Twenty Years After

by Alexander Dumas

  6. PRESIDENT BLANCMESNIL: René Potier de Blancmesnil (?–1680) was one of the senior présidents in the Grand Chamber of the Paris Parliament, and a frequent ally of Broussel during the Fronde.

  7. BARRIÉRE DES SERGENTS, THE QUINZE-VINGTS, AND THE BUTTE SAINT-ROCH: Three strategic checkpoints in the streets around the Palais Royal, extending west along Rue Saint-Honoré.

  8. SWISS GUARDS: From the Renaissance onward, Swiss mercenaries served as royal guards in a number of European courts, most notably France and Spain. The Cents Suisse, or Hundred Swiss, were guards at the Louvre and other royal palaces such as Fontainebleau; in wartime entire regiments of mercenaries were raised from the cantons of Switzerland.

  9. KING’S MUSKETEERS: A company—later two—of elite soldiers, the musketeers were the personal guard of King Louis XIII and after him Louis XIV. They were founded in 1622 when a carbine-armed company of light horsemen was upgraded and given the new, heavier matchlock muskets as primary arms. Though their function was mainly ceremonial and to serve as royal bodyguards, they were sometimes deployed on the battlefield, where they fought either mounted as cavalry, or dismounted and relying on their muskets. They are often depicted wearing their signature blue tabards with white crosses, which were adopted sometime in the 1630s. At the time of Twenty Years After, the King’s Musketeers had been temporarily disbanded by Mazarin in favor of guard companies loyal to the cardinal rather than to Tréville (see Dramatis Personae), but that didn’t suit d’Artagnan’s character arc, so Dumas conveniently ignored the fact.

  10. TRÉVILLE’S: Jean-Arnaud de Peyrer, Comte de Troisville or Tréville (1598–1672) was captain-lieutenant of the King’s Musketeers from 1634 to 1646, but had been forcibly retired by Mazarin when the cardinal temporarily disbanded the elite company.

  11. THE MUSKETEERS ARE BETTER SOLDIERS THAN THE GUARDS: This continues the theme of rivalry between elite guard units established in The Three Musketeers, with its clashes between the Cardinal’s Guards and the King’s Musketeers. In 1648 the elite units guarding the royal family were selected companies of the Gardes Françaises plus the company of Cardinal’s Guards, which Mazarin had inherited from Richelieu.

  12. THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE: In the previous century, during the French Wars of Religion (roughly 1562–1598), the hardline Catholic members of the nobility, who wanted to crush the Protestant (or Huguenot) faction, were often held in check by the more moderate Catholics, the Politiques, who were usually allied to the then-current Valois king. In 1576 a powerful and ambitious Catholic peer, Henri I, Duc de Guise, founded the Catholic League to organize opposition to the Huguenots and to King Henri III, who was regarded as too conciliatory toward the Protestants. The League was heavily armed, and more than a few battles were fought before Henri III had the Duc de Guise assassinated in 1588.

  13. A DUC DE GUISE: See note 12. Henri I, Duc de Guise (1550–1588) was a powerful and ambitious Catholic Grand charismatic and canny enough to rouse and organize other nobles to the anti-Protestant cause.

  14. FRONDE: A number of social and political conflicts combined in France to cause the messy and intermittent revolution of the Fronde from 1648 to 1652. King Louis XIV, still in his minority, was too young to rule, and the realm was ruled by a queen regent and her foreign-born prime minister, a leadership regarded as weak by the opportunistic Grands of the high nobility. Worse, the country was locked in a seemingly endless war with Spain, an existential conflict that was ruinously expensive, so much so that taxes had more than doubled in the decade leading up to the Fronde. This ever-increasing tax burden had alienated the country’s business interests and infuriated the commoners and peasantry, upon whom the burden fell (nobles were exempt). The people were outraged at the excesses of the royal “tax farmers” who collected the imposts, and were (rightfully) regarded as enriching themselves at the expense of both citizens and the monarchy. The King’s Council, at Mazarin’s behest, had also alienated the parliaments, the Men of the Robe of the legal profession, by creating and selling scores of new judicial positions that added to the treasury but diluted the value of the existing offices. In protest, treasurers stopped collecting taxes, parliaments refused to ratify decrees, and councilors and attorneys—the sinews of government—began taking up the cause of the troubles of ordinary citizens. Incidents of resistance to authority occurred in several major cities, but the center of unrest was Paris, where the neighborhood militias, organized to maintain order, instead became the instruments of rebellion. Twenty Years After is set during the so-called First or Parliamentary Fronde of 1648–49, a conflict resolved, albeit temporarily, when the Court and parliament came to terms after a year of struggle.

