“The Man in the Iron Mask” is the last portion of the D’Artagnan Romances and was serialized
between 1847 and 1850 in its original language: French. Neither Dad’s nor my edition
has a translator listed.
WES:
The introduction to my copy of The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre
Dumas likens it to a comic book or one of the pulp western novels that were
popular some years ago. It also resembles the populist Robin Hood in England and the cowboy to America. These analogies
are right on as The Three Musketeers stories seem to fulfil
the same purpose for the nineteenth century Frenchman. This book is the final in
Dumas’ series about the musketeers and their adventures as the upholders of
truth, honor and loyalty to the French kings in the late 1500s and early 1600s
when swordsmanship still predominated and romanticist depictions of the kings
and their courts tickled the tastes of the French reading public.
In this book, the great scandal is the discovery by
Aramis, Bishop of Vannes, an ex-musketeer that the present king of France,
Louis XIV, has a twin brother who has been secreted away in the Bastille by his
mother, Queen Anne of Austria, allegedly to protect the kingdom from potential disruptions
in the royal succession. I never quite understood how Aramis figured this out
since it was such a momentous secret. Since the two princes look exactly alike,
Aramis plots to capture the king while he is visiting Monsieur Fouquet, the
surintendant (yes, that’s what they call this post – not superintendent) of
finance – the principle minister to the king. It also happens that both the
king (who is married and has a queen) and Fouquet are in love with the same
woman, Mademoiselle de la Valliere, who is the king’s mistress. She really is also
secretly in love with Raoul, son of Athos, another retired musketeer, but has
evidently decided her best interests are with the king.
Anyway, the plot is consummated when Aramis whisks
Philippe, the brother, from the dungeon and takes him to the fete where the
king is celebrating. They secretly have a room overlooking the king’s room and
spy on how he conducts his toilet for a couple of days. One night they lower
the king’s entire bed below ground, kidnap him, and take him to the Bastille
where he is inserted via a clever ruse into the ex-prisoner’s room. His
screaming and beating the door is fruitless as Aramis convinces the governor of
the Bastille that he is mad. Meanwhile, Philippe replaces the king and attempts
to fool all that he is the king. Aramis has to fool his old friend, D’Artagnan,
the captain of the musketeers, who is ordered to arrest Fouquet for using his
office to enrich himself and trying to steal the king’s mistress.
For some inexplicable reason, Aramis reveals to Fouquet
the whole plot to exchange the kings, one the good king, Philippe, for Louis,
the alleged 2nd born usurper. Fouquet, instead of going along with the plan,
blows up the whole thing, and actually goes to the Bastille and rescues the
king who had previously ordered his arrest. Before the king could react, Fouquet
offered Aramis and Porthos, another ex-musketeer who was unwittingly helping
Aramis, a refuge to escape the king’s wrath, his property on Belle Isle (no,
not the Island in Detroit River – this one is off the coast of France). When
the king returns, he is understandingly enraged at all the plotters and orders D’Artagnan
to arrest them but not before he personally orders Philippe to wear an iron
mask and D’Artagnan to secretly take him to a desert island where he can be
held for the rest of his life. Thusly, Philippe is last heard of on page 318 of
a 574 page book. I guess his curse is to last forever as the musketeers never do
rescue him.
Instead, the rest of the book is devoted to the fate of
the major characters and the last adventures of the musketeers. We find that
Raoul is so crushed by the lost love of de la Valliere that he goes off to war.
He is killed in the African war and the news causes the death of his father
hours before the embalmed body of the hero-son returns. They are buried
together and de la Valliere comes to weep over the grave after being superseded
by a younger mistress. Fouquet, despite his heroic efforts to save the king, is
imprisoned by D’Artagnan after betrayal by his clerk, Colbert, who takes his
place. D’Artagnan does manage to save him from the gallows. D’Artagnan is
ordered to capture Aramis and Porthos by besieging Belle Isle but instead gives
them time to escape. This brings the wrath of the king onto him. He’s fired and
the siege proceeds without him. Aramis escapes to Spain but Porthos is killed
when the powder keg he throws at a company of attacking soldiers collapses the
cave on top of him.
