18 (p. 363) “Would they not rather have poisoned me at one of my meals, or with the fumes of wax, as they did my ancestress, Jeanne d’Albret?”: Jeanne III (1528-1572), queen of Navarre, called Jeanne d‘Albret, ruled the kingdom of Navarre during the “religious wars” in France. As a Protestant, she gave aid to her co-religionists in La Rochelle and elsewhere in France. One of her political objectives was to keep her kingdom independent, for she had the Catholic kingdoms of Spain and France on her borders. When her son, as Henri IV (1553-1610), became king of France, Navarre became essentially a part of France. Its separate identity was conserved only in the French king’s official title: Sa Majesté très chrétienne, le roi de France et de Navarre (His Most Christian Majesty, the King of France and Navarre). Jeanne d’Albret was King Louis XIV’s great-grandmother. Claude Schopp states that Catherine de Médicis ordered the murder of Jeanne d’Albret, who was poisoned by perfumed gloves.
19 (p. 510) “The States are assembled there, ” replied the King. “I have two demands to make of them: I wish to be there”: Louis XIV planned to travel to Nantes to meet with local notables drawn from the clergy, the nobility, and the third, or popular, estate. This would not be a convocation of the Estates General, but a regional meeting with the three estates of the province of Brittany.
Inspired by The Man in the Iron Mask
THE D’ARTAGNAN ROMANCES
The Man in the Iron Mask is the third segment of the third book in Dumas’s d‘Artagnan romances, the trilogy that began with The Three Musketeers (1844). The second novel in the series, Twenty Years After (1845), is less well known than its companion pieces. As its title indicates, Twenty Years After takes place two decades following the close of The Three Musketeers. It is 1648 and Charles I, the king of England, is on the verge of losing his throne to the revolutionary Oliver Cromwell. Although the Musketeers have retired, d’Artagnan convinces them that their services are needed to protect the integrity of the throne. Unfortunately, Mordaunt, the son of Milady, is determined to foil the efforts of those who killed his mother. Though the Musketeers are halted in England, they return to France in time to save its king, Louis XIV, from the Fronde, a group of insurrectionists.
The Vicomte de Bragelonne; or, Ten Years Later (1847), the final novel in Dumas’s trilogy, is three times longer than either of its predecessors. Due to its great size, it is often split into three separately titled volumes: The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Vallière, and The Man in the Iron Mask. In some editions, it is split into four volumes: The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Ten Years Later, Louise de la Vallière, and The Man in the Iron Mask. Because the exact contents of these volumes differ—sometimes even those that carry the same subtitle—much confusion can result when different editions are compared. Whatever the edition, The Man in the Iron Mask is the best loved and most widely read of Dumas’s sequels to The Three Musketeers.
Numerous authors, attempting to capitalize on the fame of Dumas’s popular stories, have written sequels. Les Trois Petits Mousquetaires (The Three Small Musketeers), by Émile Desbeaux, appeared in 1882, not long after Dumas’s death. In 1883 Émile Blondet, under the pseudonym Paul Mahalin, published Son of Porthos, which he falsely claimed was a novelization of a lost play by Dumas. Henry Llewellyn Williams, a prolific translator of Dumas, also falsely claimed that his 1901 D’Artagnan the King Maker was a novelized version of a Dumas play.
Another icon of French literature, Cyrano de Bergerac, appears with d‘Artagnan in a delightfully inventive series by Paul Féval fils and M. Lassez. Cyrano, the title character in the 1897 play by Edmond Rostand, is first an enemy of Dumas’s great hero, in D’Artagnan Against Cyrano de Bergerac (1925), a novel in four volumes. After numerous adventures, the two resolve their differences and become inseparable friends, as recorded in D‘Artagnan and Cyrano Reconciled (1928), a novel in three volumes, and in Comrades at Arms: The Further Adventures of D’Artagnan and Cyrano (1930). The novels and their individual volumes have appeared under a variety of titles.
A recent sequel, The Last Love of Aramis (1993), by Jean-Pierre Dufreigne, is a memoir told from the point of view of Aramis; it won the Le Prix Interallié literary prize, but to date no English translation has appeared.
