The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (1844)

 

The Three Musketeers

As I finished reading Alexander Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” on my way to my summer vacation three weeks ago, I have had plenty on time to think about what to say about it, now that I am back home again. I think time has mellowed my opinion a bit from a somewhat more critical position.

“The Three Musketeers” is one of the more famous works in the canon of nineteenth century literature. There are countless film and TV versions of the story, and I seem to recall an illustrated children’s version that I read as a child. It was therefore a bit of a surprise to me that the only elements I actually recognized, now that I read the book, are names of the four (not three!) musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan, and that it took place in seventeenth century France.

The original story was written as a serial and at great speed. This can be clearly felt in the organic development of the story that sort of forms itself as the story moves on. Dumas may have had some idea where the story should go, but clearly only in rough outline. There are threads started that are not or unsatisfactorily followed through and there are tangents that develops into major plot elements. Haphazard story development may be a bit harsh. Organic is a nicer term.

Our main character is a young man called D’Artagnan, who arrives in Paris from the province with the ambition to become a royal musketeer, an elite force committed to the protection of the royal person (Louis XIV). D’Artagnan is on friendly terms with the leader of the unit, Treville, and gets a position as a guard, but not quite musketeer (yet). D’Artagnan also quickly becomes friends with three (The Three) musketeers, Athos Porthos and Aramis. This happens when he challenges each of the three to a duel on swords on the same day...

Early on it becomes clear that there is a rivalry between the musketeers and the Cardinal Richelieu and his minions. Richelieu is described as an evil and cunning schemer who employs dodgy characters to promote his personal ambitions. The first adventure of the musketeers concerns some diamonds that the Queen (Queen Anne of Austria) has given to the love-struck English Duke of Buckingham. The diamonds need to be retrieved to avoid compromising the Queen. Following this, D’Artagnan falls in love with the pretty Madame Bonancieux, who then disappears, apparently abducted. He also gets involved with a mysterious woman, mostly known as Milady. As it turns out, she is a minion of the cardinal and the arch villain of the story. When D’Artagnan causes her some embarrassment she sets out to kill him.

When the musketeers are sent to La Rochelle to participate in the siege of this city, they demonstrate bravery against the enemy, but mostly they try to defend themselves from the murderous Milady. The story now takes a tangential direction, and we follow Milady on a mission to England to assassinate the Duke of Buckingham, her capture and following escape. For this section of the novel (around a hundred pages), the musketeers are not even mentioned. Finally, with Milady back in France we get a final and dramatic meetup of the characters.

The great strength of this novel, and likely the basis of its massive fame, is the extraordinary flow of the story. Dumas writes dialogue with a speed and fluidity I have not encountered in any novel prior to this one and it is a style massively imitated since. He writes like a modern action movie by wasting little time on descriptions but let the action and the plot drive the story. That has the pleasant effect of making this a page-turner novel that keeps you on edge and waiting for what happens on the next page. Employing this format, Dumas could have written on any topic and it would have been a great read.

When we get down to the actual story, things become a bit more problematic. Obviously, we are supposed to sympathize with the musketeers and think of them as great guys, but in reality, they are rash, violent and proud brutes. Maybe in the nineteenth century their qualities smacked of bravery and manliness, but in the twenty-first century, they are the type of people you do not want to meet on a night in town.

Then there is the conflict between the musketeers and the Cardinal Richelieu. I had a hard time understanding this conflict. Richelieu worked for the (in the story largely incompetent) king to secure and protect France. He drove an organization and centralization campaign we would consider modern and was not surpassed until the era of Napoleon. In a Europe dominated by the devastation of the thirty-year war, he was the glue that tied France together. When the musketeers are in opposition to him, they are largely supporting the enemies of France: Spain, Austria and particularly England. Doing this, amounts to treason and yet the musketeers are the heroes while the Cardinal is the villain.

The only way I can explain this is in the conflict between centralization and regional independence, between king and nobility, state and regions, unionism and federalism. This is a type of conflict that goes back to antiquity and still takes place today. The musketeers in this light represents the nobility who is losing power when Richelieu usurps it for the state. Whether this is a good or a bad cause, I will let the reader decide.

While I read the story, I was frustrated with the meandering storyline, especially the very long detour with Milady, but as the weeks have passed, I see it as less of a problem. Since the flow is never lost and the story remains interesting, it is simply something to accept and just flow with it. And that is the thing with this book: You are never bored by it. Perplexed and confused, yes, but never bored.

That is the best recommendation I can give a book.

 

  

The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allen Poe (1843)

 

The Pit and the Pendulum

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is another short story from the collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories I got. It is very short indeed, barely 20 pages and covers hardly more than a single scene, but what a scene it is.

The narrator is a prisoner by the Spanish Inquisition who wakes up in a dark cell. He has evidently sustained some sort of torture because even the simple act of gathering his senses is an ordeal. As he slowly comes to, he tries to orient himself, but collapses in the process.

