Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (New York: Penguin Books), 1953.
Time -- past time, perhaps -- for me to knuckle down and read some classics of adventure that helped form the adventure genre that fueled much of the pulp magazines popularity. That’s what I told myself, anyway, as I decided to read what is perhaps Alexandre Dumas’ most famous novel, The Three Musketeers. This tale has had a remarkable history in popular culture.
I remember a Tom & Jerry (famed animated cat and mouse duo from MGM Studios) comic book I had as a child -- I couldn’t even read yet, so I must have gotten it from the stash of my uncle’s comics stored in my grandparents’ basement -- but my favorite story featured Jerry mouse and his small buddy, Tuffy, and Tom the cat all dressed as musketeers and serving some buffoonish king. All with a French accent in the word balloons (or so I learned later, after I learned to read).
The 1973 film version, The Three Musketeers -- starring Michael York, Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, and Faye Dunaway -- and its sequel, The Four Musketeers, were eye-opening romps that I loved. Adventure, humor, and romance all wrapped up in a costume drama that harked to the glory days of Hollywood and its filmed spectaculars. (I haven’t seen any of the more recent filmed versions. I can’t imagine they top those two movies from the 1970s, but I may well be wrong.)
So why have I been so long in settling down to reading the novel? After seeing the two movies noted above, I found a set of Dumas’ novels in the school library. That’s when I first learned that he wrote more than one story about the musketeers, and that the also-famous Man in the Iron Mask is part of the five-volume series (it is, in fact, the last entry in the series; those volumes between it and The Three Musketeers are less well-known, but all are in print). Still, the several times I attempted to read the first volume, I just couldn’t get past the first chapter. Part of the problem was the style of writing didn’t appeal to me, I fear: my tastes in reading at the time approved of more fast-paced storytelling than what Dumas presented: Jack Kirby and superheroes, Joe Kubert’s rendition of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom and Pellucidar stories, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Doc Savage, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer tales, and The Shadow.
But more recently I’ve dipped my toe into Dumas’ work. After reading Shadowmen: Heroes and Villains of French Pulp Fiction by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, which includes several references to Dumas, I read Joseph Balsamo, the first volume of that author’s series of historical fiction about Marie Antoinette, and whose eponymous lead character is also Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, occultist, mystic, and alchemist. In Dumas’ hands, Balsamo prefigures Rasputin as a dark, mysterious character pulling the strings behind the scenes of known historical events. But this is another slow-moving novel laden with details of political and court intrigue -- whose story does not end with the last page of the book -- and the subsequent novel in the series is even more slowly paced.
Despite this dampening of my enthusiasm, I decided a summer project would be to read The Three Musketeers. After doing a little research online, I learned that the 1950 translation by Lord Sudley was considered a superior one, more readable than the recent edition translated by Richard Pevear. (Both, interestingly enough, are available from Penguin Books.) So that’s the edition I plowed into. While the Sudley edition includes an interesting introduction, I only wish it also provided the sort of annotations included in the Oxford University Press edition edited by David Coward.
Still, this lack of editorial notes didn’t subtract from the enjoyable experience of reading the story of D’Artagnan and his three friends, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.
Like the 1973 film, this novel is a romp. The camaraderie of the four heroes, and their contrasting characteristics -- that sometimes put their intentions at odds until adversity rears its head -- lays the groundwork for a multitude of teams that follow: Doc Savage’s scrappy adventurers, the Shadow’s slew of agents, the Challengers of the Unknown, the Fantastic Four, the X-Files, even Luke and Han and Chewie and a couple of robots, and so on. Dumas includes lots of action, with a dose of historical events (which aren’t necessarily accurate in their historic details), plus humor and court intrigue. And swordplay!
Outside of the four musketeers, the characters Dumas describes are quite remarkable. The sly manipulations of Cardinal Richelieu, meant to maintain his power over the king and court, are balanced by the ways he decides to use D’Artagnan and others, and the ways he decides to let them go their merry ways even when they may thwart his ambitions. It would have been easy to Dumas to make the cardinal entirely a villain, but by keeping the reader guessing about what the cardinal may do -- but maintaining a consistency with his characteristics and tendencies -- makes for a much more compelling story. Further, the shifting ambiguity of his nature points forward to the not-quite-all-bad villains and the not-quite-all-good heroes delineated so well by Frederick Faust/Max Brand.
For true evil, Dumas sculpted the template for every subsequent femme fatale by creating Milady, Lady de Winter. Her absolute evilness and unrelenting self-interest make her one of the most villainous villainesses ever to appear in literature. She makes Terry & the Pirates’ Dragon Lady, The Spirit’s P’Gell, The Maltese Falcon’s Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Iron Man’s Madame Masque, THUNDER Agents/Dynamo’s Iron Maiden and others look like pikers. She manipulates the unwary, attempts to kill the musketeers multiple times through various agents and plots, and murders d’Artagnan’s love, Constance, all to reach her own devilish ends or to have her revenge for her plans being thwarted. That her revealed history demonstrates her unredeemable evil nature -- continually, consistently and unabashedly lacking any desire to turn over a new leaf, to make a new start, or to see any need for redemption -- makes her all the more scurrilous and easy for the reader to hate.
Say, who ARE the real femme fatales from the pulps? Brigid O'Shaughnessy is the only one that really comes to mind. All the villains from the hero pulps that I can recall were male. Perhaps The Spider faced an evil female mastermind, but I can’t think of one. Any evil dames in the SF pulps?
Clearly Dumas reveled in writing about Milady. (Villains are always more fun to write about. Look at how majestically John Milton described Lucifer. Sax Rohmer’s most famous series of books were named for Fu Manchu -- not the heroes. Villainous anarchist Fantomas was the driving force behind a long series of books.) And elements he used for her appeared later in his work. For instance, the tall tale she tells the naïve Puritan, Felton, to sway him to her side includes a description of her captivity by the Duke of Buckingham in a strange room with no windows or doors. This room and a captive woman who defies her captor appears with many similarities in Joseph Balsamo, wherein Cagliostro attempts to coerce a woman to bend to his will.
The characters and their antics are engaging -- very important for a romp to be successful. There are story elements that recall the gothic and penny dreadful -- certainly Milady’s recounting to Felton of her made-up travails and imprisonment hark to Paul Feval’s vampire trilogy and Ann Radcliff’s gothic novels. The mysterious hooded man whom Athos invites for the ultimate confrontation with Milady certainly carries himself with a spooky demeanor as he accompanies the four friends, and the revelation of his identity -- and profession -- smacks of all the dramatic justice and literary coincidence that Edgar Rice Burroughs later would pull into his plots in so willy-nilly a fashion.
Great credit goes to Dumas’ nimbleness with his characters and situations, on which can be hung this story and its characters’ continuing popularity today. Plenty of people haven’t read this book but are aware of the Three Musketeers and their vow, “All for one, and one for all!” Their joie de vivre, their camaraderie, the seeming golden age in which they feint and parry are, united, all an infectious mixture that readers -- and apparently film watchers -- can’t resist. This frothy literary mixture proved a fertile ground for Dumas in multiple volumes, for pulp writers inspired in the Twentieth Century by his storytelling genius, and likely for writers yet to come.
Posted by ds at July 2, 2009 10:35 PM
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