Louis suddenly becomes mellow and seems to forgive everybody.
D’Artagnan gets back into good graces simply through his sheer loyalty and
honor to the king. Even Aramis comes back later to lead an effort to turn Spain
into a neutral while Louis moves to war against the United Provinces who were
formally his allies against Spain. France, however, is loath to ally itself to
a Protestant confederation against a fellow Catholic state. D’Artagnan in
reward for his virtue and loyalty is promoted to Marshal of France and leads
the attack but on the very day of his marshal’s baton award, he is killed
attacking a Dutch fort. Thus comes to an end the musketeer story. Aramis died
in his bed, I guess.
This story was somewhat disappointing in several ways.
After spending the first 50 pages bemoaning the injustices done to Philippe by
his mother and Louis XIII, I was looking forward to seeing him mount the throne
and be the good king and somehow fool everyone by convincing everyone he was
Louis XIV. I figured Louis would be the man in the iron mask. Instead, there
was no redemption – the bad king remained king and Phillipe was sentenced to
wear the mask and suffer eternal anonymity. The long description of Athos
parting with Raoul as he went off to war was a bit much in the romanticism vein
although this device was necessary, I guess, as a means to show the fate of
Phillipe. I about tore my hair out with all the names that the characters used
almost as a means of disguise. Everyone seemed to have multiple names. For
instance, Porthos was known intermittently as Baron du Vallon, Signeur of
Bracieux, and Signeur de Pierrefonds, among others. I guess the French are fond
of all these titles. Every place you own gives you a different title, I
suppose. I am the Baron de Little Oak Pond!
Overall, this book was interesting, especially the fierce
loyalty of everyone to the king even when he steps on your neck. I did not like
how it didn’t proceed as I thought it should. Poor Phillipe might still be
sitting out there on his prison island of Ste. Marguerite – where ever the heck
that is – I looked for it off the coast of France! I did like the character of
the musketeers and their all for one, one for all attitude and dialogue. It was
interesting seeing Aramis trying to outwit D’Artagnan. I still don’t know why he
divulged the plot to Fouquet and NOT to his fellow musketeers, especially to the
captain of the king’s guard who was most in position to help the cause. I guess
that was a case of one for one! Although it was an easy read, the problems I
had with it leads me to rate it as a 5 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).
ALLISON:
It took me longer than usual
to read this book, in part because my edition (Oxford World’s Classics) has twenty-nine
more chapters than other versions, indeed the one Dad read. What might you have
missed, were you not to read the first 200 pages that I unknowingly slogged
through? As the intro of my edition points out, the reader would miss a single
day (maybe in both the effort of reading—although, I’d estimate my 200 pages
took more like a week—and narratively in the plot). This single day, detailed
by Dumas, reveals some backstory that may or may not be critical to
understanding future relationships. Raoul has a much bigger role, and his
heartbreak with Louise is played out, setting him as a hopeless rival with King
Louis. Financial, political, and romantic complications between Fouquet and
Colbert are expounded. Largely the chapters are concerned with the plot to free
Philippe, which is painstakingly revealed, along with its various motivations
from key players. A critical and exciting piece of the book contained in these opening
200 pages was the revelation of the Queen’s birthing of secret twins, as
detailed by Madame de Chevreuse to the Queen herself, and the following
explanation of how the baby, young child, and eventual man, were hidden and
cared for without even his brother, King Louis, the wiser. (This is arguable.
At some points it is assumed Louis has been complicit in the plot to hide his
brother, at others it is insisted that he was unaware of Philippe’s existence.)
The plot to free Philippe was so dense in the first half of this book, that
when the event is actually carried out, its quick failure and subsequent
disappearance of Philippe from the narrative is surprising. He’s the title
character after all and such a romantic figure. Without the first twenty-nine
chapters, he becomes supporting cast, if not a fleeting walk-on.
