The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas

“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. n and immediately).ary, wouldarlly in the text.rilling in their demise.  mastered.