The Red Sphinx

by Alexandre Dumas

  ISABELLE: Mademoiselle Isabelle de Lautrec. The lady-love of the Comte de Moret is an invention of Dumas. She first appeared in The Dove, in which she is arguably the protagonist, and Dumas liked her well enough to revive the character for The Red Sphinx.

  JOSEPH: François Leclerc du Tremblay, “Father Joseph,” Richelieu’s “Eminence Grise” (1577–1638). Capuchin monk, Christian mystic, politician, diplomat, and spymaster, Père Joseph was one of the most fascinating men of his age. The phrase eminence grise, for a shadowy advisor, derives from his role: he was the Gray Eminence to the cardinal’s Red Eminence. Though he was undeniably effective, in person many found the intensity of his presence disquieting, even repellent—in short, if you imagine him as Peter Lorre at his creepiest, you won’t be far wrong. But smart, hellish smart. His brother Charles du Tremblay was Governor of the Bastille, which was convenient, given Joseph’s role as Richelieu’s spymaster.

  King see LOUIS

  L’Angely see ANGELY

  Lautrec see ISABELLE

  LONGUEVILLE: Catherine de Gonzague, Duchesse de Longueville, “The Dowager Duchess” (1568–1629). A fierce old relic tempered in the previous century’s Wars of Religion, the Dowager Duchess was left in charge of young Princesse Marie de Gonzague when the rest of House Nevers went off to the Duchy of Mantua to stake the family claim to the throne.

  LOPEZ: Alphonse (not Ildefonse) Lopez (1582–1649). Persecuted in Spain for his Moorish, or possibly Jewish, descent, Lopez came to Paris in 1604, where he became a fashionable jewel merchant (and possibly moneylender) to French high society.

  LOUIS: King Louis XIII, His Most Christian Majesty of France, “Louis the Just” (1601–43). Dumas wrote a great deal about Louis XIII and his reign, most of it quite accurate, thanks to the research of his assistant Auguste Maquet. Dumas had a good grasp of the melancholy king’s character and portrayed it well.

  LUYNES: Charles d’Albert, Duc de Luynes (1578–1621). The young King Louis’s falconer and first favorite, Luynes engineered the assassination of Concini which ended Queen Marie’s regency and put Louis XIII on the throne. The king rewarded Luynes by making him first a duke, and then Constable of France. Luynes was the first husband of Marie de Rohan, later Duchesse de Chevreuse.

  Marie see GONZAGUE or MÉDICIS or COMBALET or CHEVREUSE

  MAZARIN: Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, “Captain Mazarino Mazarini,” later Cardinal Mazarin (1602–61). Mazarin was a protégé of Richelieu, and succeeded him as cardinal and prime minister during the regency of Anne of Austria. He did in fact first meet Richelieu while acting as a papal envoy during the War of Mantuan Succession, and was instrumental in crafting the treaty that ended that conflict. You will find him described in ample detail in Twenty Years After, the next novel in Dumas’s Musketeers cycle.

  MÉDICIS: Queen Mother Marie de Médicis (1575–1642). Marie was the second queen to France’s King Henri IV, who married her in 1600 in a desperate search for an heir after the infertile Queen Marguerite was set aside. A nasty piece of work, Marie inherited all the ambition, pride, greed, and ruthlessness of the Medici, but none of their brains or finesse. However, she did give King Henri the royal heirs he wanted, including Louis XIII, whom Marie dominated but never liked much, and the worthless Prince Gaston, on whom she doted. Whether she actually helped conspire in the assassination of her husband, nobody can say for sure, but she was certainly capable of it.

  Marion see DELORME

  Michel see SOUSCARRIÈRES

  MIRABEL: Don Antonio de Zuñiga y Davila, Third Marquis of Mirabel, Spanish Ambassador to France (1580–1647). A scion of the House of Zuñiga, who served the Kings of Spain as diplomats for generations, the Marquis of Mirabel was a suave and accomplished envoy who acted as liaison between Anne of Austria and her brother, King Philip IV.