  15. HÔTEL DE RAMBOUILLET: The Marquise de Rambouillet’s literary and society salons at the Hôtel 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.

  16. AT THE SIEGE OF LA ROCHELLE, AT SUSA PASS, AT PERPIGNAN: D’Artagnan’s exploits at the Siege of La Rochelle are detailed in the second half of The Three Musketeers, and the forcing of Susa Pass forms part of the climax of The Red Sphinx. At Perpignan in 1642, after a protracted siege, French forces supporting Catalan rebels drove out a veteran Spanish force, winning the province of Roussillon to France.

  17. THE BASTILLE: This hulking fortress, built at the eastern entrance to Paris during the 14th century to protect the city during the Hundred Years’ War, served a second function as a royal prison starting early in the 15th century. Its eight cylindrical towers, connected by tall curtain walls, housed prisoners of all ranks in lodgings befitting their differing social conditions. Many prisoners who disappeared into the Bastille were never seen again.

  18. FATHER JOSEPH: François Leclerc du Tremblay, known as Father Joseph (1577–1638), Capuchin monk, Christian mystic, politician, diplomat, and Richelieu’s spymaster, was one of the most fascinating men of his age. The phrase eminence grise, for a shadowy adviser, derives from his role: he was the Gray Eminence to the cardinal’s Red Eminence.

  19. MARSHAL BASSOMPIERRE: Maréchal François de Bassompierre (1579–1646) was a gentleman of Lorraine, a suave and adaptable chevalier successively a favorite of Henri IV, Queen Regent Marie de Médicis, and Louis XIII, and one of the leading ornaments of their Courts—especially by his own estimation. His lively memoirs of the period are among Dumas’s primary sources.

  20. CLOAK-SNATCHING ON THE PONT NEUF: Dumas found this incident in Courtilz de Sandras’s Mémoires de M.L.C.D.R., his pseudo-memoir of the Comte de Rochefort. Parisian cloak-snatchers, known as tire-laines, were a sort of mugger who specialized in seizing nobles’ expensive cloaks and running off with them. At several points in medieval and early modern times, this practice was indulged in as a prank by drunken young gentry.

  21. KING HENRI’S BRONZE HORSE: The Pont Neuf crosses the western, downstream end of the Île de la Cité, and on the very point of the island, halfway across the bridge, is a small square dominated by a tall pedestal atop which is an equestrian statue of King Henri IV. Destroyed in 1792 during the French Revolution, it was restored in 1818 after the Bourbon restoration, and you can see it there today.

  22. WHEN I MET YOU AT MEUNG: In the very first chapter of The Three Musketeers.

  23. PLANCHET: Like his counterparts who serve the three musketeers, d’Artagnan’s doughty lackey appears throughout the novels of the Musketeers Cycle, eventually becoming less servant to the Gascon than friend and partner.

  24. THE SEVENTEEN SEIGNEURS: A group of Louis XIII’s high-ranking Court cronies, who, late in his reign, adopted this pompous sobriquet for themselves.

  25. A SECRET PASSAGE: Secret passages are a staple of the swashbuckling genre, and Dumas was as responsible for this as anyone: they show up in The Three Musketeer
s and The Red Sphinx, in several places in this novel, and recur most famously in The Man in the Iron Mask.

  26. QUINTE CURCE’S HISTORY OF ALEXANDER: Curce’s History of Alexander the Great first appeared in 1639, and though we don’t know if the young Louis XIV read it, we certainly know that it was the sort of thing he would read: the boy king was fascinated by military history.

  27. THE OPERA THISBE: This most likely refers to Théophile de Viau’s Les Amours Tragiques de Pyrame et de Thisbé, first performed at Court in 1621 and at the Hôtel de Bourgogne thereafter, though it was a court ballet rather than an opera. There’s no record of an opera titled Thisbe before Leveridge’s The Comickal Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe in 1716, itself based on the play-within-a-play in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  28. QUEEN MARIE DE MÉDICIS: The Italian heiress Marie de Médicis (1575–1642) was the second queen to France’s King Henri IV, who married her in 1600 in a desperate quest 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. The plot of The Red Sphinx turns, in part, on the question of her complicity in the assassination of King Henri IV.