When he wakes up, he realizes the cell is smaller than anticipated, but taller and at the centre of the cell there is a bottomless pit. This pit seems to be the only way out, but our narrator shrinks back from this place as a certain death sentence. Some food has been set out for him, and this has clearly been laced with a sedative because when he wakes up again, he is tied to a pallet. Only his one arm is free enough to reach some food and drink. Eventually he notices a pendulum swinging high above him. The bottom edge of is a razor-sharp blade. His sense of panic increases when he also notices that the pendulum is slowly descending. Over the next few pages, we follow this increase in panic until it reaches a crescendo when the swinging blade is low enough to cut him. Basically, his cell only holds two exits, both through death: the pit or the pendulum.

This is a very short story, but by sticking to describing the developing stages of the narrator’s panic and fear we get plenty of that. By using the first-person form, it is not just him, but us who are feeling the torture and the sense of impending death and doom. The helplessness and the inevitability are the worst of it. There is nothing he can do but wait and anticipate his own destruction. They say that in the last seconds before your death, your life passes before your eyes in summary, but not in this story. It is blind, white, all-consuming fear, you experience.

As I mentioned in my review of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe did not invent the gothic genre, but he shaped it into the form that we recognize. This is also true of “The Pit and the Pendulum”. It is a window into horror literature at least a century before this became a really big thing. Modern horror uses many of the same effects and these can also be found in the other short stories of the book. Not all are as good, but they all contain that eerie, weird feeling that something is not right.

I am not myself a fan of the horror genre, but I recognize the quality of these short stories and for fans of the genre I am certain this is essential reading. It is certainly easily accomplished.

 

  

Lost Illusions - Honore De Balzac (1843)

 

Lost Illusions

“Lost Illusions” is the third book on the List by Honoré de Balsac, a writer I am getting familiar with now. While his books are never happy, this is the most pessimistic book so far. There is a bitterness here that can only be personal.

In the provincial town of Angoulême, two young friends, David and Lucien are striking out in life. David, son of a printer, has inherited his miser of a father’s old printing house, but is more interested in inventing a new process for making paper manufacturing cheaper and so the business slides. He gets married to Lucien’s sister Eve, who tries but has trouble keeping the printing business afloat. While David is a virtuous person, whose only “fault” is his persistence in his research, Lucien is a flagrant type. He has aspirations of being a poet and has already a manuscript for a collection of poetry and a novel. This gets him invited to the salons of the local nobility and Madame de Bargeton starts flirting with him. This develops into an elopement, taking them to Paris.

In Paris Madame de Bargeton easily slides into the world of the fashionable, while Lucien is seen as an embarrassment. Left to dry, Lucien, after having squandered away the money generously donated by David, Eve and their mother, submits to an existence in poverty. His attempt at being a poet flounders amid the brutal reality of Paris, but gains him virtuous friends. A new world opens up for him when he encounters the journalist Lousteau and Lucien becomes a journalist himself. This is a world of absolute corruption, where articles are written for or against people on a whim or for political or economical gains. One day you support a person/play/book/party, the next you are against. Lucien with his talents and flossy moral is excellent at this job, but in the process, he loses his good friends in favour of less reliable friends in journalism. With his new-found power to make or break people he now gains access to also the nobility and even has aspirations to regain his maternal name of de Rubempré. This makes his interesting again to Madame de Bargeton, but Lucien prefers his actress girlfriend and the snuffed Bargeton as well as jealous journalist colleagues set in motion an avalanche of events to ruin and crush Lucien. It even gets so far that Lucien defrauds his friend David, sending him to the brink of ruin and into the arms of people who wants to steal his invention.

Lucien is obviously a flawed character. While he feels sincere remorse for the trouble he causes and seems to have some scruples on taking on questionable jobs, neither last very long. He is arrogant and ambitious enough to think he will get away with it, and it does not help that his good looks often clears the way for him. He gets plenty of admonitions on the right way of doing things, but always ends up taking the easy and fast way. During his time in Paris, his only virtuous act that he sees through is to stick to his girlfriend and even that brings him in trouble. Balzac half blames the weak character of Lucien and half the Paris society. Balzac had plenty of experience to match Lucien’s and the bitterness against to double crossings and cutthroat business of both the printing business and journalism in Paris is evident. Balzac will frequently insert a harangue against various elements of this world seemingly out of context with the story he is trying to tell, simply to vent his frustrations.

Lucien gets crushed, not so much because he deserves it as because this is what happens to naive talents in Paris. There is always somebody who wants to take advantage of you and if you step on somebody, their vanity knows no mercy. Lucien experiences this, but never seems to learn from it.

Back in Angoulême, it is the same story, but with finance and the legal system as the villains. The Cointet brothers of the rival printing house and the double-faced lawyer Petit-Claud are every bit as remorseless as the journalists and printers of Paris.

So, what is the morale of Balzac? What is the solution? His rather depressing conclusion is that either you become a monster yourself or you leave the game entirely and live as simple a life as possible. Anybody who sticks their nose out are asking for it.

Rather depressive, really. It took me a while to get through “Lost Illusions” as it kept knocking the wind out of me. If you care even a bit for the characters, you will feel distressed on every other page. At least with Lucien, I learned to write him off as a lost cause, but my heart bled for David and Eve. There is no doubt this is a well written book, it even has its moments of wry humour, and it is celebrated as one of Balzac’s best novels. Personally, I preferred “Old Man Goriot”, and I do not feel inclined to repeat the misery-feast parts of this novel, which is, honestly, the majority of it.