  “Monsieur” see GASTON

  MONTMORENCY: Henri II, Duc de Montmorency, Governor of Languedoc, Marshal of France, “The Maréchal-Duc” (1595–1632). Head of the Montmorency family, one of the greatest noble houses of France, and heir to a grand military tradition, Henri’s driving goal was to become Constable (i.e., chief general) of France like his father and grandfather before him, and in fact he was a capable military leader. Handsome, well-mannered, and personable, he was popular at Court, though the king didn’t like him because he felt Montmorency was too warm in his attentions to Queen Anne. He hesitated to speak in public due to a slight stutter; when others around him were being witty, Montmorency would just bow and smile, which gave him a reputation for wisdom that was perhaps undeserved. Like many of the grands seigneurs, Montmorency’s great sin was pride: he held to the old conviction that when the nobles’ rights and privileges were trespassed upon, they had a right to revolt to restore them, as the king was really no more than the leading member of the nobility. After the Day of Dupes in late 1630 confirmed Richelieu as prime minister and Louis as absolute monarch, that time was over—but Montmorency failed to get the memo, and joined Prince Gaston in one last nobles’ revolt in 1632. He paid with his head, and leadership of House Montmorency passed to his sister Charlotte, Princesse de Condé.

  MORET: Antoine de Bourbon, Comte de Moret, “Jacquelino” (1607–32). Son of King Henri IV and half-brother to Louis XIII, Moret doesn’t appear much in the historical record—which means at least there’s little to contradict the adventures Dumas recounts in The Red Sphinx, and that’s good enough for Dumas. Moret was trained for a career in the Church, and was nominal head of several abbacies, but he didn’t have the temperament to be a priest, and by age sixteen he was in Paris pursuing beautiful women—following in the footsteps of his father, whom he closely resembled. (Moret was said to have had a teenage crush on Madame de Chevreuse, but it was a rare cavalier who crossed paths with Marie de Rohan who didn’t fall for her.) He joined the circle of chivalrous nobles who congregated around the Duc de Montmorency, and might very well have gone along with the Maréchal-Duc on the French expeditions to Savoy in 1629–30, but we’re not sure. What we do know is that he joined Montmorency’s rebellion in support of Prince Gaston in 1632, and when that revolt was put down at the Battle of Castelnaudary he was killed. . . . Or was he? Rumors persisted throughout the 17th century that Moret was only wounded at Castelnaudary, and then went into hiding to avoid Montmorency’s fate at the executioner’s block, living under an assumed name as a monk or religious hermit. His supposed survival became the stuff of a number of romantic novels, and in The Dove Dumas was already treading a well-worn path.

  NEVERS: Charles de Gonzague, Duc de Nevers, Duke of Mantua and Montferrat (1580–1637). Even among the dukes of France, who were the least humble of men, Nevers was known for his pride and vainglory. At one time or another, he offended nearly every prominent member of the French nobility. Tracing his descent back to the Emperors of Byzantium, Nevers claimed to be heir to the throne of Constantinople, at that time capital of the Ottoman Empire, and actually tried to raise support in Europe for a new crusade to recapture the Near East for Christendom and make him its ruler. (Father Joseph was one of his few supporters in this folly.) When Duke Vincenzo of Mantua died in 1627, Nevers was named his heir, and though nobody liked him much, Cardinal Richelieu endorsed his claim as a matter of State, and persuaded Louis XIII to commit to supporting it.

  Orléans see GASTON

  PHILIP: Philip IV, His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Spain (1605–65). The dour monarch who reigned over the decline of the Spanish Empire, Philip’s wife was King Louis’s sister Elisabeth, as Louis’s wife was Philip’s sister Anne, the four of them wed in a double marriage arranged by Queen Mother Marie de Médicis. These marriages failed to fulfill Marie’s dream of making the two monarchs friends and allies, as their policies were invariably opposed.

  PISANY: Louis-Pompeo d’Angennes, Marquis de Pisany (1615–45). Pisany, second son of the celebrated Marquise de Rambouillet, was a little too young to be chasing women and stabbing sell-swords in 1629, but Dumas adjusted history a bit once again to enable him to w
rite a juicy character into The Red Sphinx. An incurable romantic frustrated by his hunched back and ugly features, he was probably less obstreperous than Dumas makes out, though he was given to writing sarcastic verses about his contemporaries.

  PONTIS: Emmanuel, Vicomte de Pontis. The “engineer-geographer” who is Moret’s rival for the affections of Isabelle de Lautrec was probably based on Louis de Pontis (1583–1670), a career military man from Provence who spent fifty years in the French army, served under Richelieu, and left behind memoirs that are still in print.

