The Red Sphinx

by Alexandre Dumas

  BOIS-ROBERT: François Le Métel de Boisrobert, “Le Bois” (1592–1662). One of the cardinal’s Five Poets, Boisrobert was a diligent aide in all Richelieu’s literary pursuits, and the prime mover in the founding of the Académie Française. A priest before becoming a poet, his sharp-tongued irreverence frequently offended the devout, but he was nonetheless granted posts as a canon and abbot. After Richelieu’s death he attempted to transfer his loyalty to Mazarin, but the Italian didn’t care for him, so he turned his hand to writing plays, at which he prospered until well into the late 1650s.

  BRANCAS: Charles de Villar, Comte de Brancas, Marquis de Maubec et d’Anilly (1618–81). Though well-known at the salons of the Hotel de Rambouillet at a later date, Brancas was too young in 1629 to be the crony of Voiture and Pisany depicted in The Red Sphinx, as Dumas was doubtless well aware. But the author had a weakness for likeable buffoons, so he added a decade or two to Brancas’s age, which gave him an excuse to recount some amusing anecdotes. Brancas really came into his own during Anne’s regency, when he was a knight-of-honor to the queen.

  BUCKINGHAM: George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628). Favorite and boy-toy 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—an assassination, according to the plot of The Three Musketeers, engineered by an agent of Cardinal Richelieu. Contemporary accounts relate that Anne of Austria was shocked by his death, and genuinely mourned the passing of her chivalrous would-be lover.

  Cardinal see RICHELIEU

  CAVOIS, CAPTAIN: François d’Ogier, Sieur de Cavois, Captain of the Cardinal’s Guards (?–1641). Cavois was the first Captain of the Cardinal’s Guard, though that company wasn’t actually formed 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.

  CAVOIS, MADAME: Marie (not Mireille) de Lort, Madame de Cavois (?—1665). Dumas got his anecdotes about Madame de Cavois from the Historiettes of Tallemant des Réaux, who said of the lady, “Never did any wife love her husband more.” The two of them had ten children, and Tallemant says that it was in order to support them after her husband’s death that Richelieu gave her one-half the Parisian monopoly on covered sedan chairs. The reality is less romantic: when the cardinal awarded one-half of the monopoly to Souscarrières in 1639, he gave the other half to Capitaine de Cavois as a reward for his loyal service.

  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.

  Charles-Emmanuel see SAVOY

  CHARPENTIER: Denis Charpentier, First Secretary to Cardinal Richelieu (?–1647). Richelieu’s loyal, long-time secretary had come with him from Poitou and had been in the cardinal’s service since at least 1608. He was entrusted with the keys to the cardinal’s coffers, an important role at a time when governments did their business on a cash basis. Charpentier outlived his master, and was remembered in Richelieu’s will.

  CHEVREUSE: Marie-Aimée de Rohan-Montbazon, Duchesse de Chevreuse (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 unshakeable 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, and was an inveterate enemy of Cardinal Richelieu. La Chevreuse continued to intrigue after the death of both king and cardinal, and will play a prominent part in Twenty Years After, the next novel in Dumas’s Musketeers cycle.

  CHRISTINE: Christine Marie de Bourbon, Princess of Piedmont (1606–63). Like King Louis’s other two sisters, Princess Christine was married off at a young age to a foreign monarch—but she must have drawn the short straw, because whereas Elisabeth got Spain and Henriette got England, Christine ended up in the relatively minor Duchy of Savoy. But of the three Daughters of France, she was probably the only one whose marriage could be called even remotely happy. In 1619 she was wed to Victor-Amadeus, Prince of Piedmont and heir to Charles-Emmanuel, the Duke of Savoy. Thereafter she was known as Princess of Piedmont until Victor-Amadeus assumed the throne upon the death of his father, after which she was Duchess of Savoy. After the death of Victor-Amadeus in 1637 she successfully ruled Savoy for another quarter-century as duchess and regent.

  COËTMAN: Jacqueline Le Voyer d’Escoman, or Coysman, or Cotman, “Dame de Coëtman” (1585–1618?). A lady in the service of Henriette d’Entragues, the embittered former mistress of King Henri IV, Jacqueline le Voyer became acquainted with the regicide Ravaillac when he stayed at the Entragues estate, and was later implicated in the king’s assassination. Despite evidence that she actually attempted to prevent the murder, she was tried and sentenced to prison à perpétuité. Conspiracy theories abound regarding King Henri’s assassination, and the unfortunate Dame d’Escoman figures in many of them.

