Spend time with four old friends

Twenty Years After

Alexandre Dumas

Translated by Lawrence Ellsworth Pegasus

Swordplay, romantic intrigue, comic escapades and desperate undertakings — Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel, The Three Musketeers, long ago set the standard for swashbuckling adventure. Even now, the thrilling pledge of “all for one and one for all,” coupled with the image of four raised swords crossed in eternal friendship, instantly brings to mind the book’s youthful heroes, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and their protégé D’artagnan.

While The Three Musketeers regales the reader with humour, as well as derring-do, it nonetheless closes on a sombre note. The scheming and cruel femme fatale, Milady de Winter, is judged guilty of the most heinous murders by an ad hoc tribunal consisting of the musketeers and her late husband’s brother. Following her secret execution, the once inseparable friends part and go their separate ways.

Twenty Years After — newly translated by Lawrence Ellsworth — opens in 1648 with D’artagnan now a 40-year-old lieutenant in the King’s Musketeers. He still mourns his beloved Constance — poisoned by Milady

— and has never married. Like so many middle-aged men, he wonders more and more, “Is this all there is?”

In the old days, D’artagnan worked to thwart Cardinal Richelieu, but now misses that consummate politician’s statesmanship, generosity and personal finesse. Louis XIV is still just a little boy, not yet the Sun King. Queen Anne — who once loved England’s Duke of Buckingham, assassinated at the instigation of the seductive Milady — has become the secret mistress, possibly even the wife, of Richelieu’s successor, the avaricious, Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin. France meanwhile is riven by unrest, and there is talk of civil war. The Duc de Beaufort, leader of the Frondeurs, as the forces opposing Mazarin call themselves, has been imprisoned for five years. He has nonetheless vowed to escape and revenge himself on the cardinal.

Mazarin needs loyal retainers he can count on. But, alas, where can such heroes be found? Once, according to some half-forgotten rumours, Queen Anne was saved from disgrace by four extraordinary young champions. The queen has never revealed their identities.

By trickery, Mazarin eventually learns that D’artagnan had been one of the four. Who and where are the others?

Aramis, it turns out, is now the Abbe d’herblay, head of a Jesuit monastery. Has that bon vivant become austere and devout? Not at all. Even though the genial, bearlike Porthos has inherited enormous wealth, his vanity yearns to add Baron to the name Porthos du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds. As the Comte de la Fere, Athos shows himself to be utterly devoted to his mysterious ward Raoul.

To all appearances, D’artagnan’s old comrades have settled into quiet, provincial lives. Or have they?

If you only know The Three Musketeers you owe yourself the pleasure of spending some happy evenings with Twenty Years After. Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’artagnan may be older and their hair starting to grey, but they’ve lost none of their romance and grandeur.