  Queen see ANNE

  RAMBOUILLET: Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665). The marquise’s literary and society salons at the Hotel de Rambouillet are justly celebrated as the crucible of modern French art and manners. Her kindness and generosity were boundless, especially to penniless writers, and in a society in which character assassination was a spectator sport, no one ever had a bad word to say about her. It is not too much to say that, by respecting French artists, she made French art respectable.

  RAVAILLAC: François Ravaillac (1578–1610): Ravaillac was the Catholic fanatic who, in Paris on May 14, 1610, leaped onto Henri IV’s open carriage and stabbed the king to death. Political assassinations by Catholic fanatics were so common in Renaissance and Early Modern France that it was practically a tradition, and Ravaillac was part of a pattern: if you led a Catholic movement, you had a murderous zealot being stoked up somewhere in the background, ready to be unleashed on your opponent if the political situation grew desperate. Ravaillac was the last such holy regicide, in France at least, as he slew a king so broadly popular that the public backlash was terrifying. Who sponsored him, and was he acting on their command, or had he simply waited too long for orders that never came and decided to act on his own? We’ll almost certainly never know, because after his execution all the evidence appears, even at this remove, to have been systematically destroyed. There are any number of conspiracy theories to explain what few facts we have; Dumas, as usual, seized on the theory that best suited the purposes of his story.

  RICHELIEU: Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, “Monsieur le Cardinal” (1585–1642), Louis XIII’s incomparable prime minister. One of the two most important Frenchmen of the 17th century, exceeded only by Louis XIV, Richelieu has been the subject of scores of biographies (including one by Dumas), and his life and works have been analyzed in excruciating detail, starting with his own Memoirs. His deeds were momentous, but it was his character and personality that interested Dumas, who loved historical figures who were great but also greatly flawed. After deploying Richelieu in The Three Musketeers as the worthy antagonist of his most enduring heroes, Dumas couldn’t resist revisiting the cardinal by making him a protagonist in The Red Sphinx. He admired his “man of genius,” but didn’t shy away from portraying Richelieu’s darker side: his vanity, ruthlessness, and bouts of near-crippling insecurity. It’s important to note that during the events of 1629–30 portrayed in The Red Sphinx, the cardinal was not yet the all-powerful prime minister he would be in the final twelve years of Louis’s reign—he was still vulnerable to domestic enemies great and small, and time and again came within a hair’s-breadth of banishment or assassination. Though gone from Dumas’s Musketeers cycle after The Red Sphinx, Richelieu nonetheless casts a long shadow over the rest of the series, from Twenty Years After all the way through The Man in the Iron Mask.

  ROSSIGNOL: Antoine Rossignol des Roches (1600–82). Richelieu’s brilliant cryptographer entered his service during the Siege of La Rochelle, after he broke the rebellious Huguenots’ ciphers in record time. He stayed with the cardinal throughout his ministry, served Mazarin after Richelieu’s death, and then Louis XIV once the Sun King came into his own. Rossignol’s innovations and refinements made French cryptography the envy of Europe, and the Grand Cipher he invented continued to be used for two generations after his death by his son and grandson, who followed in his footsteps as royal code-masters. After the death of Antoine-Bonaventure, the last of the Rossignols, nobody was left alive who could figure out how to use the Grand Cipher, and its secrets weren’t solved until the late 19th century.

  ROTROU: Jean Rotrou (1609–50). One of the cardinal’s Five Poets, Rotrou, like Corneille, was a bourgeois from Normandy who came to Paris to make it as a playwright. A talented but rather conservative writer, he avoided the innovations that made Corneille’s work so controversial; Rotrou’s plays were solid and successful, but he was no Corneille or Racine, let alone Molière.

  SAINT-SIMON: Claude de Rouvroy, Sieur de Saint-Simon (1607–93). First Equerry to Louis XIII, and the page who followed Baradas as the king’s favorite, Saint-Simon was sufficiently clever and deferential to stay in favor long enough to be made a duke. His son Louis, one of the Sun King’s courtiers, would write one of the leading memoirs of the 17th century; he appears in a prominent role in The Vicomte de Bragelonne later in the Musketeers cycle.

