Between Two Kings Read online

  Introduction by Lawrence Ellsworth

  Alexandre Dumas’s sprawling historical adventure, The Three Musketeers, was a worldwide success after first publication in 1844, and was followed in the next year by an even larger sequel, presented by this editor in two volumes as Twenty Years After and Blood Royal. Dumas then set his musketeers aside for a year before launching into his still more ambitious final sequel, the truly immense Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, which was serialized in weekly installments from October 1847 to January 1850.

  Taking a year off to plan is understandable when one considers the mind-boggling scale of Bragelonne: 268 chapters, over 750,000 words, three times the size of its largest predecessor. Dumas had a vast story to tell and boldly broke free from the typical structure of the popular novel to tell it. It was an experiment in long-form narrative, and on its own terms a successful one, albeit an approach Dumas never tried again. For one thing, the market for feuilletons, the French weekly subscription papers that printed continued stories, had peaked and crashed, and the demand for prolonged serials dried up. For another, the book publishers who had to collect the Bragelonne mega-novel and issue it in multiple volumes strained to fit it into their usual formats.

  And why had Dumas put them to the trouble? Why experiment on such a grand scale with the novel, a form that he’d arguably mastered only a few years before? Dumas had set his sights high, aiming to spin out what we now call long character arcs portraying the maturity of all four of his popular musketeer protagonists, their tales intertwined with the stories of dozens of secondary characters, and more than that, all set against the overarching saga of the early reign of King Louis XIV. It was an arc not just of people, but of a nation.

  Ambitious indeed! How to make it work? The answer was to construct it from components Dumas already understood well, that is, short, punchy chapters, each built around a single dramatic scene that drove the overall narrative forward. This perfectly suited the feuilleton publication format, providing readers with enough forward momentum in each installment to ensure that they would come back eager for the next.

  However, Dumas, the master dramaturge, was also telling his story in larger patterns, in acts of about eight to fifteen chapters that set up and then pay off with satisfying minor climaxes. Moreover, the entire meta-structure of Bragelonne is bookended (wordplay intended) by two grand sequences of fifty-some chapters each that stand alone as complete novels in themselves. These are the concluding chapters, 212 through 268, justly famous as The Man in the Iron Mask, and chapters 1 through 50 that comprise our current volume, which this editor has dubbed Between Two Kings. (See “Regarding the Title” below.)

  The chapters that make up Between Two Kings admirably set up and lead directly into the volumes to follow, but they also tell a complete story of their own, beginning, middle, and end. And the story they tell is that of the long forging and final tempering of that once-fiery man of iron, the now mature d’Artagnan. His comrade Athos has a large role to play as well, but even more than in the earlier books in the Musketeers Cycle, Between Two Kings is d’Artagnan’s story.

  At first the tale seems to echo the structure of Twenty Years After, with the long-serving d’Artagnan, still only Lieutenant of the King’s Musketeers, increasingly discontented with his situation and seeking a way to make a dramatic improvement in it. Dumas assumes his loyal readers are familiar with his hero’s previous career and artfully plays on their expectations for him. Indeed, the author is so confident his readers know all about his protagonist that, in a neat and playful trick, he doesn’t even mention the character’s name until chapter fourteen, when he has the king finally utter it as a proof that he recalls his musketeer’s previous services.

  But then Dumas subverts his readers’ expectations by showing them that this is not the d’Artagnan of Twenty Years After who passively awaits the assignment of a mission with which to prove himself. This, instead, is a mature and confident d’Artagnan who, once he decides the time to act has arrived, assigns himself a mission, and proceeds, without hesitation, to undertake it on his own account. Moreover, this is a d’Artagnan who has learned from his previous adventures and doesn’t make mistakes, at least not in planning, tactics, and execution.

