The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [5]
This letter incidentally gives us a good idea of how they worked. They would draw up the plan of a novel together. Then Maquet would do the initial development, including historical research, producing a rough draft which he would turn over to Dumas. Dumas would rework Maquet’s material, expanding it, recasting it, removing characters, adding others, elaborating the plot, and above all imparting to it the movement, the invention, the life of his own unmistakable style. Art is cruel but just, as someone once said. Ninety pages of Maquet’s first draft of The Three Musketeers have been preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and are included in the Garnier edition. A comparison with the finished version shows just how important Dumas’s reworking was. Maquet’s Musketeers would have been forgotten at once; Dumas’s touch transformed them into immortals.
Let us go back to the third, and least important, of the collaborators on The Three Musketeers: Gatien de Courtilz. The novel owes to the pseudo Memoirs d’Artagnan’s setting out from home on a gaunt yellow nag, his quarrel with a mysterious gentleman in Meung, the description of his arrival in Paris and taking rooms on the rue des Fossoyeurs, his connection with M. de Tréville, captain of the king’s musketeers, the duel with the cardinal’s guards. It owes to Courtilz the incantation of names, not only of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, the three musketeers whom d’Artagnan meets in M. de Tréville’s antechamber, but also of their opponents Jussac, Biscarat, Cahusac, and Bernajoux, as well as the name of Milady, who appears briefly in the Memoirs as “Miledi X…” but in Dumas becomes the central antagonist of the novel.
In other words, Dumas took some details from Courtilz, he took the atmosphere and mores of the seventeenth century, and he took certain minor episodes or suggestions, sometimes developing them into major incidents. But he shifted the historical period from the reign of Louis XIV to that of Louis XIII, placed the stories of Buckingham, Richelieu, and the siege of La Rochelle at the center of the historical plot, and invented the love story of d’Artagnan and Mme Bonacieux that weaves its way through the entire novel. And above all he created the characters of Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and his own d’Artagnan. There is nothing faintly resembling them in Courtilz. They are pure Dumas.
A number of episodes and details in the novel come from the genuine memoir literature of the time: the Historiettes of Tallement des Réaux; the memoirs of the duc de La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maxims; the memoirs of people close to Anne d’Autriche, such as Pierre de La Porte and Mme de Motteville; and of major figures like the maréchal Bassompierre and Richelieu himself. The “affair in Amiens,” for instance, comes from Mme de Motteville, who witnessed it, while the episode of the diamond pendants is recounted by both the duc de La Rochefoucauld and the comte de Brienne.
Yet, as his disdain of chronology reveals, it was not history itself that interested Dumas so much as the imaginative possibilities contained in it, about which André Maurois quotes an amusing passage from the journal of a certain Dr. Prosper Ménière:
I heard Alexandre Dumas recount the battle of Waterloo in the presence of generals who had been there on the battlefield. He went on and on, placing the troops and citing various heroic words. One of the generals finally managed to interrupt him:
“But that’s not how it was, my dear sir; we were there, we…”
“In that case, General, you saw nothing…”
In the same spirit, Dumas refers to the manuscript of the Memoirs of M. le comte de La Fère, which he claims in his preface to be reproducing in The Three Musketeers. Both the count and the manuscript are his own invention. In a brief note entitled “A Message,” appended