The End of D’Artagnan

I had known about The Man in the Iron Mask since my childhood encounters with Classics Illustrated and knew that I would read the actual book some day. I didn’t get that particular title from CI when I was a kid, so I didn’t know the story. I didn’t even know it was a Three Musketeers book until about four years ago. So the long, long wait, the return of beloved characters, the positive comparison with the dreadfully tedious Louise de la Valliére (the “Musketeers” book I read last year), and the poignant end of three of the four musketeers made this a very satisfying and moving read.

The Man in the Iron Mask is actually only the final third of a novel three times the length of either The Three Musketeers or its first sequel, Twenty Years After. But having read the whole series now, I can see why it is often published (and filmed) separately: only a little background is needed to understand the situation, and only in this last third do we get an interesting, exciting plot involving the characters we (and, from what I can tell, Dumas) actually care about.

The man in the iron mask was a real personage, a prisoner in the Bastille held by Louis XIV for historically undisclosed reasons. But Dumas had made the musketeers famous by putting them at the heart of historical events, and here he makes the masked prisoner the twin brother of King Louis and has our heroes involved in a plot to substitute one for the other. Whether for or against, I won’t say!

And I won’t reveal any other secrets of the story except to say again that, as becomes a final volume in a series about favorite characters, the reader grieves some deaths at the end. Each death is utterly befitting its respective character, as is the non-death: that character needs to live with some regrets for a while.

Yes, I am truly grieving. I was sad when I finished the book, and I’m sad now writing about it. This is the end, in several ways, of characters that I have deeply loved since I was sixteen. And, as with many real deaths I’ve experienced, I didn’t see these coming.