  Not that he doesn’t still have important lessons to learn. D’Artagnan, ever a man of heart—like Alexandre Dumas—is a musketeer who prefers gallant cavaliers like Superintendent of Finance Fouquet over calculating bureaucrats, which leads him to underestimate King Louis’s new assistant, the intendant Colbert. And d’Artagnan’s firm grasp of the tactics of intrigue leads him to believe himself equally skilled at the strategy of politics, and as a result he’s more than once outplayed. Though he’s nonetheless victorious in the end, there will be more lessons to come. For his new master, Louis XIV, truly king at last, will test his ingenious officer of musketeers in ways even the foresighted Gascon never expected.

  Regarding the Title

  Why Between Two Kings when that title has never historically been used for a sub-volume of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne?

  As an author Dumas had many virtues, but he didn’t have the facility for memorable titles of his great contemporary Charles Dickens. Dumas’s subtitle for Bragelonne was Dix ans plus tard, and historically when the mega-novel in English translation was divided into several volumes, Ten Years Later has been used for the first or second book (the other titles usually being The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louis de La Vallière, and The Man in the Iron Mask). Using the title Ten Years Later for a volume that follows Twenty Years After is obviously problematic and has confused readers for generations as to the order in which they should be read. Therefore, this editor and translator decided to restore Ten Years Later to its status as a subtitle, inventing Between Two Kings as the overall title for the first volume of Bragelonne, as it accurately describes d’Artagnan’s adventures in this episode of the Musketeers Cycle.

  A Note on the Translation

  The fifty chapters of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne that comprise Between Two Kings were first published in late 1847 and early 1848 in Le Siècle, a Parisian weekly. They were collected almost immediately into book form by the publisher Michel Lévy Frères in Paris, followed just as rapidly by the first English translation by Thomas Williams, an American, for publisher W.E. Dean of New York. When Bragelonne was completed in 1851 a full translation was published by Thomas Pederson of Philadelphia, followed in 1893 by another complete version by yet another American, H. L. Williams. These Victorian-era translations, endlessly reprinted, have been the only versions of the first volumes of Bragelonne available for over a century. Those early translators did their work well, but they were writing for a market that was uncomfortable with frank depictions of violence and sexuality. Moreover, they employed a style of elevated diction that, though deemed appropriate for historical novels in the 19th century, seems stiff, stodgy, and passive to today’s readers. It also does a disservice to Dumas’s writing style, which was quite dynamic for its time, fast-paced and with sharp, naturalistic dialogue. Between Two Kings, the first significant new translation of its sequence in over a century, attempts to restore Dumas’s edge and élan, aiming as well to recapture some of the bawdy humor lost in the Victorian versions. I hope you enjoy it.

  Historical Character Note

  The first time a notable character from history is mentioned in the text, their name is marked with an asterisk.* A brief paragraph describing that person appears in the Historical Characters appendix at the end of the book.

  I The Letter

  Toward the middle of May in the year 1660, at nine o’clock in the morning, when the already hot sun was drying the dew on the ramparts of the Château de Blois,1 a little cavalcade,
composed of three men and two junior pages, was returning into the city across the Loire bridge. This produced no effect on the loiterers on the span other than a movement of the hand to the head in salute, and a movement of the mouth to say, in the purest French spoken in France: “Here comes ‘Monsieur’2 returning from the hunt.” And that was all.

  However, as the horses climbed the steep slope that ascends from the river to the château, several shop boys approached the last horse, which bore, hanging from its saddle-tree, several bird carcasses hung by their beaks. Seeing this, the curious lads showed with rustic candor their disdain for such meager game, and after loudly announcing that hawking was a poor sort of sport, they went back to their work. Only one of these onlookers, a chubby lad in the mood for a jest, lingered long enough to ask why Monsieur, who thanks to his vast revenues had his choice of amusements, would choose such a pathetic entertainment, and was answered, “Don’t you know that Monsieur’s main diversion is to be bored?”

  The cheerful shop boy shrugged his shoulders in a gesture that said, plain as day, In that case, I’d rather be plain Pierre than a prince, and everyone went about their business.

