So, I've been reading the three musketeers on my phone, lately,
and its awesome, hilarious, fun, a little raunchy and very French. The funniest
thing about the whole book is that, although its about an affaire d'honneur
that becomes a oneupsmanship race between the cardinal and this young, upstart
Gascon boy, with the Gascon winning (forgetting the boy). All along however, if
you already know the story, which of course, everyone misknows in the movie
generation, you realize that in the original story, pre-children's movie
adaptations, the honor involved is the Queen's, but in a very French,
marry-for-money-love-a-lover sort of way, so that all of these tit-for-tat,
public rivalries, some of them deadly, and all of which make up the very real
fight that is going on just then over Nationalism, are set against a background
of a life or death battle to get the Queen of France LAID! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Shaft
of light, choir of angels, the whole nine yards.
So this fight, Nationalism, for those who don't know the whole
story, at the time, was about whether one was going to be loyal to one's
ethnic, supreme ruler, or one's own ethnic nation alone and independent, which
is essentially the way to look at the reformation, as an ethnic split in
Europe, with Protestants, ironically, more loyal to English interests than
Spain or France ever were to Roman power. Nationhood, however, was the epic
battle of the day, and if you're going to write the great French novel, you
write it about one man, fighting the odds and the power of Rome. The marriage
between the French king and a very desirable Spanish Habsburg princess was a
tense one, but it was an important source of independent cooperation between
Spain, Austria and France against Italy, and a direct line of succession is the
best way to keep the sovereignty stable enough for all of the little moves that
make up a grassroots struggle against an authority as far-reaching as the
Catholic church. Fights like those that D'Artagnan fights, the little punk Bernajoux,
who is responsible for picking many of the fights between Cardinalists and King's men
(i.e. Musketeers) in Paris, the haughty Count, who works for the cardinal in a
capacity to have permission to cross the channel when a port is sealed, even
the greedy, relatively rich commoner, his landlord. So if the French king
cannot, in fact, be induced to conceive a child with the queen, and since all of the
nobility of Europe is a single, extended family at the time anyways, it is no
matter to nationalists who the crown prince's father is, so long as the world
never truly knows, and the child is raised to think of France as his country, his birthright.
In The Man in the Iron Mask, Dumas underlines this exact point
again, by taking for a king a man who has been imprisoned by the prior King of France all his
life, but in France, by Frenchmen. In the end, like the dirt
poor Gascon, who has nothing but his title and his father's hideous, barely
marketable horse, he naturally sides with his homeland, and his people, which
give the Gascon a much greater chance of social mobility, and represents the
freedom so long denied to the new king, who knows little of religion, only has
thoughts on right and wrong. It does not matter who is King of France, Dumas is
saying, so long as he is French, first of all, and more or less just, second of
all.
So it's funny every time D'Artagnan sets off on
another super secret undercover mission. This is when he's most like the don
Quijote that Dumas compares him to, the farcical figure who imagines windmills
on a distant hill to be giants and charges headlong, but in the end, he is actually doing something productive for the Nationalist cause. It's funny and so very French,
and if you're nerd enough to appreciate the irony, and remember all along that D'Artagnan is a ridiculous figure, it's a laugh aloud read.
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