A little more that forty years ago, I read The Three Musketeers for the first time. I knew then that the rollicking historical novel had a sequel called Twenty Years After, and I definitely wanted to read it. But loving the original so much, I never imagined it would take me over twice as long as the period in the title of that sequel to get around to it.. But I knew I would one day: my dad told me to.
We were probably in the local public library when he said it. He and I often went up and down the aisles looking at the titles, my dad giving me his opinions and advice. Well, not so much advice. When it comes from Dad, it’s more like life instruction. One day, son, when your beard begins to grow . . . . One day, son, you’ll have to make difficult decisions about balancing family and career . . . . One day, son, you should read Twenty Years After . . . . Yeah, it sounds different in that context, doesn’t it? And after all, he was right about the beard and the career. So I owed it to the Old Man to read this book and keep his record spotless.
And, boy! am I glad that I did! I woke up every day of the last few weeks looking forward to my time with D’Artagnan and his friends, and not a single page disappointed my expectations.
I suppose I have to admit that there are reasons the first book is so famous, so popular, so ingrained in public consciousness, and so frequently filmed, while the sequel languishes in obscurity. For instance, as much as Dumas tries to tell us that Cardinal Mazarin, though a smaller man than Richelieu, is just as interesting, the successor to Richelieu just comes out, well, smaller. The real Mazarin did big things like making France (and himself) rich and contributing to the principles of Westphalia that continue to govern international relationships, but somehow Dumas only saw the mean side of the man. Perhaps the author could never forgive the later cardinal for being Italian.
There’s also the problem of names and factions. I thought the rivalries between King, Queen, and Cardinal were confusing when I first read The Three Musketeers. Well, that political situation was a simple game of tic-tac-toe compared to the intrigues of Twenty Years After. It didn’t help that almost every major player in the machinations went by at least two names. Dumas’s original audience probably knew that J. F. P. de Gondi was also a cardinal named Retz and was also “The Coadjutor.” But I felt like Lois Lane landing the biggest scoop of her life when I discovered halfway through the book that they were all the same person. And then there’s le Duc de Condé, who is sometimes, without explanation, referred to as The Prince.
But all that got straightened out. And in any case, none of the confusion detracted from the joy of going on new adventures with the musketeers, four of the most wonderful characters I’ve ever encountered. And what adventures! They find themselves in battle against each other early on (those tricky factions!) and discuss (while battle rages around them) how to remain loyal friends to each other while continuing to perform their respective duties. (I know of some people in Washington who could learn from this book.) They chase and are chased by Lady de Winter’s son. (The rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the rotten tree.) They protect young Louis XIV during the Fronde. They try to rescue English King Charles I from execution. (They fail, as actual history determines they must, but Dumas allows himself to place Athos under the scaffolding where he holds a hushed conversation with Charles during that unfortunate monarch’s historically documented quiet moment to the side before he placed his head on the chopping block.)
I have The Man in the Iron Mask, another sequel, scheduled for 2022, year 6 in my third ten-year plan of reading. But now I discover that Iron Mask is only the last part of a trilogy that, in its entirety, is a sequel to Twenty Years After and completes the story of D’Artagnan. Two other Dumas novels – each with nineteenth-century length – fill in the gap between what I just read and what I plan to read in two years. What do I do? What do I do? I wish I could ask Dad.
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