  COMBALET: Marie Madeleine de Vignerot du Pont de Courlay, Madame de Combalet (1604–75). Marie de Vignerot was one of Cardinal Richelieu’s several nieces, and of them certainly his favorite. In 1620 she was married to the Sieur de Combalet, a nephew of then-Constable de Luynes; it was a sad mismatch, and after he died in 1622 the Widow Combalet became a Carmelite nun and swore off marriage and men. But she’d developed a taste for high society, and thanks to her position as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mother Marie de Médicis (due to Richelieu’s influence), every door was opened to her. She became a habitué of the Rambouillet salons, a patron of the arts and artists, and very probably Richelieu’s mistress. Her hand was sought by a series of great nobles seeking an alliance with the cardinal-minister, but nothing ever came of these courtships—and indeed, she didn’t need a high-ranking husband, as she was made Duchesse d’Aiguillon in her own right in 1638 for her (ahem) services to the State. After the cardinal died, she withdrew from high socie
ty but continued her patronage of the arts and sciences, sponsoring mathematicians, poets, and writers, including Pierre Corneille, whose breakthrough play The Cid was dedicated to her.

  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.

  CONDÉ, PRINCE: Henri II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, “Monsieur le Prince” (1588–1646). Head of the “cadet line” of the Bourbon dynasty, Condé was second in line for the throne after Prince Gaston, and spent a life of power and privilege wallowing in royal entitlements, despite his negligible abilities and obnoxious personality.

  CONDÉ, PRINCESS: Charlotte Margeurite de Montmorency, Princesse de Condé, “Madame la Princesse” (1594-1650). For many years the reigning beauty of the French Court, Charlotte de Montmorency’s charms were first noticed by the roving eye of King Henri IV, who intended to make her the next in his series of royal mistresses by marrying her in 1609 to his cousin the Prince de Condé. This was intended to keep her near at hand, but Charlotte was having none of it: rather than submit to the aging Henri’s advances, she fled with her new husband to the Low Countries. After Henri’s assassination, the Condés returned to France, where they became leaders of the fractious nobles opposed to the queen mother’s elevation of Concini—so much so that Marie had them both imprisoned, though they were freed after Louis XIII came to power. During Louis’s reign, Charlotte gloried in her role as Madame la Princesse, and was loyal to her thoroughly unpleasant husband and the perquisites that came with being his wife. She was the mother of Anne Geneviève de Bourbon, later Duchesse de Longueville, and Louis de Condé, called “The Grand Condé”—both major historical figures who will play key roles later in the Musketeers cycle.

  CORNEILLE: Pierre Corneille (1606–84). Son of a Norman lawyer, Corneille’s talents as a poet and playwright brought him to the attention of Cardinal Richelieu, who made him one of the Five Poets who collaborated on his literary projects. But Corneille’s literary ambitions and abilities exceeded those of his patron, and he broke with Richelieu over the innovations in his play The Cid (1637). Corneille’s play is considered one of the greatest French tragedies of the 17th century, a precursor of the work of Racine and Molière, and was just the beginning of the poet’s successes. Dumas revered him.

  CRÉQUI: Charles I de Blanchefort, Marquis de Créquy, Prince de Poix, Duc de Lesdiguières, Governor of Dauphiné and Marshal of France (1578–1638). Maréchal de Créqui came of a noble and military family and thought he deserved to be Constable of France, but though a talented general he was a poor politician and often found himself on the wrong side of quarrels with the king and cardinal.

  DELORME: Marion Delorme, or de Lorme, or de l’Orme (1613–50). A witty, irreverent, sophisticated, and beautiful French courtesan, Marion was renowned for her liaisons with the high and mighty—including, it was rumored, Cardinal Richelieu. She was too young in 1629 to play the part assigned to her in The Red Sphinx, but Dumas had few scruples about adjusting the historical record if it meant he could add a fascinating character to his cast. And though she did have a house in the Place Royale, it was sometime after Richelieu had his residence there.

  ÉPERNON: Jean Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, Duc d’Épernon (1554–1642). One of King Henri III’s notorious favorites the mignons, d’Épernon was elevated to the peerage at an early age, and acted thereafter as a monster of pride and entitlement who caused nothing but trouble throughout the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII. Though implicated by rumor in the assassination of King Henri, he was a key supporter of Queen Mother Marie de Médicis during her regency, so long as plenty of money flowed from the royal treasury into his pockets. Though by all accounts a capable politician, in every other way d’Épernon was a thoroughly nasty character.

