Notes on the Text of Court of Daggers

 

  1. PALAIS ROYAL: Cardinal Richelieu started building his Palais Cardinal 1633 and completed it in 1639. When Richelieu died in 1642, he willed his grand Paris residence to the king, and it was renamed the Palais Royal. Upon the death of Louis XIII, Queen Anne moved her family—including Cardinal Mazarin—from the Louvre into the more modern Palais Royal.

 

  1. GRIMAUD: The laconic Grimaud has been Athos’s “lackey,” or manservant, since The Three Musketeers. Like the musketeers’ other lackeys, Grimaud appears throughout the Musketeers Cycle, and eventually one gets the impression that this stoic but caring and utterly reliable man was Dumas’s favorite of the four.

 

  1. MONCK: General George Monck or Monk, 1 st Duke of Albemarle (1608-1670) was a career soldier who worked his way up through the ranks, fighting on the Continent, the Scottish border, and against the Irish in the rebellion of 1641. He became one of Oliver Cromwell’s most trusted commanders and proved to be as canny at political strategy as he was at warfare. After Cromwell’s death, he consolidated his position in the north of Britain and began a waiting game, biding his time to see how matters would play out. He finally threw his support behind Charles II and was instrumental in the Restoration that put the Stuarts back on the throne. He was rewarded with a peerage and, eventually, the admiralty.

 

  1. PISTOLES: Pistole was a French word for a gold coin of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, usually Spanish in origin. The leading European states liked to mint their own coins, but gold was hard for them to come by—except for Spain, which flooded Europe with gold from its possessions in the New World, making the Spanish escudo the de facto base currency of European trade for two centuries. When Dumas’s characters refer to pistoles, they are mostly Spanish escudos . One pistole is worth about ten livres or three French crowns ( écus ).

 

  1. YOU WENT TO SPAIN FOR THE ROYAL WEDDING: Well, to the border, anyway: the June 7, 1660 wedding of Louis XIV and the Infanta Maria Theresa was held on the Isle of Pheasants in the Bidassoa river that forms part of the border between Spain and France.

 

  1. THE LOUVRE: The ancient palace of the Kings of France in Paris; first built as a medieval fortress in the 12 th century, it was enlarged and modernized by each succeeding generation if the reigning monarch could afford it. The royal residences were mainly in the four three-story halls that surround the square Cour Carrée, the easternmost portion of the modern Louvre.

 

  1. THE KING’S MUSKETEERS: A company—later two—of elite soldiers, the musketeers were the personal guard of King Louis XIII and after him Louis XIV. They were founded in 1622 when a carbine-armed company of light horsemen was upgraded and given the new, heavier matchlock muskets as primary arms. Though their function was mainly ceremonial and to serve as royal bodyguards, they were sometimes deployed on the battlefield, where they fought either mounted as cavalry or dismounted and relying on their muskets. They are often depicted wearing their signature blue tabards with white crosses, which were adopted sometime in the 1630s.

 

  1. PLANCHET: Like his counterparts who serve the three musketeers, d’Artagnan’s stalwart Picard lackey appears throughout the novels of the Musketeers Cycle, eventually becoming less servant to the Gascon than friend and partner.

 

  1. VINCENNES: The Château de Vincennes, a grim 14 th -century royal fortress just east of Paris, was used by the French monarchy as a refuge in wartime and as a prison for their enemies in times of peace.

 

  1. FRANÇOIS II: François II (1544-1560) came to the French throne at the age of fifteen when his father, Henri II, was killed at a tournament in a jousting accident. Immature and unready to rule, François was a pawn in the hands of his mother, Queen Catherine de Médicis, and died of an ear infection less than a year and a half after his coronation. His widow was the young Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whose dramatic life Dumas recounted in both fiction and nonfiction.

 

  1. THE PLACE DE GRÈVE: In Paris, the broad square on the Right Bank of the Seine in front of the Hôtel de Ville where convicted criminals were publicly tortured and executed, commoners by hanging and nobles by decapitation.

