The good old days, the honest man, the restless heart, the promised land

[evelyn_b]

Or, Musketeers Monday Tuesday.

I'm still on hiatus, but I wanted to make sure that I finished The Three Musketeers before the end of the year. Most of what I can say about The Three Musketeers can be summed up by its results.



The first thing I did after I turned the last page was sit down and write the first thousand words of a fic called The Surprising Adventures of Charlotte Backson in the New World, which will almost certainly never see the light of day. Charlotte Backson was the pseudonym assigned to maligned criminal mastermind Milady for her transportation to America, a punishment she unwisely tries to evade. I'm convinced Milady could have made out like a bandit in America, if she didn't die of malaria first. I'm not totally sure how I feel about her as a character. As a criminal mastermind, she's a lot of fun to watch - the third of the book that is just Milady Manipulates a Puritan is very clever and Dumasian. The refrain "It's impossible to insult Milady (because she is a lying whore)" was less fun for me.

I was disappointed that my two favorite characters, Legs Buckingham and Anne of Austria, spent most of the book elsewhere and only reappeared in time for Buckingham to get stabbed by a misguided Puritan two minutes before a message arrives from Anne imploring him to 1) end this cruel war, in the name of their love, and 2) watch out for assassins! I have every confidence that he would have made his death scene much more dramatic and fabulous if he'd only had the time. But I can't very well blame Dumas for writing a book about some musketeers and their nemesis instead of devoting all 600 pages to my well-dressed drama llamas. That is, I can and will, but probably shouldn't. After all, Dumas had to stick to the rough outlines of history and couldn't just invite Legs to be de facto king of France. The fate of Constance was also unsatisfying. I suspect Dumas is setting up for a sequel and wants her out of the way without making D'Artagnan too much (more) of a cad.

Overall, I enjoyed it. Some things about it haven't aged well - for example, I don't think "callously seduced an innocent priest at the age of 15!" is going to endure as a marker of pure evil, at least in the short term. I probably liked Aramis and Porthos more for being goofy side characters. I don't love D'Artagnan quite as much as I wanted to, but I enjoyed him 90% of the time. I never really warmed to Athos, which is really just a diplomatic way of saying I spent the entire book wanting to throw conkers at his stupid chiseled head and set his clothes on fire.

The other result of The Three Musketeers is that I am now reading a book called The Romance of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham by Philip Gibbs, a kindred spirit who read The Three Musketeers and concluded that what the world really needed was an entire book about the adventures of Legs Buckingham, The Little Peacock Who Could. It's an old-fashioned biography (copyright 1900), obviously influenced by Scott and Dumas and history-as-storytelling, where the author has strong opinions about all the people involved and is more than happy to share them with you over some mulled wine and a big book of color portraits.

Anyway, it's excellent. James I is the most embarrassing dad, collecting handsome young men to admire and then trying to make his son Charles befriend them so they can be one big happy excessively demonstrative family. At the moment Buckingham (aka Steenie) and "Baby Charles" (who is not a baby, he is 23 :|) are taking an incognito road trip to Spain to get Baby Charles engaged to a Spanish princess, staying at low wayside inns along the way. They are "incognito" but they also haven't bothered to change their sumptuous court clothes for regular clothes, because who wants to wear sackcloth?? James is upset because they are not writing long enough letters enough times a day.

I'm reading a few other books, but very slowly. Regular posting will resume in January, in one form or another.

Comments

[chelseagirl]

I now feel that I do not need to read The Three Musketeers because you have given me as much joy as I am likely to get out of it, in any case.

[evelyn_b]

It was worth reading! Not pure delirious magic like Monte Cristo, but that's hardly a fair comparison. Solid silliness with some very enjoyable parts and a few pebbles in the muesli.

[osprey_archer]

I will never get over the fate meted out to poor Constance, who never did anything but be loyal and faithful and true (except I guess to her husband, but eh, who cares about him). CONSTANCE DESERVED BETTER.

And I also would have enjoyed to spend more time with Anne & Legs Buckinghman (is that your nickname for him, or is that a historical nickname a la Steenie? Also, what is with the upper class British and weird nicknames. Steenie?), and I do think it's a bit of a loss that the book pretty much writes them out altogether after that early episode.

Also Milady would 100% have made out like a bandit in the New World, assuming that her brother-in-law didn't arrange to have her drowned en route, which I think it is entirely possible that he might have done if he had the chance. But I did super enjoy the way that she spiritually seduced the Puritan fellow to her bidding and I would have hated to miss that, so I am at peace with the outcome of that at least.