  Meanwhile, Monsieur continued on his way with an air at once so melancholy and so majestic that onlookers would surely have admired it, if there’d been any onlookers. But the citizens of Blois couldn’t forgive Monsieur for having chosen their merry city to be bored in, and whenever they saw the royal sourpuss coming they slipped away, yawning, or withdrew inside, to escape the dour influence of that long, pale visage, those half-lidded eyes, and that slouching physique. Thus, the worthy prince was greeted by deserted streets nearly every time he ventured out.

  Now, this irreverence on the part of the citizens of Blois was, in truth, very improper, for Monsieur, after the young king—and maybe even before the king—was the foremost noble in the realm. In fact, God, who had granted the reigning king, Louis XIV,* the happiness of being the son of Louis XIII, had granted Monsieur the honor of being the son of the great Henri IV. So, it should have been an object of pride for the city of Blois that Gaston d’Orléans* chose to hold his Court in the ancient hall of the Estates General.3

  But it was the destiny of this exalted prince to excite indifference rather than admiration on the part of the populace. Monsieur had grown used to it. Perhaps it was even responsible for his unfailing air of ennui. It wasn’t as if his early life hadn’t been considerably busier; a man can’t be responsible for the executioner taking the heads of a dozen of his friends without feeling some excitement. However, since the rise of Cardinal Mazarin* there had been no more decapitations, Monsieur had had to put aside his hobby of rebellion, and his morale had suffered for it. The life of the poor prince was thereafter very sad. After a morning hunt along the banks of the Beuvron or in the woods of Cheverny, Monsieur would ride across the Loire for lunch at Chambord,4 whether he had an appetite for it or not, and the town of Blois would hear no more from its sovereign and master until he rode out for his next hunt.

  So much for his boredom outside the city walls; as for his ennui inside them, let’s follow his cavalcade up to the Château de Blois and the famous hall of the Estates. Monsieur was riding a smallish horse with a large saddle of red Flemish velvet and half-boot stirrups. The horse was a bay; Monsieur’s doublet was of crimson velvet, the horse wore a matching blanket, and it was only by this colorful ensemble that the prince could be distinguished from his two companions, whose ensembles were purple for the one and green for the other. The one on his left, dressed in purple, was his equerry, and the one on the right, all in green, was his royal huntsman. A pair of pages followed, one carrying a perch bearing two gyrfalcons, the other a hunting horn, which he winded casually as they arrived at the château. (Everyone around this indifferent prince behaved with a casual nonchalance.)

  At this signal, eight guards who’d been dozing in the sun in the inner courtyard hurried to grab their halberds and take their positions as Monsieur made his solemn entry into the château. When he had disappeared under the shadows of the gate, three or four busybodies, who’d followed the cavalcade to the château, commenting on the hanging birds, turned and ambled off—and once they were gone, the street outside the courtyard was deserted. Monsieur dismounted without saying a word and went into his apartments, where his valet helped him change his clothes; and as “Madame”5 had not yet sent word it was time for breakfast, Monsieur stretched out on a chaise longue and fell as fast asleep as if it had been eleven o’clock at night.

  The eight guards, who understood that their work was done for the day, reclined on stone benches in the sun, the grooms disappeared into the stables with the horses, and except for a few birds, chasing and chirping merrily in the flowering shrubs, one would have thought that everyone in the château was sleeping as soundly as Monsieur.

  Suddenly, into the midst of this soft silence, a bright peal of laughter rang out, which caused the dozing halberdiers to half open their eyes. This burst of laughter came from a window of the château that was now bathed by the sun, which struck it at an oblique angle for a while before giving way at midday to the shadows of the chimneys on the opposite wing. The small wrought iron balcony in front of this window sported a pot of red wallflowers, another of primroses, and an early rose, whose lush green foliage was already dappled with the red that portends blossoms.