 

  1. LIVRES: The livre was the standard unit of account in French finances; in this period, it was used mostly for reckoning official finances rather than as a coin. In value it was about equal to a franc, or one-third of a crown. The smallest French coin was the denier, then the sou, the franc, and the crown ( écu ). Approximate values were 12 deniers to 1 sou, 20 sous to 1 franc, 3 francs to 1 crown, and 3 crowns to 1 pistole (see Note 4).

 

  1. FONTAINEBLEAU: Originally a royal hunting lodge in the middle of the forest southeast of Paris, the Château de Fontainebleau was expanded by many French monarchs over the centuries until by the time of Louis XIV the palace, gardens, and grounds were extensive and extravagant. It was grand and imposing, which Louis loved, and he spent more time there than any other king.

 

  1. SWISS GUARD: From the Renaissance onward, Swiss mercenaries served as royal guards in a number of European courts, most notably France and Spain.

 

  1. LOUIS THE JUST: Louis XIII was called “Louis the Just” because he was born under the sign of Libra, but he loved the appellation because it implied a Solomonic ruling wisdom that he most emphatically lacked.

 

  1. THE BASTILLE: This hulking fortress, built at the eastern entrance to Paris during the 14 th century to protect the city during the Hundred Years War, served a second function as a royal prison starting early in the 15 th century. Its eight cylindrical towers, connected by tall curtain walls, housed prisoners of all ranks in lodgings befitting their differing social conditions. Many prisoners who entered the Bastille were never seen again.

 

  1. THE KING’S LITTLE STAIR: The Petit Escalier, or the King’s Little Stair, was His Majesty’s private entrance into the palace from an inside corner of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée.

 

  1. MADEMOISELLE DE MANCINI: Marie de Mancini (1639-1715) was the middle-born of the five nieces of Cardinal Mazarin that he brought over from Italy to find them politically advantageous marriages in France. Though not the most conventionally pretty of the sisters, Marie was by all accounts the liveliest and most intelligent, and when they were teenagers, she became the first real love (of many) of Louis XIV. He explored the idea of making her his wife but was forcefully dissuaded by the queen and cardinal.

 

  1. MONSIEUR DE LYONNE: Hugues de Lionne or Lyonne (1611-1671) was a French statesman who served Louis XIV as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

 

  1. CAPTAIN-LIEUTENANT OF MUSKETEERS: Though called Captain of Musketeers for short, the position the king refers to was technically Captain-Lieutenant of the King’s Musketeers because the ultimate rank of “Captain” notionally was held by the king himself. Louis is right about the prestige and precedent the position commanded at Court due to its propinquity to the Crown, though it was less prestigious as a battlefield rank in times of open warfare.

 

  1. BELLE-ÎLE-EN-MER: A medium-sized island in the Atlantic, Belle-Île is about ten miles off the south coast of Brittany, renowned for its mild summer clime and the dramatic cliffs along its Côte sauvage.

 

  1. SAINT-MANDÉ: In 1654 Fouquet bought the mansion of Saint-Mandé just east of Paris on the road to Vincennes, which he had refurbished and expanded in a grand manner that prefigured his construction of the extravagant estate of Vaux-le-Vicomte.

 

  1. ARIADNE: In the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, Ariadne was the prisoner in the labyrinth who led Theseus to her by means of a thread.

 

  1. HÔTEL DE VILLE: The Hôtel de Ville is the French municipal building Americans would call City Hall.

 

  1. MONSIEUR DE MENNEVILLE: In the previous volume, Between Two Kings, the roguish swashbuckler Menneville had served d’Artagnan as second in command on his expedition to England to abduct General Monck.

 

  1. THE POMME-DE-PIN OR THE BARREAUX VERTS: Two notorious Parisian taverns: the Pomme-de-Pin was the legendary watering-hole of the demimonde tucked away back in the ancient alleys of the Île de la Cité, the former hangout of the outlaw poet François Villon and the satirical humanist François Rabelais, while the Barreaux Verts was a low dive in the Marais near the Bastille.

 

  1. AMPHITRYON: In Greek myth, Amphitryon was a king whose wife was seduced by Zeus in disguise, later giving birth to Hercules. His story has been retold many times, perhaps most notably by Molière in 1668, in a play where he’s represented as the host of a great banquet. Dumas has jumped the gun by eight years in having La Fontaine refer to Fouquet in the same terms.

