will in fact pardon Aramis. He does so, however, not because of the efficacy of the Musketeer’s language, but because he discovers that Aramis and his friends fought to protect a woman who, unbeknownst to them, is none other than Milady—the very person the Cardinal has come to meet at the inn.
Comic scenes like this and the others described above seem to me to be more than just occasions for laughter. They play a role in the development of character psychology—something critics have at times insisted is lacking in Dumas’s novel. In fact, these comic episodes show that, even when characters evolve little over the course of the story, their foibles do not go unexamined and readers are afforded some insight into the workings of their minds. What is more, although D’Artagnan’s transformation from an impetuous youth to a thoughtful, resolute adult is often slow and uneven, he does travel the road from innocence to experience, from naivete to knowledge.
In this way, despite the swashbuckling nature of his adventures, Dumas’s seventeenth-century protagonist is very much like Eugène de Rastignac, the nineteenth-century hero of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (Old Goriot, 1834—1835), whose journey, while seemingly more urbane and of a more modern nature, follows a very similar path. Both novels begin with a naive young man’s arrival in Paris, where he is forced, for lack of funds, to take modest lodgings. Both show him making mistakes and being guided by mentors. Both novels end with a somber, sobering death that, overt differences aside, similarly marks the definitive end of the protagonist’s youth and the beginning of his more knowing manhood. This quick comparison with Balzac’s novel, a work rarely faulted for its lack of character psychology or viewed as appealing primarily to adolescent boys, leaves one wondering why the two books have long occupied such very different positions in the literary canon. Perhaps it is the liberal, joyful inclusion of humor, the immoderate feasting, and the clashing of swords that diminishes the prestige of Dumas’s work in the minds of some.
To be sure, Balzac’s novel is considerably shorter than Dumas’s and is devoid of the lengthy interpolations (for example, the story of Milady’s imprisonment) that temporarily divert attention away from the hero’s growing understanding of the complex codes and relationships that are key to his future success. Modern critics, who tend to prefer brevity and who may fail to note the pertinence of these episodes to the overall design of Dumas’s novel, may grow impatient with such elements of the text, finding them either old-fashioned or superfluous. While such a view is mistaken, it might account for some of the scholarly disdain to which Dumas’s work is still occasionally subject despite its enduring popularity with readers.
Then, too, the myth that has grown up around Balzac—a myth most notably embodied in Rodin’s statue of the man—often paints him as a solitary genius who spent long nights in monk-like garb writing and revising his texts. Such an image coincides perfectly with our modern conception of the artist as an intensely focused, singularly original creator. The truth is more complex, however, for Balzac, like Dumas, lived a full and varied life and accumulated massive debts in the process. Dumas, though, worked with a collaborator—Auguste Maquet—a face he openly acknowledged, even though his signature alone appeared on the text. Much has been made of this collaboration, which has been used to dismiss Dumas’s genius and to deny him literary paternity of his works. Some of this criticism no doubt reflects our modern bias in favor of individual (versus collaborative) composition. Some of it reflects a misappraisal of Dumas’s talents and Maquet’s contributions, and some seems to have been motivated by racism—Dumas’s father was born on a plantation in Haiti, the son of a black slave and her white master, a minor French nobleman.25 The work of serious contemporary scholars like Claude Schopp, who have examined the extant portions of Maquet’s drafts for The Three Musketeers, make it clear, however, that the text that has enthralled generations of readers is most definitely Dumas’s.
Although it is Dumas’s adventuresome heroes who generally garner most readers’ attention, the infamous Milady—a.k.a. Anne de Breuil, Milady de Winter, Charlotte Backson, and Lady Clarick—is just as important a figure. Beautiful, ruthless, intelligent, and determined, she is D‘Artagnan’s principal antagonist in The Three Musketeers and one of Cardinal Richelieu’s secret agents. Variously described as a tigress, a lioness, a panther, and a serpent, she uses every means at her disposal to gain her ends and attack her enemies. Actress and seductress, she has an uncanny ability to see into the hearts and minds of her victims. A bigamist as well (she has married both Athos and Lord de Winter’s brother), she has led her husbands and other men astray and destroyed their lives. Some critics have taken the character of Milady as proof of the misogynistic nature of Dumas’s novel, though such a view is hard to credit given Dumas’s personal affection for women. To be sure, like Marguerite de Bourgogne in Dumas’s 1832 drama, La Tour de Nesle (The Tower of Nesle), Milady conforms to the nineteenth-century stereotype that portrayed some women as diabolical and treacherous creatures.26 Promiscuous, powerful, and/or profligate, such women were seen as a threat to (patriarchal) society, to the family, and even to the nation. In The Three Musketeers, Milady very clearly represents a danger to these fundamentally male-centered institutions and relationships, and so it comes as no real surprise that, in the end, she must die. The fact that Milady is also responsible for the death of Constance Bonacieux—the woman D’Artagnan loves—is, of course, a further and more romantic rationale for her execution. (Consta
nce herself embodies another stereotype, that of women as angels and/or innocent victims.)
Dumas’s deployment of this stereotypical vision of the diabolical woman is, I believe, no different from his use of the conventions of the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, or Gothic fiction. By adopting the gender stereotypes of his day, Dumas is not so much expressing a hatred of women as he is conforming to the expectations of his audience. The cliché he sets out here helps his readers to make sense of and situate his novel within the parameters of their prior literary and cultural experiences. Consider, for instance, Milady’s reaction to the insulting letter she receives from “De Wardes.” Although she grinds her teeth, turns “the color of ashes,” and collapses into an armchair after reading that missive, Milady quickly rebuffs the ministrations of her maid.
“What do you want with me?” said she, “and why do you place your hand on me?”
“I thought that Madame was ill, and I wished to bring her help,” responded the maid, frightened at the terrible expression which had come over her mistress’s face.
“I faint? I? I? Do you take me for half a woman? When I am insulted I do not faint; I avenge myself!” (p. 403).
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