  29. MADAME DE GUÉMÉNÉE: Anne de Rohan, Princesse de Guéménée (1604–1685) was sister-in-law to Madame de Chevreuse, and while she didn’t have her relative’s taste for politics, she was a thorough connoisseur of romantic intrigue.

  30. WHO LOVED ONE OF MY WOMEN: A reference to Constance Bonacieux, the queen’s onetime linen maid who served, in The Three Musketeers, as her go-between with the Duke of Buckingham. Constance and d’Artagnan shared romantic adventures and fell in love, an affair that ended in tragedy.

  31. THE ASSASSIN OF CHALAIS, OF MONTMORENCY, AND OF CINQ-MARS: Three French nobles, all of whom went to the execution block for supporting Prince Gaston in conspiracies against the throne. The rebellion and capture of the Duc de Montmorency is central to The Dove, the final section of The Red Sphinx.

  32. MONSIEUR DES ESSARTS: François de Guillon, Sieur des Essarts (?–1645) was a captain of a Royal Guards regiment, and d’Artagnan’s commander before he joined the King’s Musketeers.

  33. pistoles: Pistole was a French word for a gold coin of the 16th and 17th centuries, usually Spanish in origin. The leading European states liked to mint their own coins, but gold was hard for them to come by—except for Spain, which flooded Europe with gold from its possessions in the New World, making the Spanish escudo the de facto base currency of European trade for two centuries. When Dumas’s characters refer to pistoles, they are mostly Spanish escudos. One pistole is worth about ten livres or three French crowns (écus).

  34. RUE TIQUETONNE: A street in the middle-class neighborhood of the Rue de Montorgueil north of Les Halles, it had just changed its spelling in 1647 from Rue Quiquetonne, which had been named after the establishment of a prosperous 13th-century baker.

  35. THE CAMPAIGN IN FRANCHE-COMTÉ: Dumas embroiders; there was no campaign in the eastern province of Franche-Comté until Louis XIV wrested it from the Spanish in 1668.

  36. CEMETERY OF THE INNOCENTS: The oldest and largest municipal cemetery in the capital, in central Paris off the Rue Saint-Denis on the Right Bank, dated back to medieval times, but the walled compound was no bigger than a large city block.

  37. THE FIRST A GRAND SEIGNEUR . . . THE SECOND A SOLDIER . . . AND THE THIRD A REFINED ABBOT: In the French nobility, if a family had multiple sons, this order of careers was their usual destiny: the eldest would inherit the title and estate, the second joined the military, and the third entered the clergy. Many a melodrama begins with a son who isn’t satisfied with his predestined fate.

  38. SIEGE OF BESANÇON: More embroidery: Besançon, the capital of Franche-Comté, wasn’t besieged until 1668 (see note 35).

  39. THAT THESIS HE DISCUSSED SO EARNESTLY AT CRÉVECŒUR WITH THE CURATE OF MONTDIDIER AND THE SUPERIOR OF JESUITS: In Chapter XXVI of The Three Musketeers, “The Thesis of Aramis.”

  40. BAZIN: Just as the scheming Aramis is the least sympathetic of the musketeers, his servant, the pompous and selfish Bazin, is the least likable of the lackeys, mainly serving as a butt for Dumas’s jokes about churchmen.

  41. BATON THAT CONDÉ THREW—OR DIDN’T THROW—INTO THE ENEMY’S LINES AT THE BATTLE OF FRIBOURG: According to popular tradition, at the Battle of Fribourg (1644) the young Duc d’Enghien, not yet the Prince de Condé, threw his marshal’s baton into the ranks of the enemy to induce his soldiers to charge and recover it.

  42. HIPPOCRAS: A drink made by mulling wine with sugar and spices, a process that took at least twenty minutes.

  43. HE WENT TO NOISY: Dumas later makes it clear that he means the town of Noisy-le-Sec, a few miles northeast of Paris. However, he has confused it with Noisy-le-Roi, the town southwest of Paris where Cardinal de Gondy had a château that became a gathering place for Frondeurs.

  44. AN AFFAIR WITH COLIGNY: Madame de Longueville’s affair with the Comte de Coligny led to his celebrated duel with the Duc de Guise in the Place Royale on December 12, 1643—a duel referred to several times in Twenty Years After due to Aramis’s relationship with the duchess. Coligny was badly wounded, and died of his injuries.