 

  1. THE CONCIERGERIE: The grimmest piece of the medieval Paris City Palace ( Palais de la Cité ) on the Île de la Cité, the Conciergerie was used as a state prison from the 13 th century until after the Revolution. The governor was a royal appointee.

 

  1. EPICURUS: The empiricist Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) taught that the purpose of life and philosophy was to define and find happiness and tranquility.

 

  1. ‘ANTECHO,’ AS THEY SAY AT PORT ROYAL: The abbey of Port Royal in Paris was the center of Jansenism, one of the leading Catholic theological movements in 17 th -century France. The Jansenists were ascetics who insisted that only divine grace could counter original sin and the darker side of human nature. Many in the Catholic hierarchy, particularly the Jesuits, considered Jansenism heresy, albeit of a mild sort. Antecho is Greek and, as used in debates, means, “I stand my ground.”

 

  1. ALCIDES: An alternative name for Heracles or Hercules.

 

  1. EPICTETUS: The Greek philosopher Epictetus (55-135) was one of the Stoics and taught that one should accept what happens, though a person is responsible for their own actions.

 

  1. THE QUAI LE PELLETIER: In 1660, the Right Bank of the Seine along the Place de Grève and extending upstream and east past the Hôtel de Ville, a muddy shore occupied by noisome tanners and dyers, was still known as the Place au Foin; it wouldn’t be called Le Pelletier until 1675 when Colbert, in one of his urban improvements, had it cleaned up, paved, and named after the then-current Merchants’ Provost. In 1868 it was merged with the Quai des Gesvres to the west and is known by that name today.

 

  1. THE FAUBOURG AND RUE SAINT-ANTOINE: The Rue Saint-Antoine was the broad street that extended east from the Place de Grève to the gate in the walls of Paris overlooked by the Bastille; the Faubourg (quarter or neighborhood) was the surrounding district.

 

  1. THE GOD PLUTO: The Roman god of wealth, who lends his name to words such as plutocrat.

 

  1. BAUTRU: Guillaume Bautru, Comte de Serrant (1588–1685) was a courtier, wit, poet, and diplomat, acting as one of Richelieu’s trusted envoys—he appears in that role in The Red Sphinx . Bautru was one of the founding members in 1634 of the Académie Française.

 

  1. LIKE A HARLEQUIN ON A STAGE: Harlequin, a melodramatic clown, was one of the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte traveling theater troupes so popular in Europe in the 17 th century. Harlequin was often performed without speaking, conveying all action with exaggerated movement and dramatic gestures.

 

  1. CALCHAS OR PYTHIA OF APOLLO: Greek soothsayers who received their prophesies from the god Apollo: Calchas advised King Agamemnon in the Trojan War, and Pythia was the high priestess known as the Oracle of Delphi.

 

  1. MONSIEUR DE TURENNE … WINNING THE BATTLE OF THE DUNES: After the rebellion of the Fronde, when the Prince de Condé left France to become a commander for the Spanish, his cousin the Marshal de Turenne became the leading French general. He beat Condé several times, including at the Battle of the Dunes, fought outside Dunkirk in 1658.

 

  1. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: Monck taking d’Artagnan to a performance of Much Ado About Nothing is certainly an invention of Dumas’s, but though unlikely it’s not impossible: several of Shakespeare’s plays were revived after the Restoration, and Much Ado found considerable popularity during the reign of Charles II.

 

  1. THE MAXIMS OF MONSIEUR DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Though François IV de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac or Marsillac, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) published the first version of his celebrated Maxims in 1665, they had been circulating in manuscript form among the French literati since 1657, so d’Artagnan’s second-hand familiarity with some of them in 1660 is not entirely impossible. The musketeer most likely to be familiar with them, however, is Aramis, who in Twenty Years After was a romantic rival of the Prince de Marcillac for the affections of Madame de Longueville.

 

  1. ALBERT DE LUYNES: Charles d’Albert, Duc de Luynes (1578–1621) was the young Louis XIII’s falconer and first favorite. Luynes engineered the assassination of Concini that ended Queen Marie’s regency and put Louis XIII on the throne, and the king rewarded Luynes by making him first a duke and then Constable of France.

