“All for one, and one for all ...” The stirring motto of the three musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—is about to be heard in movie theaters again (tomorrow, in fact), and the prospect of an imminent reunion with some of my favorite swashbucklers made me revisit the works of Alexandre Dumas.
Published nearly 170 years ago, The Three Musketeers (first serialized in 1844) continues to charm perhaps because Dumas doesn’t take himself that seriously. Our heroes are not the upright, morally impeccable and completely humorless characters of Dumas’s near contemporary, Sir Walter Scott; D’Artagnan is young, naive, clearly out of his depth at first, and occasionally a figure of comic fun (the Gascons were apparently the butt of nineteenth century French jokes in the same way that, say, Polish jokes abounded in the Midwestern United States.) The three Musketeers themselves are a mixed bag—Porthos is a glutton and a mercenary whose goal is to marry for money and lead a life of ease; Aramis is a would-be priest who consoles himself for the loss of his clerical ambitions with swordplay, both actual and metaphorical with various ladies of his acquaintance, and Athos, the straight man of the group, has a complex hidden background that’s slowly revealed throughout the book.
Moreover, it’s difficult to imagine a Victorian with quite the same casual attitudes towards extramarital affairs enjoyed by both commoners and royalty (D’Artagnan and Constance Bonacieux; Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham.)
And then there are the villains: the string-pulling Cardinal Richelieu, whose machinations to ensure his own power (but also that of France) drive the story forward; the Comte de Rochefort, D’Artagnan’s rival in love and intrigue, and last, but most memorably, the fatally seductive Milady de Winter, whose charisma leaps off the page.
Dumas continued the story of the Musketeers in two further novels, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne, a 268-chapter tome set thirty years after the events of The Three Musketeers. The final third of The Vicomte de Bragelonne was published in English as The Man in the Iron Mask, and takes place during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, but neither of the sequels was ever as popular as the original adventures of the Musketeers.
Although Dumas wrote long before the advent of moving pictures, his works seem ideally suited for the movies. The Three Musketeers has been filmed almost two dozen times, if one includes animated features based on the story: Hollywood filmed a silent version with Douglas Fairbanks, a 1948 feature starred Gene Kelly and Lana Turner, and my personal favorite, the 1973 version with Oliver Reed as Athos, Michael York as D’Artagnan, Raquel Welch as Mme Bonacieux, and the marvellous Faye Dunaway as Milady. Charlie Sheen, Chris O’Donnell, and Tim Curry starred in an ill-considered remake in 1993, and now the story is getting the 3D treatment with Milla Jovovich, Orlando Bloom, Matthew McFadyen, and Ray Stevenson.
Dumas was a prolific writer, so much so that he set up a kind of writers’s workshop in the way that Renaissance painters hired journeymen to do the backgrounds of their portraits. In other words, many of the works published under his name were not solely, or even principally, authored by him. In addition to the d’Artagnan novels, Dumas also wrote a novels set at the Renaissance French court of the Valois dynasty. One of these, Queen Margot, featuring another adulterous Catholic queen, Marguerite de Valois, whose love affair with a Protestant nobleman, the unromantically named Boniface de la Mole, in the midst of the great St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres of Protestants sets the events of the novel in motion. Queen Margot was adapted for film by Patrice Chereau in 1994, and starred the stunning Isabel Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the equally stunning Vincent Perez as de la Mole, along with a cast of European acting luminaries (particularly Virna Lisi as the scheming Catherine de Medici, the dowager queen of France.)
The Count of Monte Cristo is perhaps Dumas’s most famous work aside from The Three Musketeers, at least among English speakers. A gripping melodrama of betrayal and revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo has also been filmed many times, most recently in 2002 with Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce, and Richard Harris that also featured the newest Superman, Henry Cavill, in a small role.
Dumas’s own life could have formed one of his novels. His paternal grandparents were a French aristocrat and a mixed-race Haitian woman. (Dumas’s only work that references his African heritage and the racism that he experienced himself is Georges. The eponymous protagonist is a mixed-race Creole who passes for white, and the novel’s plot foreshadows that of The Count of Monte Cristo.) Dumas’s father was a Napoleonic general, and he himself participated in the coup that removed the last Bourbon King, Charles X, from the throne of France and replaced him with the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, and later in the campaign to unify Italy. He was a lavish spender, so despite the large sums he earned from his prolific writing (there have been estimates that he—and his workshop—produced something like 1000 volumes of plays, novels, essays and travelogues), he was frequently broke. He had a succession of mistresses (and fathered his son, also named Alexandre, who wrote the famous Lady of the Camellias, on one of them).
In short, like his Musketeers, Dumas lived large and partied hard, and his skill with words, plots, and the creation of memorable characters has ensured that the grandaddy of all swashbucklers is still remembered when many far more “literary” novelists have been utterly forgotten.
Regina Thorne is an avid reader of just about everything, an aspiring writer, a lover of old movies and current tv shows, and a hopeless romantic.