  Escoman see COËTMAN

  FARGIS: Madeleine de Silly, Madame de Fargis, “Marina” (?–1639). Though he disliked and distrusted women, the reign of Louis XIII abounded with clever, brave, and free-spirited ladies—an irony that wasn’t lost on Dumas, who wrote them in wherever possible. La Fargis was smart, talented, irreverent, and mischievous, and Dumas couldn’t resist making her drop-dead gorgeous into the bargain, though she didn’t need looks to enthrall her impressive roster of high-ranking lovers. As a young woman, her amorous adventures scandalized her father, who sent her to a Carmelite convent to straighten her out, but it didn’t take. When he died, she rejoined the salons of Parisian society, and soon captivated Charles d’Angennes, Comte de Fargis, who promptly married her and carried her off to Madrid, where he’d been appointed as French Ambassador. After outraging the prim and prudish Court of Philip IV for four years, she returned with her husband to Paris—right about the time the king had banished the Duchesse de Chevreuse from Queen Anne’s household, and Richelieu was looking for someone to replace her. Madame de Combalet admired La Fargis’s brains and wit and recommended her to the cardinal, who sponsored her to the role—but once in Her Majesty’s household she quickly gained Anne’s trust and transferred her loyalty to the queen. To Richelieu’s displeasure, Fargis soon became almost as troublesome as Madame de Chevreuse.

  FERDINAND: Ferdinand II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (1578–1637). Head of the House of Hapsburg, Catholic overlord of the Germanies and distant uncle to Anne of Austria, Ferdinand was the arch-enemy of Protestantism in Europe and as responsible for the bloodbath of the Thirty Years War as anyone.

  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 co-conspirators in return for immunity from consequences—because as the healthy heir to a chronically unhealthy king, he knew his life was sacrosanct. Despite his being a worm, the Great Nobles turned to him time and again in their long struggle to resist France’s transition to absolute monarchy, and he was too weak to resist joining any plot that might put him on the throne.

  GONZAGUE: Princesse Marie Louise de Gonzague (Gonzaga) (1611–67). Daughter of the Duc de Nevers, and a mere ingénue at the time of The Red Sphinx, her status as the probable heir to the Duchy of Mantua made her a handsome prize to whoever might win her hand. Prince Gaston made a play for her, and though it was almost certainly insincere, her marriage to Monsieur would have given him a power base outside the country; this was an outcome the king and cardinal dared not risk, so they placed Marie under virtual house arrest for a while to take her out of circulation. Though treated as a pawn in the Mantua affair, she had considerable brains and willpower behind her undoubted good looks, and she carved out an independent life for herself in Parisian high society throughout the 1630s. In 1639, Cardinal Mazarin finally strong-armed her into a political marriage with the King of Poland, where she surprised everybody by taking an active role in Polish politics, leading that country ably through difficult times.

  GOURNAY: Marie Le Jars, Demoiselle de Gournay (1565–1645). A novelist, poet, and essayist, de Gournay was one of France’s most important early female writers, and a far more capable person than Dumas’s rather condescending depiction would indicate. A protégée and “adopted daughter” of Michel de Montaigne, she supported herself entire
ly through her writing, though late in life she did receive an honorary stipend from Cardinal Richelieu. She wrote forcefully and persistently on behalf of equality of the sexes. She never married.

  GUISE: Charles, Duc de Guise (1571–1640). Though the House of Guise in Lorraine reached its height of power in France during the Wars of Religion in the late 16th century, when the Guises led the Catholic League, they retained considerable wealth and prestige well into the reign of Louis XIV. Charles, the fourth Duc de Guise, was past his prime by 1629, and was known mainly for his lechery and overweening self-importance.

  GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS: Gustave II Adolf, King of Sweden (1594–1632). Widely regarded as the greatest military commander of the 17th century, King Gustave led Sweden to victory in the Thirty Years War and established his country as a great power. A dynamic, larger-than-life figure who led his troops from the front, Dumas admired him without reservation, perhaps because Gustavus reminded him of his own father, the famous General Dumas who commanded an army for Napoleon.

  HAUTEFORT: Mademoiselle Marie de Hautefort, “Aurora” (1616–91): First brought to Court in 1630 as a maid of honor to the queen mother, Marie soon joined the household of Queen Anne, where she pulled off the astounding trick of becoming close friend and confidante of both the king and the queen. Her relationship with King Louis was platonic, and she seems to have been a genuinely good person who had only the best interests of Louis and Anne at heart. This baffled everyone; nobody knew what to do about it.

  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 Red Sphinx, as his royal sons—Louis, Gaston, and Antoine, Comte de Moret—and his greatest political disciple, Cardinal Richelieu, all struggle with Henri’s legacy and try to define their roles in light of it.