 

  1. DE VITRY: Baron Nicolas de Vitry, Captain of the King’s Guard, killed the overweening Concino Concini in 1617 at the behest of Louis XIII and his favorite, Luynes (see Note 42).

 

  1. THE FAMOUS YELLOW HORSE ON WHICH HE’D FIRST MADE HIS ENTRANCE INTO THE WIDE WORLD: In Chapter I of The Three Musketeers.

 

  1. THE FAMILY DE RAIS: Belle-Île had been a fief of the infamous Gilles de Rais (1405-1440), luridly infamous as a serial killer of children for occult sacrificial purposes.

 

  1. THE GENTLEMAN COMEDIANS OF THE HÔTEL DE BOURGOGNE: This venue was the first dedicated dramatic theatre built in Paris, opening in 1548, and well into the mid-17 th century it was the premier venue for French drama; every aspiring Parisian playwright hoped to see his work performed there. From 1628 to 1680 its house troupe was the Comédiens du Roi.

 

  1. MESSIEURS CORNEILLE, ROTROU, AND GARNIER: Pierre Corneille (1606-1684), Jean Rotrou (1609-1650), and Robert Garnier (1544-1590) were the leading French tragedians of the era before Racine. Corneille and Rotrou appear in The Red Sphinx.

 

  1. ACTIVITY LIKE THAT WHICH TELEMACHUS SAW WHEN HE LANDED AT SALENTUM: The Adventures of Telemachus (1699) by François Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, was a novel of moral instruction inveighing against the materialism and authoritarianism of France late in the reign of Louis XIV. Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, travels around the eastern Mediterranean learning various object lessons that are explained to him by his tutor, Mentor (no, really), who turns out to be Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, in disguise.

 

  1. MOUSQUETON: The loyal servant of Porthos throughout the Musketeers Cycle. As related in The Three Musketeers, his birth name was Boniface, but his master renamed him with the more martial French word for musketoon, a large-caliber musket cut down to the length of a carbine.

 

  1. MOUSTON: As related in Twenty Years After, upon becoming a wealthy seigneur Porthos had his servant’s name of Mousqueton (i.e., “Musketoon”) abbreviated to the more respectable Mouston.

 

  1. CERTAIN LETTERS TO MARIE MICHON: In The Three Musketeers, Aramis corresponded with the intriguing Duchesse de Chevreuse, who hid her identity under the name Marie Michon.

 

  1. ANTAEUS: The giant of classical myth who drew limitless strength from the earth as long as he was touching the ground.

 

  1. OLD ARMORICA: The Romans called the Breton peninsula and nearby coasts Armorica, attested as early as the first century by Pliny the Elder.

 

  1. BAZIN: Throughout the Musketeers Cycle, Bazin serves as the loyal lackey and assistant of Aramis. Just as the scheming Aramis is the least sympathetic of the musketeers, his servant, the pompous and selfish Bazin, is the least likeable of the lackeys, mainly serving as a butt for Dumas’s jokes about churchmen.

 

  1. PORTHOS ATE LIKE PELOPS: For once, Dumas got a classical reference wrong, as in Greek myth Pelops was not the consumer but the consumed. Pelops’s father was King Tantalus, who as an offering to the divines cut up his own son and served him in a stew to the gods of Olympus. The gods, miffed, reassembled Pelops and resurrected him.

 

  1. CASTRAMETATION: The military art of laying out and fortifying a camp; the term goes all the way back to the Roman army.

 

  1. IN EXACTLY THE SITUATION HE’D FOUND HIM BEFORE IN THE INN AT CRÈVECŒUR: A reference to Chapter XXVI, “The Thesis of Aramis,” in The Three Musketeers.

 

  1. AN ARQUEBUS: The arquebus was a long-barreled, smooth-bored matchlock firearm, a predecessor of the musket and usually lighter than that weapon (though still heavy by modern standards).

 

  1. FERRET, GOOD TROTTER THOUGH HE WAS, WASN’T THE MOUNT FOR THESE CIRCUMSTANCES: And besides, Ferret had been left in a stable in Croisic in Chapter LXVIII.