But The Man in the Iron Mask is not the accurate title of this tome and
the history of these characters extends far beyond the first 29 chapters. An
alternate title for this portion of Dumas’ epic is Ten Years Later, as this is a continuation of the saga of The
Three Musketeers. I didn’t know this going in, in fact I was unfamiliar with
the names of the heroes (Athos, Aramis, Porthos, D’Artagnan) and it took me
quite some time to figure out their particular significance. My early readings
of Porthos were especially comical. The chapter “How Mouston had Become Fatter
without giving Porthos Notice Thereof, and of the Troubles which Consequently
Befell that Worthy Gentleman” although already ridiculous, was made even more
hilarious without the context of Porthos’ Andre-the-Giant-esque stature. I
spent a good portion of this book wondering why I felt untethered to the
characters, like I was missing critical information before I discovered that
there were likely 1200 or so serialized pages preceding even the extra ones I
had read. So, yes, I was missing quite a bit.
We’ve read a couple of
serializations in the bookclub thus far: The
Mystery of Edwin Drood and The
Moonstone. Neither of which are as complex and encompassing as what Dumas
accomplished with The Three Musketeers
series. Dumas, although not the
first, could be considered the Godfather of historical novel, employing real
life figures as his protagonists and villains. I am quite fascinated by the
time of long-running serializations. If we were to compare this format with the
media of today, we might consider Dickens and Collins as having written one-off
six-episode television mini-series that the BBC has so expertly mastered. Dumas,
rather, has written a twelve year epically-arced American television series,
like NYPD Blue. Where Dickens and Collins both had suspense-driven plots, Dumas
was almost theatrically Sophoclean, or more contemporarily, soap-oprean, in its
longwinded and complicated conversational interactions. All of the plot points
are reiterated in verbal form, individually, by all parties involved. I won’t
lie, this was tiring. In the introduction to my edition, David Coward says
Dumas spent little energy creating a universe of historical detail, like
“descriptions of dress, buildings, or court ritual” or even mooring the reader
in summaries of previous action, “which would simply have bored the reader.”
However, being a Johnny-come-lately reader, I would have much preferred an
anchorage in the history of our heroes to the thick dialogue of “What we’re
going to do, why we might do it, how we’re going to do it, and who we plan to
undercut while we’re at it,” over and over again.
Which brings me Dumas’ panache
for thrilling action! Once they finally stop pontificating and get to it, the
action of this book was marvelous. I recently watched the film Titanic and recalled the bookclub’s
reading of Dead Wake and thought,
“Would Larson’s depiction of the sinking of the Lusitania have been so successful
without the visual impact of Cameron’s film?” We all experienced the Titanic
sinking so viscerally, in one of the very first CGI masterpieces, that much of
Larson’s work conjuring the horror of an event few of us could possibly fathom,
was done for him already. That’s not the case for Dumas. This being the final
chapter of the Musketeers histories, Dumas was especially rousing in their
demise. The grotto scene where Porthos and Aramis lay trap and kill dozens of
soldiers is chilling and brutal and as terrifying as any horror film. Porthos’
death scene has all the emotional impact of an avalanche. The chase of the
black horse and the white horse (my absolute favorite chapter), in which D’Artagnan
arrests Fouquet is in equal measure poetic and kinetic, as to have left me
breathless. And Raoul, poor Raoul and Athos’ heartbreaking finale. I did not
need any visual context to experience these dramas to their fullest—all of it
was imbedded terrifically in the text. Unfortunately, in the end, I wanted more
of this, earlier and sustained.
And what the heck happened
to Philippe?
In the intro, David Coward,
absurdly states: “But a summary of the plot so far is as necessary as a handle
on cabbage.” I’ve hardly heard a more bizarre comparison (although I plan to
use this often and immediately). A handle is unthinkably incongruent to the
function of vegetable, but a rooting in time and place, would have greatly
influenced my reading, especially as there was so much political machinations
going on in this story. Dumas is not responsible for my loss of footing, of
course. He meant for me to be hooked from the start. If only I hadn’t started
from the end.
I give this book a 4 on Dad’s
scale of 1-10, 1 being highest. Although oft lost, I was also oft moved.
