The Vicomte de Bragelonne

Introductory Note

The Vicomte de Bragelonne, the longest and in many respects the most powerful of the d’Artagnan series, was first presented to the English-speaking public in an unabridged translation, conforming to the author’s own arrangement and in readable form, by the present publishers. Owing to its great length it had been previously been translated only in an abridged form. Detached portions of it, too, have appeared from time to time. The chapters devoted to Mademoiselle de La Vallière have been published separately under the title of Louise de La Vallière, while what is commonly known as The Iron Mask is a translation of that portion of Bragelonne which relates the attempted substitution of the Bastille prisoner for Louis XIV.

The romance, as it was written and as it is here presented in English, offers a marvellously faithful picture of the French court from a period immediately preceding the young king’s marriage to his cousin, Maria Theresa, the Infante of Spain, to the downfall of Foquet. This period was a momentous one for France, embracing as it did the diplomatic triumph of Mazarin in the advantageous Treaty of the Pyranees; the death of that avaricious and unscrupulous, but eminently able and farseeing, minister and cardinal; the assumption of power by Louis in person; and the rise to high office and influence over the crushed and disgraced Foquet, of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. These two years marked the beginning of the most brilliant epoch of court life in France, as well as of her greatest, if someone factitious, glory both at home and abroad.

The historical accuracy of the author of Bragellone—which Miss Pardoe, in her justly popular and entertaining work on Louis XIV, and the historian Michelet as well, have so strongly maintained—is perhaps more striking in this than in any other of his romances. It is not only in the matter of events of greater or less importance that one familiar with the history of the period seems to be reading some contemporary chronicle, but the character sketches of the prominent personages are drawn with such entire fidelity to life that we seem to see the very men and women themselves as they appeared to their contermporaries.

Thus it is with the king, whose intense egotism was beginning to develop, being unceasingly fostered by the flattery of those who surrounded him and told him that he was the greatest of men and kings, invincible in arms and unequalled in wisdom; who was rapidly reaching that state of sublime self-sufficiency which led to the famous saying: “L’État, c’est moi”; but who was, nevertheless, more bashful and timid and humble at the feet of the gentle and retiring La Vallière than if she had been the greatest queen in Christendom.

Of his favorites La Vallière was the only one who loved him for himself alone, and she has come down to us as one of the few Frenchwomen who have ever been ashamed of being known as a king’s mistress. Her life is faithfully sketched in these pages, from her first glimpse of the king at Blois, when she gave her heart to him unasked. When the scheme was formed to use her as a cloak for the king’s flirtation with Madame Henriette, “there was a rumor connecting her name with that of a certain Vicomte de Bragelonne, who had caused her young heart to utter its first sighs in Blois; but the most malicious gossips spoke of it only as a childish flame—that is to say, utterly without importance.”

Mademoiselle de Montalais made herself notorious as a go-between in various love affairs, while Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente, otherwise Mademoiselle de Rochechouart-Mortemart, clever and beautiful, was destined, as Madame de Montespan, to supplant her modest friend in the affections of their lord and master; and after a career of unexampled brilliance to be herself supplanted by the governess of her legitimated children, the widow Scarron, better known as Madame la Marquise de Maintenon.

“Un maîtresse tonnante et triomphante,” Madame de Sévigné calls Madame de Montespan. The Mortemart family was supposed to be of the greatest antiquity and to have the same origin as the English Mortimers. The esprit de Mortemart, or Mortemart wit, was reputed to be an inalienable characteristic of the race. And what of Madame herself, who played a part at the court of France which was almost exactly duplicated forty years later by her granddaughter, the Savoy princess, who became Duchesse de Bourgogne, and whose untimely death was one of the most severe of the many domestic afflictions which darkened the last years of the old king’s life? Let us listen for a moment to Robert Louis Stevenson, writing of the Vicomte de Bragelonne after his fifth or sixth perusal of it:—

Madame enchants me. I can forgive that royal minx her most serious offences; I can thrill and soften with the king on that memorable occasion when he goes to upbraid and remains to flirt; and when it comes to the “Allons, aimez-moi donc,” it is my heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche.

The mutual passion of de Guiche and Madame lasted all her life, we are told; and yet alas! it was but short-lived, for Madame’s days were numbered. She died in 1670, after an illness of but a few hours regretted by everybody except her husband. There is little doubt that she was poisoned through the instrumentality of the Chevalier de Lorraine, and probably with the connivance of Monsieur, whose favorite he was. The Chevalier was a prodigy of vice, and one of the most unsavory characters of the period.