 

  1. THE GRANITE GIANT ON THE PLAINS OF AGRIGENTO: At Agrigento, a site of Greek ruins in Sicily, a huge stone telamon (male caryatid) lies on its side near a fallen temple; Dumas had visited the site in 1840 and written of it in a travel book the following year.

 

  1. CRIMES OF LÈSE-MAJESTÉ : Such crimes are offenses that violate the dignity of the monarch or the state. The idea goes back to the late Roman period, when emperor and empire were viewed as one and the same; it was adopted by European royalty during the rise of western nation-states and reached its peak during the period of absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV.

 

  1. MADAME THE DOWAGER PRINCESS: Marguerite of Lorraine, Duchesse d’Orléans (1615-1672), wife of Prince Gaston, was known as “Madame” just as Prince Gaston was known as “Monsieur.” After the death of Gaston in 1660 she was referred to as “the Dowager Madame.”

 

  1. A WINDOW WE ALREADY KNOW: The reader knows it from Chapter I of Between Two Kings, in which Montalais was first introduced and La Vallière made her first adult appearance in the Musketeers Cycle.

 

  1. AS TALLEMANT DES RÉAUX WOULD SAY: Gédéon Tallemant, Sieur des Réaux (1619-1692) was the author of the Historiettes, several volumes of gossipy mini-biographies filled with juicy anecdotes about prominent courtiers, courtesans, writers, artists, and the nobility of the French Court. Dumas mined the Historiettes extensively for his novels set in the 17 th century.

 

  1. MARSHAL GRAMMONT: Antoine III, Duc de Gramont or Grammont, Marshal of France (1604-1678), father of the Comte de Guiche (see Historical Characters), was a capable military commander during the Fronde who later served Louis XIV as a diplomat.

 

  1. A GRAPE-STAINED ERIGONE: In Greek myth, Erigone was the daughter of Icarius of Athens, who was killed by his shepherds after the god Dionysus gave them too much wine; when she heard that her father had been murdered, Erigone hanged herself. The implication is that Montalais is a woman of passions.

 

  1. THIS PROTEAN FEMALE: Proteus was a Greek sea god who could change his form at will; “protean” has come to mean changeable or adaptable.

 

  1. POST HORSES: The post horse system was a way of hiring horses by stages, turning in a rented horse at a “post” and then hiring another one, if necessary, for the next stage. Pack horses, carriages, and wagons could also be rented by post, usually coming with a hired driver who rode the lead horse and was called the postilion.

 

  1. HÔTEL DE GRAMMONT: The grand Paris mansion of the house of Gramont or Grammont, located just a few blocks north of the Palais Royal; Dumas jumped the gun a bit, giving it to the Grammonts three years before Louis XIV did, in 1664.

 

  1. SHE’S A CRIPPLE: Louise de La Vallière had a slight limp due to a childhood injury to her ankle, an accident recounted in Twenty Years After.

 

  1. LE HAVRE: A French seaport in Normandy at the mouth of the Seine on the English Channel. The city was only a century and half old in 1661, having been established by King François I to replace the old harbors of Harfleur and Honfleur, which had silted up.

 

  1. THAT NAME BRINGS NOTHING BUT SADNESS TO THE ROYAL HOUSE OF FRANCE: A reference to the behavior of the first Duke of Buckingham as depicted in The Three Musketeers, where the duke’s illicit courtship of Anne of Austria caused strife between the queen and King Louis XIII, and war between England and France.

 

  1. THE ADMIRAL, THE DUKE OF NORFOLK: There was no Duke of Norfolk who was a British admiral in 1661; Dumas may have been thinking of Thomas Howard, 3 rd Duke of Norfolk, who was famously appointed Lord Admiral by his friend King Henry VIII in 1513.

 

  1. SHUT HIMSELF UP LIKE ACHILLES IN HIS TENT: In the Trojan war, after a quarrel with King Agamemnon, the Greek hero Achilles refused to take any further part in the fighting and sat out battles sulking in his tent.

 

  1. AN AEOLIAN HARP: A legendary stringed instrument played by the movement of air across the strings and named after Aeolus, god of the wind; it was said to have sounded ethereal and otherworldly.