  SAVOY: Charles-Emmanuel I, the Duke of Savoy, “Prince of Marmots” (1562–1630). Charles-Emmanuel ruled the small interstitial state of Savoy for fifty years, and in pursuit of his lifetime goal of expanding his duchy into a kingdom, got his small realm into one conflict after another. He never succeeded in making Savoy a great power, but on the other hand he maintained its independence during his entire reign, which was no small feat given Savoy’s strategic location and powerful neighbors. Though reckless in his youth, he grew cunning with age and experience, and was every bit as wily as Dumas portrays him.

  SOUSCARRIÈRES: Sieur Pierre de Bellegarde, Marquis de Montbrun, Seigneur de Souscarrières, “Monsieur Michel” (1595?–1670). One of the cleverest rogues of his time, Souscarrières had an entire chapter devoted to him in the gossipy Historiettes of Tallemant des Réaux, and his exploits were the subject of one of Courtilz de San-dras’s lurid pseudo-biographies. A man of low birth who connived his way into the nobility, managing to hobnob with the high and mighty like one of their own, the actual facts of his background are a matter of some dispute—but the remarkable story related by Richelieu in The Red Sphinx is close enough, even if some of the details are off. He was in fact responsible for popularizing in Paris the enclosed English version of the sedan chair, the monopoly for which was shared between him and Capitaine de Cavois.

  SULLY: Maximilien de Béthune, Baron de Rosny, Duc de Sully, Prime Minister to King Henri IV (1560–1641). Sully was Prince Henri of Navarre’s right-hand man during the Wars of Religion, and continued in that capacity after the prince became King Henri IV. Born a Huguenot, he advised his coreligionist Henri to adopt Catholicism in order to rule effectively, though he remained a Protestant himself all his life. But stubbornness was central to his character, and a large part of what made him successful as Henri’s chief minister of state—that, and a tight fist on the royal funds. His sharp tongue made him a lot of enemies, and though he survived his master King Henri by thirty years, they were lonely ones. Richelieu was an admirer of Sully, and adopted some of his methods, where he thought them appropriate to the new century. The Hotel de Sully, near the Place Royale, is now a museum, and is still much as it’s described by Dumas.

  VAUTIER: François Vautier, or Vauthier, or Vaultier, Confidential Physician to Marie de Médias (1580–1652). The queen mother’s conspirator-in-chief, whom Richelieu called in his Memoirs “the principal and most dangerous agent in the entire faction,” was in fact an actual medical doctor of some renown. Though his treasonous career led Richelieu to eventually throw him in the Bastille, after the death of Louis XIII he was released and restored to favor, and ended up as the respected physician to young King Louis XIV during the regency of Anne of Austria.

  VICTOR-AMADEUS: Victor-Amadeus I, Prince of Piedmont (1587–1637). Victor-Amadeus was raised largely at the Spanish Court in Madrid, and then married a French princess, King Louis’s sister Christine, all of which helped him to assist in Savoy’s eternal dance between France and Spain—a dance he continued as Savoy’s ruler after the death of his fat
her, Duke Charles-Emmanuel. Handsome and personable, he was an effective diplomat, and fortunately did not inherit the consuming ambition that drove his father to drag Savoy into one war after another.

  VOITURE: Vincent Voiture (1597–1648). The most popular poet among the habitués of the Hotel de Rambouillet, favorite of the ladies and an intimate crony of Prince Gaston, Voiture was arguably more successful as a courtier than he was as a versifier. Indeed, despite his association with the hated Gaston, his tact and deference enabled him to mend fences with Cardinal Richelieu and become one of the earliest members of the Académie Française. A master of sly innuendo and the poetic in-joke, he knew just how far he could go in lampooning his patrons among the Great Nobles, and was the witty and insolent upstart you most wanted to have as a guest at your high society soirée.

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  Also from Pegasus Books

  THE FIRST-EVER PUBLICATION IN ENGLISH OF THE

  NEWLY DISCOVERED LAST NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR OF

  THE THREE MUSKETEERS.

  Rousing, big, spirited, its action sweeping across oceans and continents, its hero gloriously indomitable, the last novel of Alexandre Dumas—lost for 125 years in the archives of the National Library in Paris—completes the oeuvre that Dumas imagined at the outset of his literary career.