  45. LAFOLLONE: Père Mulot de Lafollone, one of Cardinal Richelieu’s cronies, famous for his appetite. He appears in Chapter XXVI of The Red Sphinx.

  46. PAS DE DEUX: Dumas’s title for this chapter was “The Two Gaspards” (“Les Deux Gaspards”), a reference to the popular 1817 play of the same name, in which two con men, Gaspard l’Avisé and Gaspard Simplet, banter humorously while trying to cheat each other at cards. This pop culture reference would have made sense to Dumas’s Parisian readers in 1845 but is lost on 21st-century Anglophones like us. Not coincidentally, gaspard was also Parisian street argot for a rat or weasel—but titling this chapter “The Two Weasels” just seemed a bit too disrespectful to our dashing musketeers.

  47. MONSIEUR VOITURE: Vincent Voiture (1597–1648) was the most popular poet among the habitués of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a 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; 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.

  48. MONSIEUR DE BOIS-ROBERT: François Le Métel de Boisrobert or Bois-Robert (1592–1662) was one of Cardinal Richelieu’s famous Five Poets. A diligent aide in all Richelieu’s literary pursuits, he was the prime mover in the founding of the Académie Française. After Richelieu’s death he attempted to transfer his loyalty to Mazarin, but the minister didn’t care for him.

  49. MARQUIS DE CARABAS: The fictional nobleman whose name Puss uses with abandon in Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Puss in Boots,” which wouldn’t be published until 1697.

  50. MADAME DE MOTTEVILLE: Françoise Bertaut, Madame de Motteville (1621–1689), longtime maid of honor to Anne of Austria, wrote several volumes of memoirs after the queen’s death in 1666, which were republished in 1823 and 1838; they were among Dumas’s primary sources about internal affairs at the French Court.

  51. MADAME DE FARGIS: Madeleine de Silly, Madame de Fargis (?–1639), was sponsored by Richelieu to join Queen Anne’s household to replace the Duchesse de Chevreuse when the latter was temporarily exiled after the scandalous affair in the garden of Amiens. Smart, talented, irreverent, and mischievous, Fargis quickly gained Anne’s trust and transferred her loyalty from the cardinal to the queen.

  52. MOUSQUETON: As related in The Three Musketeers, the birth name of Porthos’s Norman lackey was Boniface, but his master renamed him with the more martial French word for musketoon, a large-caliber musket cut down to the length of a carbine. Further on in the story he will be renamed again, this time at his own behest.

  53. BACK TO PHARAMOND, OR CHARLEMAGNE, OR AT WORST HUGUES CAPET: In other words,
bloodlines that go back to France’s earliest rulers: Pharamond in the 5th century, Charlemagne in the 8th, and Hugues Capet in the 10th.

  54. NO PESKY JUSSACS: In The Three Musketeers, Claude de Jussac (1620–1690) was an officer in the Cardinal’s Guard with a penchant for meddling in the musketeers’ business.

  55. DUEL WITH THE ENGLISH AT THE LUXEMBOURG: This refers to an incident in Chapter XXXI of The Three Musketeers in which the four comrades fought a duel against Lord Winter and three other Englishmen. In Dumas’s original manuscript this line erroneously places the duel at the enclose de Carmes, confusing it with the duel with the Cardinal’s Guards in Chapter V.

  56. GRIMAUD: Like the other lackeys, Athos’s servant Grimaud appears throughout the Musketeers Cycle, and eventually one gets the impression that this stoic but caring and utterly reliable man is Dumas’s favorite of the four.

  57. BLOIS: Old medieval city on the Loire River about 120 miles southwest of Paris. The large Château de Blois was a royal castle occupied by Prince Gaston from about 1620 until his death in 1660.

  58. CHAMBORD: The largest château in the Loire valley, built for King François I early in the 16th century as a hunting estate. Still stunning today, it’s one of the finest examples of French Renaissance architecture.

  59. RAOUL: Athos’s son Raoul, the Vicomte de Bragelonne, who at this point is not yet aware that the Comte de La Fère is his father, is an invention of Dumas, based on a single reference to a young man whom Louis de La Vallière loved in her early youth. Raoul, who embodies all of Athos’s noble virtues, even those unsuited to a less chivalric age, will be a major character throughout the rest of the novels of the Musketeers Cycle.