I definitely think that a lot of the treatment of Milady hasn't aged well, though. The fact that she is pure evil, and understands herself as pure evil rather than thinking that she's in the right or just trying to survive or whatever - and the way that evil is so intertwined with her existence as a sexual being (which really came into focus right after we were discussing how refreshingly non-sexist Dumas is most of the time! Clearly we should have knocked on wood) -

This especially comes into focus at the end, when they're all naming their grievances against Milady. D'Artagnan is all "You tried to kill me three times and also murdered my girlfriend" (pretty bad, I think we can all agree, even if d'Artagnan brought some of those murder attempts on himself by pretending to be Milady's lover), and the random executioner is all "You seduced and then abandoned my brother!" which is probably not a hanging offense, but still kind of mean... and then Athos is all "You married me without telling me you were branded!", as if that's in the same category as the others. Like, come on, man. What kind of tragic backstory is that? Especially coming from Dumas, who created the tragic life of Edmond Dantes??? I expected a higher quality of tragedy here.

Oddly, though, even though the book is weird and unwieldy and I liked it a lot less after the Anne & Legs parts were over, it's made me really interested in Three Musketeers adaptations. There's the stuff of a great story in there, even if Dumas' take on it didn't always scratch my itch. Maybe I'll finally watch that BBC Three Musketeers people were raving about a few years ago.

[evelyn_b]

Constance deserves better than a last-minute poisoning, but she also deserves better than D'Artagnan. A dilemma? Not really, but oh well. I'm just glad I didn't read this when it was in serial form, because if I'd waited 18 months or whatever it was for THAT I don't know what I would do. Probably just yell about it whenever anyone mentioned Dumas. But like, A LOT.

Steenie is 100% Jamie Stuart. It's not a nickname for George - it comes from St. Stephen and is a reference to his personal beauty - because St. Stephen had "the face of an angel." For reference, Steenie began his letters to James "Dere Dad and Gossope" and signed them "Your most humble Slave and Dogge Steenie."

"Legs" is just me being silly.

Even if Milady's brother-in-law arranged to have her drowned, it would backfire instantly. She'd manage to rig it so that the planned "accident" would kill everyone else on the ship (thus sending back a giant bundle of lifelong guilt: sucks not to be a sociopath, bro!) steal a lifeboat and some flares and get herself rescued by some pirates or Portuguese slave traders or whoever happened to be using the lanes, with a ready-made tale of persecution and bad luck beautifully attested to by the surrounding wreckage. How her beauty and strength would shine in the moonlight, among the corpses and the kegs of salt pork! There would be twelve ballads and a stage play about The Fair Nymph of the Atlantic within a ninemonth.

I have a soft spot for villains who self-identify as evil, I can't lie. And I'd be all about the intertwining of villainy and sexuality . . . if only all the bros of the book weren't quite so on the nose about it all the time.

Athos is a pompous petulant whiner and a bad valet employer who can go drown in his own manly tears. I hope Grimaud sells all his clothes and replaces them with incredibly itchy look-alikes. Then quits without warning, because Athos is bullshit. I did enjoy D'Artagnan's fanatical admiration of him, though.

And I totally agree about adaptations! I want to watch all the adaptations! Or one or two of them, at least. There's one with Christopher Lee in it that I'd like to check out.

[osprey_archer]

Constance may be the original cinnamon roll, too good and pure for this world. Obviously her husband doesn't deserve her, and I'm not sure that she would want to remain in the convent forever, either. If Milady didn't poison her, could she have returned to the queen's service? That would have been the best option for her, I think. She probably would have carried on an affair with d'Artagnan for a while and then they would have drifted apart.

I am HERE for Milady's ridiculous lifeboat plans. She doesn't even need to drown the rest of the ship, just steal a lifeboat in the night (after of course winning the liberty of the ship from the captain, who is indignant at the way his fair prisoner has been treated) and drift away, convinced that she'll find a ship somehow. The sheer force of her character will draw a ship to her!

Although if she's suborned the captain, presumably she won't need to steal a lifeboat at all. She could just marry him and turn him into a pirate and become a pirate queen.

[thisbluespirit]

Ha, it was pretty obvious you were not going to be keen on the latter half, but it would have been annoying to say so, or warn you that you had attached yourself to people who were hardly even in the book (in Anne's case, anyway).

I read it first as a teenager, and while I can objectively acknowledge that there may be problems with it, I revelled in Milady's evilness. I did not want even the tiniest sliver of redeemability in her. I loved her implacable villainy and everyone's fear of her and her TRAGIC EVIL murder of Constance.

And so one half of my adult brain is, like, okay, this is kind of terrible, but my heart is loving it and thinking that half of my brain and the rest of the world are just rotten spoil sports. Besides, on the more serious side, Dumas does seem to think the Musketeers are kind of terrible too and it's hard to see where the line lies and how far his tongue is in his cheek, so I just enjoy it anyway still.