  In the chamber lit by this window was a square table covered by an old Haarlem floral tapestry, in the middle of that table was a long-necked sandstone vase holding irises and lilies of the valley, and at each end of the table was a young lady. These two lasses looked somewhat out of place, as they could easily be taken for two young maidens who’d escaped from a convent. One, with both elbows on the table and a plume in her hand, traced letters on a sheet of fine Dutch paper, while the other kneeled on a backward chair, a position that enabled her to lean over the table and watch her companion write. From this latter came a thousand jests, jeers, and laughs, the loudest of which had frightened the birds in the shrubberies and half-roused Monsieur’s halberdiers.

  Since we’re sketching portraits, we’ll present the last two of this chapter. The lass who was leaning on the chair, that is, the loud and laughing one, was a beautiful young woman of nineteen or twenty, tawny of complexion, brown of hair, and resplendent, with eyes that sparkled beneath strong arched brows and glorious white teeth that shone like pearls behind coral lips. Her every movement was a theatrical flourish, her life a vivid performance.

  The other, the one who was writing, regarded her energetic companion with blue eyes as limpid and pure as that day’s sky. Her ash-blond hair, arranged with exquisite taste, fell in silky curls to caress her ivory cheeks; she held down the paper with a fine, slender hand that bespoke her youthfulness. At each laugh from her friend she shrugged her white shoulders, which topped a slim and poetic form that lacked her companion’s robust vigor.

  “Montalais! Montalais!” she said at last, in a voice soft as a song. “You laugh too loudly, as loudly as a man! You’ll rouse messieurs the guards, and you won’t even hear Madame’s bell when she calls.”

  The young woman she called Montalais,* without ceasing to laugh and sway, replied, “Louise,* you know better than that, ma chère; when messieurs the guards, as you call them, are taking their nap, not even a cannon could wake them. And you know that Madame’s bell can be heard halfway across the river bridge, so I can hardly fail to hear it when she summons me. What really annoys you is that I laugh while you write, and what you really fear is that your worthy mother, Madame de Saint-Rémy,* will come up here as she sometimes does when we laugh too much. And then she’ll see this enormous sheet of paper on which, after a quarter of an hour, you’ve written only two words: Monsieur Raoul.* And you’re right, my dear Louise, because after those two words, Monsieur Raoul, we could add so many others, so moving and so incendiary that Madame de Saint-Rémy, your saintly mother, would burst into flame if she read them. Eh? Isn’t that so?”

  And Montalais
redoubled her laughter and teasing provocations. The blond girl was furious; she tore up the sheet on which, in fact, Monsieur Raoul had been written in a beautiful hand, crumpled the paper in trembling fingers and threw it out the window.

  “Look, now!” said Mademoiselle de Montalais. “Look at our little lamb, our baby Jesus, our cooing dove so very angry! Don’t worry, Louise, Madame de Saint-Rémy isn’t coming, and if she was, you know I’d hear her. Besides, what could be more proper than writing to a friend you’ve known a dozen years, especially when the letter starts so formally with Monsieur Raoul?”

  “Fine, then—I won’t write to him,” said the blond girl.

  “Well, there’s Montalais told off, and no mistake!” laughed the brunette jester. “Come on, take another sheet of paper, quickly now, and finish up our correspondence. Ah! And there’s the sound of the bell! Well, too bad. This morning Madame must wait, or even manage without her first maid of honor.”

  A bell was indeed ringing, a sound that signaled that Madame had finished dressing and awaited Monsieur, who was to take her hand in the salon and lead her to the refectory. Once this formality was accomplished, always with great ceremony, the couple would eat breakfast and then separate until dinner, which was invariably served at two o’clock.

  At the sound of the bell a door opened in the wing to the left of the courtyard, out of which came two waiters, followed by eight scullions bearing a table-top laden with covered silver dishes. The first of these waiters, the premier maître d’hôtel, silently tapped with his cane on one of the guards who was snoring on a bench; he was even kind enough to hand the groggy guard his halberd, which had been leaning against the nearby wall, after which the blinking soldier escorted Monsieur’s breakfast to the refectory, preceded by a page and the pair of waiters. As Monsieur’s meal passed, the door guards presented arms.