When in England many years ago, I bought a pretty collection of five, wee, hard-cover novels. Each book, clad in a yellow dust jacket, measured 7 inches by 4.5 inches, more or less the size of my hand. Despite the size, each book somehow contained over 600 pages of story in an eminently readable but petite font.
In a preface, the author says that while in the National Library (of France), researching an intended history of Louis XIV, he found the memoirs of a Monsieur d’Artagnan which inspired him to write the five books I’d bought.
Dumas — yes! the author is indeed M. Alexandre Dumas — further tells us how he learned about the three eponymous musketeers, Athos, Aramis and Porthos, whose adventures he was narrating in the book I was reading, The Three Musketeers, the first of the five novels spanning their lives. That’s what the quintet is, a 3000-page epic centered in the 17th century French (and English) royal courts and covering the entire lives of those four distinct and marvelous characters.
Back then, when I read The Three Musketeers, I came to realize that no film based on the story was as sprawling, as diffuse and as psychologically shifty as the novel.
I did not think of reading the whole collection until the 21st century, i.e., last year. Dust had accumulated on the four remaining dust jackets; I did my due diligence with a duster and began at the beginning, re-reading The Three Musketeers.
When I had first read it, search engines did not exist. So I had accepted Dumas’s portrayal of the real-life royals, Louis XIII, Queen Anne and the others, as sort of factual, but highly dramatized creations.
But last year, when I re-read The Three Musketeers, I had Perplexity, Wikipedia and encyclopedias galore at my fingertips. So each morning, I’d sate my gnawing curiosity by searching the Dumas characters I had spent time with the previous night, to clarify how much of their existence and doings were factual.
I was quite surprised at how many genuine incidents and nuances Dumas pulled from his own historical research. The Three Musketeers was, ergo, Dumas’s densely colored history of the King Louises, while the musketeers were his marvelous fictional implants who interacted with real history.
In this read, then, toggling between historical fiction and historical fact, I became thoroughly captivated by the grand romance that is the musketeers’ life story. The fictional musketeers were infinitely more attractive than the factual, fatuous, adulterous royals and their entourages.
By the fourth novel, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, D’Artagnan remains the only full-time musketeer of the quartet. So it is D’Artagnan who accepts a commission from Louis XIV, the Sun King, to go under cover as a spy upon the wild Breton island of Belle-Île, a territorial possession of the king’s powerful and wily minister, Fouquet, one of those genuine historical figures I mentioned earlier.
Fouquet had accumulated great wealth while in the king’s service. That is, he — maybe, possibly, alledgedly, probably — was a big-time grifter. There were rumors, some of which had reached the king’s ear, not a good place to be if you were Fouquet.
One of those rumors was Fouquet was secretly building up the fortifications and armaments on Belle-Île. If so, Fouquet, who already had his own fleet of warships, was arming himself against…well, maybe King Louis. And doing it with the king’s treasury.
Certainly, there were plenty of people who wanted to bring down Fouquet. But Louis, in an act weirdly judicious for an all-powerful monarch, decided on an actual investigation, uh, due process, rather than just ordering Fouquet to be arrested and tossed into prison. Which is why D’Artagnan, in clever disguise, travels from Paris to the coast of Brittany to gather visual evidence of Fouquet’s dangerous deceit.
Unlike D’Artagnan, I’ve been to Brittany, but like him never to Belle-Île. However, unlike D’Artagnan, I had available an old Michelin Brittany guide. I pulled it out and found an entire paragraph verifying Fouquet’s ownership of Belle-Île and his surreptitious construction project. Fact.
I continued reading: “The last act was played out at Nantes, which the Court was visiting in 1661. D’Artagnan and the Musketeers seized Fouquet as he came out of the castle and put him in a coach which made all speed for Vincennes [prison]. He died in 1680.”
Actually, I didn’t get through that quoted section. What I read was: “D’Artagnan and the Musketeers—” and stopped short, blinking frantically, my heart making all speed. Whatwhatwhat?? For several split seconds my brain paused any rational process; for several split seconds I thought, “Is Michelin deliberately fooling around…?” Or, “Have Dumas and Michelin somehow crisscrossed, or did Dumas write this Michelin segment?” Or….
For one split second, I wondered whether this was a ruse to trick me into…something, I didn’t know what. But my psyche lacks natural paranoia, so I calmed down. And asked Perplexity, “Was D’Artagnan a real person?”