FILM
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was cast in the dual roles of Philippe and Louis XIV in the 1998 film The Man in the Iron Mask, directed by Randall Wallace. The side plots slow down the film at first, but it takes off when Philippe ascends the throne. DiCaprio ably evokes the sense of entitlement in Louis XIV’s character. The Man in the Iron Mask also stars Jeremy Irons as Aramis, John Malkovich as Athos, Gérard Depardieu as Porthos, and Gabriel Byrne as d’Artagnan. Depardieu stands out as the flatulent, lustful Porthos, particularly in a nude scene. The only Frenchman in the cast, Depardieu brings an authentic ribaldry to his aging womanizer. Malkovich’s overwrought way of delivering dialogue pervades the film, but beautiful sets and costumes, as well as artistic cinematography, give it an aesthetically pleasing air. While the fencing and musketry scenes perhaps lack the grace found in earlier cinematic versions of Dumas’s classic, Wallace’s film offers engrossing action and a pageant of Hollywood giants.
A low-budget version of The Man in the Iron Mask was also released in 1998. It was directed by William Richert, who also plays Aramis; his son, Nick Richert, portrays Philippe and Louis XIV Dennis Hayden is d’Artagnan, Timothy Bottoms is Fouquet, and Eddie Albert Jr. plays Athos.
In the 1929 silent movie The Iron Mask, Douglas Fairbanks employs his gift for physical comedy as d’Artagnan, a role he’d first taken in the 1921 version of The Three Musketeers, directed by Fred Niblo. The Iron Mask was Fairbanks’s last silent film, and its duel scenes showcase both Fairbanks’s swordsmanship and charisma. Directed by Allan Dwan, the film also features William Bakewell in the roles of Philippe and Louis XIV
A talking version of The Man in the Iron Mask by horror film director James Whale was released in 1939, starring Warren William as d‘Artagnan and Louis Hayward as Philippe and Louis XIV In 1952 Hayward returned to the Dumas classic when he played d’Artagnan in a gender-bending version called Lady in the Iron Mask. Directed by Ralph Murphy, it features Patricia Medina as Princess Anne and Princess Louise. A 1977 television version of The Man in the Iron Mask, directed by Mike Newell, stars Richard Chamberlain as Philippe and Louis XIV and Louis Jordan as d‘Artagnan. Two years later Ken Annakin directed the film The Fifth Musketeer (also known as Behind the Iron Mask), with Lloyd Bridges as Aramis and his real-life son Beau Bridges as Philippe and Louis XIV In this version, Cornel Wilde portrays d’Artagnan, and Olivia de Havilland makes an appearance as the Queen Mother.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to _ filter Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTS
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
The books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we admire the most; we choose and we re-visit them for many and various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or two of Scott’s novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, The Egoist, and the Vicomte de Bragelonne, form the inner circle of my intimates. Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; The Pilgrim’s Progress in the front rank, The Bible in Spain not far behind. There are besides a certain number that look at me with reproach as I pass them by on my shelves: books that I once thumbed and studied: houses which were once like home to me, but where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms (and blush to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt.... But it is ei
ther four or five times that I have read The Egoist, and either five or six that I have read the Vicomte de Bragelonne.
Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little famous as the last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with the Vicomte began, somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The name of d‘Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend, for I had met it the year before in a work of Miss Yonge’s. My first perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I understood but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is of the execution of d’Eymeric and Lyodot—a strange testimony to the dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de Greve, and forget d‘Artagnan’s visits to the two financiers. My next reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands. I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down with the Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-light evening by the fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends. I would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no part of the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my friends are quite so real, perhaps quite so dear, as d’Artagnan.
Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in my favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me call it my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it more seriously than ever. Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, being so well known in these six volumes. Perhaps I think that d’Artagnan delights to have me read of him, and Louis Quatorze is gratified, and Fouquet throws me a look, and Aramis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays to me with his best graces, as to an old patron of the show. Perhaps, if I am not careful, something may befall me like what befell George IV about the battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the Vicomte one of the first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works. At least, I avow myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the Vicomte with that of Monte Cristo, or its own elder brother, the Trois Mousquetaires, I confess I am both pained and puzzled.
—from Memories and Portraits (1887)
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
The main points of strictly technical variation in Dumas as compared with Scott are thus the more important use made of dialogue, the greater length of the stories, and the tendency to run them on in series. In quality of enjoyment, also, the French master added something to his English model. If Scott is not deep (I think him much deeper than it is the fashion to allow), Dumas is positively superficial. His rapid and absorbing current of narrative gives no time for any strictly intellectual exertion on the part either of writer or reader; the style as style is even less distinct and less distinguished than Scott’s; we receive not only few ideas but even few images of anything but action—few pictures of scenery, no extraordinarily vivid touches of customs or manners. Dumas is an infinitely inferior master of character to Scott; he can make up a personage admirably, but seldom attains to a real character. Chicot himself and Porthos are the chief exceptions; for d’Artagnan is more a type than an individual, Athos is the incarnate gentleman chiefly, Aramis is incomplete and shadowy, and Monte Cristo is a mere creature of melodrama.