 

  1. AT LENS, AT BLÉNEAU, AT THE DUNES: Three battles in which Bragelonne fought for the French crown: the Battle of Lens in 1648 vs. the Spanish (recounted in Twenty Years After ), the Battle of Bléneau in 1652 during the so-called Second Fronde, and the Battle of the Dunes in 1658, near Dunkirk in what was then known as the Spanish Netherlands.

 

  1. THE FLYING SQUADRON, AS QUEEN CATHERINE USED TO CALL THEM: In the 16 th century, Queen Catherine de Médicis maintained a bevy of young and attractive ladies-in-waiting at the French Court known popularly as her “flying squadron,” and frequently deployed as lures and honey traps for political ends.

 

  1. MADAME DE CHALAIS AND MADAME DE LA FAYETTE: Anne-Marie de La Trémouille, Madame de Chalais (1642-1722) and Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), prominent ladies of high rank at the French Court. Both were highly accomplished, Chalais as an international diplomat for France and La Fayette as the author of the celebrated novel La Princesse de Clève (1678).

 

  1. MESDEMOISELLES DE CRÉQUY AND DE CHÂTILLON: Madeleine de Créquy, the daughter of the famous general who later married Charles de La Trémouille, and Élisabeth-Angélique de Montmorency-Bouteville, Duchesse de Châtillon (1627-1695), widow of that Duc de Châtillon who was slain by Aramis at the Battle of Charenton (as depicted in Blood Royal ). Notorious for her amorous intrigues, Châtillon was certainly no mademoiselle in 1661, and it’s unclear why Dumas titled her so.

 

  1. HIS MEMOIRS: Dumas, in his Author’s Preface to The Three Musketeers, claimed to have discovered the story in “The Memoirs of the Comte de La Fère,” a conceit he seemed to have immediately forgotten once the novel began. Here he returned to the idea by showing Athos at work on his long-overlooked memoirs.

 

  1. DO YOU TAKE ME FOR A DON DIEGO: In the first act of Pierre Corneille’s play Le Cid (1637) , Don Diego asks his son Don Rodrigo to fight on his behalf to avenge an insult to his honor.

 

  1. MOLIÈRE: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673), known as Molière, was the greatest French playwright of the 17 th century, best known for his comedies satirizing the pretensions of the bourgeois and the nobility. Dumas idolized him.

 

  1. HER MORNING LEVER: The lever (rising) was an official morning reception held at the bedside of every adult member of the royal House of France, and by other important members of the Court as well. The relative importance of a person could be measured by the quantity and quality of those who attended their lever.

 

  1. MONSIEUR DE SAINT-RÉMY: Jacques de Couravel, Marquis de Saint-Rémy, was First Chamberlain to Prince Gaston during his internal exile in Blois, and stepfather to Louise de La Vallière.

 

  1. SOMETIMES, COUNT, IT IS RESISTED, I CAN ASSURE YOU: A reference to Louis’s early love affair with Mazarin’s niece, Marie de Mancini (see Note 18), a romance which he dutifully broke off when it came time to marry Spanish princess Marie-Thérèse, as related in the early chapters of Between Two Kings.

 

  1. LOST FOR SEVERAL DAYS IN A BEAUTIFUL DREAM: This is most likely a reference to the tale in A Thousand and One Nights in which Badr al-Din is enchanted by djinni into a dream-state and spirited away to Damascus, where he is unsure whether he’s asleep or awake.

 

  1. BAISEMEAUX DE MONTLEZUN: François de Montlezun, Seigneur de Baisemeaux or Besmeaux, Governor of the Bastille (c. 1613—1697). A Gascon like d’Artagnan, Baisemeaux came to Paris and joined the King’s Musketeers in 1634, where it’s known he was friends with the historical d’Artagnan during their shared time in the regiment. He saw action in Italy in the 1640s, and Cardinal Mazarin made him captain of his personal guard in 1649. He gained the prize office of Governor of the Bastille in 1658, a post he held for forty years until his death.

 

  1. LETTRE DE CACHET: A letter signed by the King of France, usually for imprisonment, a decree that cannot be appealed.