The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [4]
It is through his arrangement of history, then, that Dumas is a great animator. What a lesson of generosity and of courage his heroes give us! Everything is stacked against them, their enemies are formidable, their allies few, yet they remain thoroughly loyal to their principles, fallible though these may be. In The Three Musketeers Dumas has given a lesson in moral courage, in naturalness, in sincerity. As a tract alone, the work is worth its weight in gold.
Further, Dumas is the sole animator of this book. He may have had collaborators aplenty but they served only his lesser purposes; he himself, always in person, ran the show. Maquet, his chief collaborator, was very useful, certainly. But no work written singly by Maquet awakes any sign of interest; and the manuscripts bearing corrections by Dumas of Maquet’s first drafts are illuminating.
Finally, as a narrator, the gifts of Dumas are indisputable. What does it matter if the same note reproduced three times in the text is dated differently each time? (He wrote for serial publication.) What does it matter if he forgets about one character for a few moments or days and then suddenly comes back to him or her? (He wrote for serial publication and his avid readers never forgot any person they had ever read about at the foot of some installment on an ill-printed page.) What does it matter that any one of a thousand details jar and upset and annoy and amuse and offend the reader who may be better versed historically or better informed technically than Dumas? The tale goes on, it gathers momentum, its dynamics defy all laws.
Isn’t that what a good story should do?
—JACQUES LE CLERCQ
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Wherein It Is Proved
That Despite Their Names Ending in -os and -is,
the Heroes of the History We Are About to
Have the Honor to Relate Have Nothing Mythological About Them
About a year ago, while I was engaged in research in the Royal Library for my History of Louis XIV, I chanced upon a volume called The Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan. Like most works in a period in which authors could not tell the truth without risking a more or less lengthy sojourn in the Bastille, it was printed at Amsterdam. The publisher was one Pierre Rouge. The title fascinated me; I took the book home (with the permission of the Librarian of course) and I devoured its pages.
I do not intend to give a minute account of this curious work here; I merely indicate it to those of my readers who enjoy pictures of a given period. In it they will find a gallery of portraits penciled by a master; and, though most of these sketches may be traced on barracks doors or on the walls of taverns, yet they present the figures of Louis XIII, of Ann of Austria, of Richelieu, of Mazarin and of most of the courtiers of the period quite as vividly and faithfully as Monsieur Anquetil does in his History of France.
Now as everybody knows, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet does not always impress the mass of readers. So while I admired, as others doubtless will admire, the details I have just cited, my main preoccupation concerned a matter to which no one had paid the slightest attention previously.
In his Memoirs, Monsieur d’Artagnan relates that, on his first visit to Monsieur de Tréville, Captain of His Majesty’s Musketeers, he met in the antechamber three young men belonging to the illustrious corps in which he was soliciting the honor of enrolling. Their names were Athos, Porthos and Aramis.
I must confess these three foreign names struck me. I immediately decided that they were pseudonyms under which D’Artagnan disguised names that were perhaps illustrious. Or else, perhaps, the bearers of these names had themselves chosen them on the day when, thanks to a whim, or discontent, or exiguity of fortune, they donned the uniform of a ranker in the Musketeers.
From then on I knew no rest until I could find some trace in contemporaneous works of these three names which had aroused my passionate curiosity.
The mere catalogue