The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [6]
André Maurois speaks of “the immense undertaking…that would assure [Dumas’s] glory: to resurrect the history of France in novel form.” But history, present as it is in The Three Musketeers in the figures of Richelieu, Louis XIII, Anne d’Autriche, the duke of Buckingham, M. de Tréville, and any number of minor characters, takes second place to the pure fiction of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The magic of the novel comes from the interweaving of the two elements and the surprising reversals it brings about.
Dumas’s title has often been questioned. Why three musketeers, when there is obviously a fourth, and the fourth happens to be the central character of the novel? It is even this fourth who dictates the famous formula “All for one, and one for all.” True, he enters the king’s musketeers only at the very end, but that seems little more than a technicality. However, if we reflect on the title before trying to correct it, we will find it both precise and revealing. There are only three musketeers. D’Artagnan loves and admires them, but he can never become one of them. He is too practical, down to earth, fleshly. He acts as an intermediary between the contingent historical world and the free realm of the musketeers, whom Isabelle Jan, in her excellent little book Alexandre Dumas, Novelist*calls “aerial beings.” D’Artagnan is their witness, and thus becomes a touchstone for the novel’s readers. We see the musketeers as he sees them; we know them as he knows them. It is he who moves the intertwining plots. He acts, suffers, loves. He has normal human feelings and failings. The three musketeers are above history and above personal involvements. Their names are adopted, their identities are hidden, yet Dumas gives no reason for that concealment, and it plays no part in the novel. It is simply the case. Unlike Balzac’s heroes, as Isabelle Jan notes, the musketeers have no material lodgings. We never enter Porthos’s apartment, nor Aramis’s, and we are given only a brief glimpse of Athos’s room, which houses a few relics from a noble past. They also have no money. Purses slip through their fingers, they are unable to accumulate anything, and when d’Artagnan’s adventures bring him rich rewards—the queen’s ring, Buckingham’s horses—the musketeers manage to squander them at once. They seem to need no material support. Their freedom from historical ties, which bind Buckingham, Anne d’Autriche, Louis XIII, Richelieu, the Huguenots of La Rochelle, gives them a godlike insouciance. “Naked as the poorest wretch,” writes Isabelle Jan, “but masters in faithfulness, rapidity, and effectiveness, they are indeed demigods.” Yet there is no magic behind their demidivinity, no miraculous birth or spell, as with folktale heroes, but only the power of pure fiction—or, say, of pure incantation. Porthos, immense Porthos, as Jan nicely observes, represents “the triumph of the essentially paradoxical and masked art of Dumas, for it is to him, the colossus, that falls the greatest lightness. What is his deep role if not to annihilate gravity, to overcome the world?”
It seems at first that the villain of the novel will be Cardinal Richelieu—the all-powerful “red duke,” as Aramis calls him. But his very contingency makes him unsuited to that role. He is a politician, that is, a relative, mixed character, capable of cold cruelty, but also, when it suits him, of generosity and of a just appreciation of merits—as d’Artagnan discovers. For conflict, the aerial needs its pure opposite—earth, flesh, the down-drag of evil.