The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

cw: discussion of sexual assault

Ummm… Yes.

So, The Three Musketeers is a classic, right? A French classic? Full of swashbuckling action, bonhomie, friendship, political intrigue, travel and the pursuit of honour and nobility? Well, yes. Yes, it is all of those things.

But it’s also a deeply strange novel that shifts halfway through from being about rival factions within the governance of pre-revolutionary France (the sinister, scheming, Cardinal Richelieu vs the somewhat flat King Louis XIII) to being a revenge fantasy using wars of religion as a backdrop. And the revenge is… well, this is where the novel gets difficult to summarise as a cheeky piece of very well-done trash entertainment, because what happens is that the novel’s world-famous swashbuckling¹, hunky, wannabe musketeer D’Artagnan sexually assaults a woman (who turns out to be the wife of one of the titular Three Musketeers), and she becomes the central antagonist of the second half of the novel as she is – within the context of the novel – “unreasonably” unhappy about this, and therefore must be killed…

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The novel was – like a lot of very big novels from the 19th century – published episodically in a magazine, so every single chapter functions as a neatly-produced, tight vignette, that both tends to have something happen and be resolved, yet also leaves (or adds!) some kind of new thread to be hungrily picked up by the reader when the next episode appears.

Alexandre Dumas (with quite a bit of assistance, according to the Introduction (especially re: all of the historical research)) was writing The Three Musketeers as it was published chapter by chapter, and latter editions of the full novel (including the text as translated here) usually contain little to no changes from the version as initially published.

As you can probably speculate, this means that there are minor textual and narrative errors that have persisted, because no one was triple checking things as the novel came out, and the precedent is that nobody does now.

There are multiple occasions where locations and chronologies leap or change between chapters, with the most notable error being that at one point D’Artagnan travels to England with Planchet, his manservant, and at the end of the trip (without it being mentioned that they have separated), D’Artagnan travels back to Paris as fast as it is physically possible to do, to find Planchet waiting for him at home.

This is the biggest example, but minor mistakes (where and when past events happened, what season/month the action is taking place in etc.) occur throughout. Maybe not in every chapter and certainly not on every page, but they’re such a frequent thing that until about halfway through the novel, I was regularly fliccking back to see if i’d misremembered a narrative detail. But I hadn’t – Dumas (and his team) had.

But once you’re able to accept this (and if you’re absolutely fine with the sexism), then this book can be enjoyed for the kinda thing it is meant to be: action soap opera. Mass entertainment. Frothy, frivolous, fun. That just happens to be sexist.

Yes.

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For those of you who don’t know the general shape of the novel The Three Musketeers, it’s a story about four men (whose ages seem to vary depending on the mood/narrative needs) in the mid-1620s in France.

The country is in the tail end of the War of Religion[s], when the Protestant Huguenots and the Catholic Rest of France went at it, hard, for several decades.

Although France is Catholic and at war with its own (now fringe) Protestant elements (most of whom have been herded up and squashed into the port city of La Rochelle on the West Coast), at the start of the novel France has more friends in England than it does on the continent.

The King is married to a hot (everyone who appears in the novel is frequently and repeatedly clarified to be both impossibly good-looking and impossibly horny) Spanish princess and the country seems constantly worried that she is going to try and organise an invasion from her relatives over the Pyrenees.

She’s not, though – the secret messages and sneaking around that she’s doing is actually in pursuit of an affair with the impossibly good-looking and impossibly horny Duke of Buckingham, who seems to bounce between being the English Ambassador to France and the Prime Minister of England, depending (again) on what makes the least narrative friction. (Maybe those were jobs you could do a time share on in the 17th Century!)

The forces of the Church are led by Cardinal Richelieu, who is trying to prise apart the King’s marriage in order to give himself more political leverage, and there is a key divide (at the start of the novel) between the Catholic forces most loyal to the Cardinal and the Catholic forces most loyal to the King.

The King has his private guard – the most elite soldiers in France – and these bad, horny, naughty boys are the Musketeers, which young, poor, and full of cum (he’s not dumb, but he is naive) D’Artagnan dreams of joining, when he rocks up to Paris from the provinces with nothing to his name, having even lost the letter of introduction to the head of the Musketeers that his “on hard times” but formerly well-connected father had given him as his sole inheritance.

