Twenty Years After

Summary

Twenty Years After takes up d'Artagnan in 1648, when he is about forty, still a lieutenant of musketeers, living in a Paris inn and serving Cardinal Mazarin, the Italian minister who governs for the boy Louis XIV and his mother, Anne of Austria. Paris is restless under new taxes, and the parliament's resistance is about to become the civil war called the Fronde. Mazarin, who needs men he can trust, asks d'Artagnan to find the companions who once served the queen so well. The search is a study in what two decades do to men. Porthos has married money and owns three estates but is miserable because he is not a baron. Aramis, now the Abbé d'Herblay, writes verses, intrigues with duchesses and keeps a ladder at his window. Athos, the Comte de la Fère, has given up drink and lives at Bragelonne, near Blois, devoting himself to the education of his ward Raoul. D'Artagnan and Porthos take Mazarin's side; Athos and Aramis secretly serve the Frondeurs and help the Duc de Beaufort escape from Vincennes. The friends cross swords on a dark road, then meet at the Place Royale and swear that their swords will never be raised against one another again. The past arrives in the person of Mordaunt, son of Milady de Winter, whom the four friends condemned and had beheaded in the earlier novel. Disguised as a monk, he hears the deathbed confession of the executioner of Bethune and stabs him; in England he kills his uncle, Lord de Winter, and serves Cromwell. Sent across the Channel on opposite errands, the four reunite in England and try to save Charles I. Their plan to remove the London executioner fails when a masked volunteer takes his place, and Athos, hidden beneath the scaffold, receives the king's last word, Remember, and the king's blood. Mordaunt attempts to blow up their ship; in the open sea Athos tries to pull him from the water, and Mordaunt drags him under, dying on Athos's dagger. Back in France the friends find themselves betrayed by Mazarin: Athos and Aramis are imprisoned at Rueil, d'Artagnan and Porthos break out, capture the cardinal himself, and with Mazarin as hostage extract a treaty from the queen. Porthos becomes a baron and d'Artagnan a captain, Athos returns to Bragelonne, and Raoul goes to war with d'Artagnan. The book is darker than its predecessor, weighing loyalty to friends against loyalty to party and throne, and asking what the old execution of Milady still demands of the men who carried it out.

Top Lessons

• An oath at the Place Royale

  Divided between Mazarin and the Fronde, the four could easily kill one another on the Vendomois road. Instead they meet by night, explain their conduct, and swear that their swords will not cross again. Dumas makes friendship a promise renewed by speech, candour and forgiveness, not a feeling that survives on its own.

• The executed woman's son

  Mordaunt is a murderer and a regicide's tool, yet his grievance is real: the friends judged and killed his mother without lawful authority. Athos alone admits this and calls it a possible bond of crime. The book lets students weigh justice done privately against the vengeance it provokes.

• The king and the crown

  At Saint Denis Athos teaches Raoul to distinguish the king, a mortal man, from royalty, which he calls the gift of God. That distinction lets Athos fight Mazarin in the Fronde while risking his life for Charles I, and it is a seventeenth-century noble's creed presented sympathetically by a nineteenth-century novelist, not a modern political theory.

• History bent by romance

  Dumas and Maquet keep real dates and names: Broussel's arrest, the flight of the court, the trial at Westminster Hall, the execution at Whitehall and Charles's word Remember to Bishop Juxon. They invent the musketeers' plots around them. Reading the book well means telling the documented frame from the invented action.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

This is an adventure novel, not a medical one, but it handles wounds and dying with unusual concreteness for a romance. The headsman of Bethune, shot through the thigh and abdomen by marauders, judges his own wound mortal before any surgeon arrives, and a surgeon later withdraws Mordaunt's dagger from him. Battle deaths at Charenton, the beheading of Charles I described from beneath the scaffold, and the near-drowning and revival of Athos are given in physical detail. Mousqueton's ordeal adrift after the explosion is played for comedy, but it turns on the old sea custom of drawing lots for food when starvation threatens. Grimaud is said to have become something of a surgeon through years of making lint and bandages, a glimpse of how soldiers' servants supplied rough field care.

• Chapter XV (Athos as a Diplomatist)

  Raoul reports that young Louise de la Vallière has fallen and that the physician fears she will be lame for life.

• Chapters XXXI-XXXIII (The Monk; The Absolution; Grimaud Speaks)

  The wounded headsman of Bethune describes his own mortal gunshot wound; after Mordaunt stabs him, a surgeon draws out the blade and he dies.

• Chapter LX (Respect to Fallen Majesty)

  Grimaud dresses a wound, the narrator noting that years of making lint and bandages have made him something of a surgeon.

• Chapter LXVI (Remember!)

  The execution of Charles I as experienced by Athos hidden beneath the scaffold.

• Chapter LXXIV (How Mousqueton had a Narrow Escape of being eaten)

  Cold and hungry in an open boat after the explosion, the survivors joke grimly about who should be eaten first.

• Chapter LXXVIII (The Battle of Charenton)

  Chanleu falls mortally wounded and the Duc de Châtillon is shot through a notch in his cuirass.