But Dumas excels Scott himself in the peculiar and sustained faculty by which he can hold his reader by and for the story. With Sir Walter one is never quite unconscious, and one is delighted to be conscious, of the existence and individuality of the narrator. The “architect, artist, and man” (may Heaven forgive me, as Scott certainly would, for coupling his idea in any way with that of the subject of this phrase!) is always more or less before us, with his vast, if not altogether orderly, reading, his ardent patriotism, his saturation with romance coexisting with the shrewdest common-sense and knowledge of business, above all that golden temperament which made him a man of letters without pedantry and without vanity, a man of the world without frivolity and without guile, a “man of good” without prudery and without goodiness.
—from “Scott and Dumas,” in Macmillan’s Magazine (1894), reprinted in Modern English Essays, Vol. 3 (1922)
G. R. CARPENTER
It happened that as a boy I did not even hear of Dumas. In the Massachusetts village where I lived we knew the New England poets and Tennyson; we read Scott and Cooper and Dickens and George Eliot; and ambitious boys firmly believed that there were untold literary treasures still awaiting them in various ancient and modern tongues. Of Victor Hugo we knew something, too; but nothing of Dumas. At school and at college also I can scarcely remember hearing the name mentioned among young men eager to know what was best in literature.
We were under the spell of Matthew Arnold’s critical theories, and anxious to feed ourselves only on masterpieces whose permanent rank had been established beyond all peradventure. We were either students of the great classics—Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, for instance—or condescendingly attentive to the more distinguished authors of our own day; and, somehow, I got firmly fixed in my mind the doctrine that one’s real enjoyment should be derived from the few great masters only, though it was perhaps human and pardonable sometimes to take a slight and passing interest in writers who were not quite the “best.” Without ever having opened a volume of Dumas’s work, therefore, I classed him with Bulwer Lytton as a trivial favorite of a bygone generation.
It was several years after I left college that, on a long railway journey, I wonderingly took up “Les Trois Mousquetaires,” influenced largely by the chance remark of a sober-minded physician, who declared that it was about the only book he really cared to read. Surprised to find that the day had passed so quickly and happily, I made a point thereafter to provide myself under similar circumstances with a similar volume; and, thus led from book to book, I found, in the course of some years, not only that I had read the thirty-five volumes that make up Dumas’s three great series of historical romances, but that I was quite prepared to read them anew with equal pleasure. On the whole, I find myself a better and a saner man for this reading. For the dispiriting hours of weariness or anxiety, at least, I can imagine no better companion than Dumas, unless it be an old friend with whom one may join in exercise that is both restful and stimulating. In literature, so far as my own feeling goes, he can be compared only with Scott, whom he imitated and surpassed, and with Sienkiewicz, who, in his great trilogy, in turn imitated and surpassed Dumas....
The exciting plot is not, of course, what is really worth while in Dumas’s romances. Mere excitement we can get at any time from many sources,—from the detective story, for instance,—less artistically produced, but sufficient in quantity. The exciting plot, however, never alone gives permanence to literature; and Dumas’s work must be better based than that if it is to survive. For my own part, I find one explanation of the deeper ef fect these volumes make on me in the fact that Dumas—recklessly as he apparently wrote, and in headlong haste—has somehow managed to build his characters out of genuinely human material. He seems to treat them like the
veriest puppets; they wear their hearts on their sleeves; and yet neither the creations of Scott nor of Shakespeare are more truly alive. With women he was less successful; though Marguerite, the queen of folly, the gracious Diane de Monsoreau, and the proud Comtesse de Charny are wonderful types of womanhood. But his men are men. D Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis; Chicot, Henri IV, La Mole, Coconnas, Bussy d’Amboise; Balsamo, Philippe de Taverney, and Gilbert,—not to mention others,—these are as solidly and finely imagined as any characters in literature. How the author could have produced them we may never cease to wonder; but they do exist. He lived a foolish life; and he wrote in haste: but he wrote from his heart; and his heart was by nature clairvoyant. These characters appeal to us because they are implicit in the lives of us all, because they are the varied types of human ambition and endeavor; and this wide appeal assures their permanence. So the “Odyssey” lives, not because of the roll of its hexameter, but because millions of men, far wandering, made by fate to tarry for a time on enchanted isles, have pressed unceasingly forward, by force and guile, toward the longed-for day of their home-coming....
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