The head of the Musketeers takes a meeting, though, due to fond wartime memories of D’Artagnan’s father, and though D’Artagnan doesn’t have the chops to immediately join the Musketeers (spoiler alert: he later does), the guy is able to get D’Arty a job in the much less prestigious Palace Guards, with the promise to re-consider his application at a later date, because he really did like D’Artagnan’s dad.

In the course of his first day of trying to get a job in Paris, though, D’Artagnan – as a hot-tempered and fiery provincial desperate to not be seen as a loser – keeps getting into minor altercations and challenging strange men to duels. He ends up arranging three over-lapping duels with three different musketeers. Who, yes, will turn out to be THE three musketeers of the title: Aramis (into God), Porthos (into food) and Athos (secretly very important but on the run and using a fake name because strangled his wife to death (HE THINKS) after he found out that she may have been a sex worker before they met). The four lads end up getting into a fight with some of the Cardinal’s top private soldiers (a fight they win, with D’Artagnan pulling his weight FOR SURE) and then decide to be friends. 

The lads keep getting into fights with the Cardinal’s private guards, they keep having amorous adventures with impossibly beautiful (though sometimes just impossibly rich) women of Paris, while-

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Sorry sorry sorry, I’ve been writing this in  20 minute bursts the past few days while commuting to three consecutive days of work. This is the first time in a very long time when I’ve had three full 10 hour work days in a row (I’ve worked more consecutive days, sure, but they’ve usually been comprised of much shorter shifts than this) and it’s absolutely eroding my sense of self.

Dressing up in serious, tradmasc, clothes, getting under an hour of the day with my wonderful² toddler… Constant need for small talk, low action, merely in exchange for blunt economic value. Such a sense of emptiness, yes, being a cog in the machines of the economy. The systems so corrupt, so stultifying, so bloated and so inefficient… labour and money seeking out at every level but the excess always trickling up up up… It doesn’t take much money to have enough food and somewhere warm to sleep… It doesn’t take a lot to hit the needs… But so many people with more money than could be spent in several lifetimes, and so many, too, who struggle to acquire what is necessary… Restorative, redistributive, society-changing switches and changes are what’s needed… No one should have to suffer to work 30 hours in three consecutive days lol. Not in a better world.

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The Three Musketeers (and D’Artagnan) take a lot of time off.

They’re always getting granted official leave to pursue their unofficial missions, which mostly revolve around trying to enjoy their own affairs and help other people (mainly the Queen) enjoy hers, consequence-free.

Cardinal Richelieu has a spy slash assassin, Milady, who runs all over France and to England and back, trying to expose the affairs (and kill people) which the Musketeers and D’Artagnan (who does eventually officially join the ranks, but unofficially is with them for most of the novel) are helping to hide.

D’Artagnan gets a girlfriend at one point, who is the much younger wife of his landlord. But it’s absolutely fine for him to be relentlessly pursuing her, because she’s hot and her husband is not only old, but also stupid.

Milady, of course, is also stunningly sexy, and uses her beauty, charm and raw sexuality to get whatever she wants – there is a long series of several chapters in the final quarter of the novel where she is held prisoner in an English castle while en route to a political assassination, and day by day manages to seduce-corrupt-trick an extremely devout Puritan into not only busting her out of prison, but going and doing the cold-blooded political assassination she was meant to do, even while knowing he would immediately be executed for doing it.

Dumas has a lot of fun with this, and it is a lot of fun, I suppose.

Milady is resourceful and smart and articulate. The fact that she is eventually caught and quite brutally murdered as an extra-judicial execution by the lads and a small-town executioner (who has a personal grudge against her due to some earlier-in-life crimes and seductions) feels quite sad.

She’s a good villain!

Desperate but effective!

Cruel but measured!

Clever but not reckless!

But, as Dumas is keen to point out over and over again, she is a “physically weak woman” who can poison and mislead and fuck as much as she wants to, but what she cannot do is physically overcome an attacker.

The reason why her malice shifts from the targets she is paid as a spy to spy on to the lads is because D’Artagnan rapes her.

There is a phrase I remember being used by the old school Shakespeare scholars that taught on my undergraduate degree which is “bed trick”, which is what D’Artagnan does here. He seduces Milday’s personal servant, has a lot of sex with her (that’s she is really really really into) And uses her to get access to Milady’s bedroom at a time when she’s expecting a visit from a completely different man, and then stays all night just fucking and fucking and fucking for the whole night, before leaving before the light.