I am very glad that you managed to find a book all about Buckingham, though! It sounds amazing and probably unreliable but wonderful. See you also in the New Year, with many more books ahead of us. <3

[evelyn_b]

HAH INDEED. I wouldn't say that I wasn't keen on the latter half. I enjoyed Milady's machinations a lot, and those take up practically the whole last third of the book.I was sorry not to see Anne again for sure, but I get that everyone can't be hanging out with the Queen of France all the time.

Besides, on the more serious side, Dumas does seem to think the Musketeers are kind of terrible too and it's hard to see where the line lies and how far his tongue is in his cheek, so I just enjoy it anyway still.

Absolutely! I get the impression that he's using "other times, other mores" as an excuse to write a lot of very cartoonish swashbuckling assholery without worrying about it too much - he addresses the reader directly, I think more than once, to say "You may find this shocking, but these musketeers are not our morally upright contemporaries, so read something else if you can't deal" - and part of me, I would say the majority, is all for it, though there's always the nagging undervoice fretting about real life and realities and spoiling the fun. I don't know, I think it's a balance that is hard to strike in any age. I appreciate the attempt, even if the whole book didn't necessarily come together for me as well as I wanted it to.

(and def. want to see that tongue-in-cheek Super 70s adaptation you linked me earlier).

The Romance of George Villiers is exactly what I want to be reading right now, pure coziness in spite of some convoluted court politics that were very serious business at the time.

<3

[thisbluespirit]

I suspect if I'd read it later, I'd be more bothered too, but I read it as a teenager following the endless Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds cartoon and HELLO, the actual version had COMEDY and TRAGEDY and EVIL and I sucked it up while pitying people who had only seen the cartoon. (The cartoon went on forever and had an annoyingly catchy theme song. Everyone was a dog, except Milady who was a cat, naturally.)

I'm glad you had some fun, though. As I said somewhere at the start, there are reasons people sometimes take against it, and quite rightly, the treatment of Milady being the main one. But her unstoppable evil is the best. I mean, put her down anywhere and she would have everyone eating out of her hand even while she murdered them and looked beautiful and innocent all the while.

and def. want to see that tongue-in-cheek Super 70s adaptation you linked me earlier

It comes in two parts, because the director decided there was enough material to make two for the price of one, causing a new clause to be put into actors' contracts ever after to say that wasn't on, but they are The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, but I'm pretty sure if you put 70s musketeers in Google or YT that'd be what you'd get. (I think they did do the sequel Twenty Years After too, but I don't think I've ever seen it. They made it twenty years after and one of the actors died during filming, so sometimes it's better to be less literal about stuff.)

The first thing I did after I turned the last page was sit down and write the first thousand words of a fic called The Surprising Adventures of Charlotte Backson in the New World, which will almost certainly never see the light of day.

This would be amazing if it could see the light of day, though!

[liadt]

I didn't like book Athos either! It was the whole branded thing that did it for me too. Go Milady, ha!

Your Buckingham book sounds ace. Is it in archive or Gutenberg being old?

[evelyn_b]

I was already pretty down on Athos because of his draconian treatment of his valet - clean your own damn chamber pots if you're going to forbid your servants to speak, buddy - but the "tragic" backstory just killed me. He's so quick to judge! It's not even that he finds her in bed with his brother or something and rips her nightdress in anger to see the brand. It's not that she's cold to him after their marriage or gives him any reason to suspect her. He's had plenty of time to cook up a bunch of red flags in retrospect, but he doesn't even bother. He sees that brand and INSTANTLY decides that it's hanging time, then spends the next 10 years marinating in his own angst about it. What, you're not even going to ask what it's about before you call for a rope? He was right in his assessment of Milady's character, as it turns out, but it's a stopped-clock judgment. He's not right by any virtue of his own.

The Romance of George Villiers is not in Gutenberg, but it is in Archive. You can find it here!

[liadt]

Woo hoo! I love the full title: 'and some men and women of the Stuart court' ha, ha! I have a Stuart Pretender book to read. It seems more interested in personality than anything else and warns readers to get lost if they want to read about Culloden!

[brigdh]

"The Surprising Adventures of Charlotte Backson in the New World" sounds AMAZING and I'm sorry it won't be shared! Milady is just the best supervillainess, even if she's sadly written by an author with some sexual hangups.

[evelyn_b]

Maybe I'll try to finish it for you and lost_spook, if I can get my act together a little this year. 2018 is the year of no promises! but I'll see what I can do. I loved the whole third of the book where it just turned into The Milady's Machinations Hour.

[brigdh]

Milady is totally the best! I dressed up as her for Halloween the year I first read Three Musketeers.