The greed and avarice of Mazarin were his most prominent characteristics; they are illustrated by innumerable anecdotes, one of which may perhaps be repeated here: He had been informed that a pamphlet was about to be put on sale, in which he was shamefully libelled, he confiscated it, and of course the market price of it at once increased enormously; whereupon he sold it secretly at an exorbitant figure and allowed it to circulate, pocketing a thousand pistoles as his share of the transaction. He used to tell of this himself, and laugh heartily over it. His supreme power had endured so long that everybody desired his death, and his contemporaries hardly did justice to the very solid benefits he had procured for France.

In drawing the characters of Foquet and Colbert, Dumas has perhaps, as Mr. Stevenson says, shown an inclination to enlist his reader’s sympathies for the former against his own judgment of the equities of the case.

“Historic justice,” says the essayist, “should be all upon the side of Colbert, of official honesty and fiscal competence. And Dumas knows it well; three times at least he shows his knowledge—once it is but flashed upon us and received with laughter of Foquet himself, in the jesting controversy in the gardens of Saint-Mandé; once it is touched on by Aramis in the forest of Sénart; in the end it is set before us clearly in one dignified speech of the triumphant Colbert. But in Foquet—the master, the lover of good cheer and wit and art, the swift transactor of much business, l’homme de bruit, l’homme de plaisir, l’homme qui n’est que parceque les autres sont—Dumas saw something of himself, and drew the figure the more tenderly; it is to me even touching to see how he insists on Foquet’s honor.”

The grand fête at Vaux was the last straw which made the superintendent’s downfall absolutely certain. “If his disgrace had not already been determined upon in the king’s mind, it would have been at Vaux … As there was but one sun in heaven, there could be but one king in France.”

It is interesting to read that the execution of the order for Foquet’s arrest was entrusted to one d’Artagnan, Captain of Musketeers, “a man of action, entirely unconnected with all the cabals, and who, during his thirty-three years’ experience in the Musketeers, had never known anything outside of his orders.”

Foquet lived nearly twenty years in prison, and died in 1680. He has been connected in various with the “Man in the Iron Mask,” some investigators having maintained that he was identical with the individual, and therefore could not have died in 1680; while others have claimed that the Iron Mask was imprisoned at the Château of Pignerol while Foquet was there. The legend of the unfortunate prisoner has given rise to much investigation and to many conjectures. Voltaire bent his energies to solve the mystery, and in our own day M. Marius Topin has gone into the subject most exhaustively, but without reaching a satisfactory conclusion as to the identity of the sufferer. The somewhat audacious use made of the legend by Dumas is based upon what was at one time a favorite solution; namely, that the unknown was a brother of Louis XIV, said by some to have been a twin, and by others to have been some years older and of doubtful paternity.

It would be an endless task to cite all the portions of these volumes in which historical facts are related with substantial accuracy; in them fact and fiction are so blended that each enhanced the charm of the other—the element of authenticity adding zest and interest to the romantic portions, while the element of romance gives life and color to the narration of facts.

Our old friends of the earlier tales bear us company nearly to the end; but for the first time, political interests are allowed to interfere with the perfect confidence that has existed between them. Aramis, as General of the Jesuits, is true to the reputation of the order, and hesitates at no dissimulation to gain his ambitious ends. Porthos, still blindly faithful to that one of his friends who claims his allegiance, falls at last a victim to his childlike trust in the scheming prelate. The magnificent outburst of righteous anger which the Comte de la Fère visits upon the king is the last expiring gleam of the spirit of the Athos of the Musketeers. Wrapped up in his love for the heartbroken Bragelonne, he lives only in his life and “dies in his death.”

And d’Artagnan? His praises and his requiem have been most fittingly and lovingly sounded by the same graceful writer who has already been quoted, and in the same essay, entitled “Gossip Upon a Novel of Dumas”—

It is in the character of d’Artagnan that we must look for that spirit of morality which is one of the chief merits of the book, makes one of the main joys of its perusal, and sets it high above more popular rovals. … He has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind, and upright that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the copybook about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district visitor, no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void of all refinement, whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings true like a good sovereign. … Here and throughout, if I am to choose virtues for myself or my friends, let me choose the virtues of d’Artagnan. I do not say that there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is none that I love so wholly. … No part of the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages; and not even my friends are quite so real, perhaps so dear, as d’Artagnan.

Dramatis Personae

Period, 1660–1671