This is definitely non-consensual sex.

D’Artagnan is there for the entire night, during the entirety of which it is impossible for Milady – who is smart – to figure out the man that she’s with is not the man she wants, but a different man who she knows very well and isn’t interested in having sex with. Hours and hours and hours, during which time there is no recognisable glimmer, no vocal inflections, no giveaways… Which makes D’Artagnan all the more sinister, because Milady is not a fool, and so – narratively, for this to make sense – D’Artagnan must be continuing a direct and a clear and an unambiguous deception throughout the entire night. Which is, for sure, undeniably, sexual assault.

Dumas has a few of his characters – and the occasionally present omniscient narrattor, who mostly isn’t a character in the text – express a bit of disapproval at this, a “well we wouldn’t do this now” type thing, an acceptance that D’Artagnan is acting outside the bounds of established 19th century morality…

But it’s phrased and described as something dishonourable, rather than something evil or criminal… a deception he shouldn’t have done, sure, but not one that requires the honorable Musketeers to ostracise their friend.

In fact, they’re all much more shocked and offended by the way in which – after the night – he sends Milady a fake letter from the guy she thought she was having sex with saying “thanks for that – I’ll be back when I’ve gone through all the rest of the women on my roster”.

This is, to the Musketeers, even worse than the sex itself.

This is a cruelty that will be felt, rather than one that might never have come to light without the confession of D’Artagnan and/or the maidservant he seduced for the access.

And then, once Milady does find out and starts trying to get D’Artagnan and his buddies killed and/or arrested, it’s seen as out of line, especially once they all figure out that she’s the ex-wife of one of the Musketeers who he thought he’d murdered because he found out she had “a past” a short while into their marriage.

It’s the novel itself, then, even more than in the actions and opinions of the characters within it, where this uncomfortable misogyny starts to be unquestionable. There is absolutely no criminal consequence for D’Artagnan, and beyond a couple of “you shouldn’t have done that” from the lads, no social consequences, either, and these all fade away into nothing once his friends realise/decide Milady isn’t a “goodie” and so deserves to die anyway…

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WWhat, then, can we do with The Three Musketeers?

If it’s a sexist text – which it is – should it be dismissed and forgotten?

I think, though, that one can argue that by having the major antagonist of the novel be an incredibly competent and intelligent woman – seen as a fair and equal foil to the boys – it is perhaps offering a glimmer of hope?

Women can be villains in equality?

But, then again, is Milady being a scheming, manipulative, sexy, hot, woman keen to use her sexuality as a weapon an example of misogyny, too?

The evil temptress who rewards, yes, with sex (or the promise of it), but is evil. This is a sexist trope, too.

Lots of historic art, alas, falls into this hole.

And Dumas himself does go out of his way to clarify that the sexism of his boys is sometimes a bit OTT.

But isn’t this – as a lot of writers did in the late 20th century and early 21st – just having ones caking and eating it too?

You get to both have the “fun” misogynistic tropes and dialogues and actions, but you also get to say “ooh, that’s bad” and shake ones head to clarify you’re a better guy than them.

Is it ironic?

Is it said to be ironic?

Is this slightly more acceptable?

Is even haviing this fucking little conversation here on this blog a waste of mine and everyone else’s time?

Am I trying to judge the past by the standards of today, something that almost always finds the past wanting?

Who does this serve? What does writing and thinking about this add to the world or to progressive causes?

I dunno.

I don’t know. 

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Textual examples of misogyny:

• on p. 532, Athos says, “In truth, the man is rather imprudent to speak to other men like that. You’d think he only ever had to do with women and children.”
• Athos, again, this time to D’Artagnan after Milady has poisoned the woman he’d like to be his mistress, on p. 643: “Be a man, my friend: women weep for the dead, men avenge them!”
• p. 541, indicating how sinister Milday is when she figures out which of her guards she can manipulate best: “Felton is something else. He’s a naive, pure, and seemingly virtuous young man; him there are ways to destroy.”

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1. Is it just pirates that buckle swash or can all hunky lads with swords do that??? ↩︎
2. Not just my opinion – a paediatrician once stopped me in the street to tell me how cute my child is. ↩︎