The Man in the Iron Mask

Summary

The Man in the Iron Mask is the closing section of Alexandre Dumas's immense novel The Vicomte de Bragelonne, the last of the d'Artagnan Romances, set in 1661 and the years after, when the young Louis XIV takes personal power. Aramis, now Bishop of Vannes and secretly general of a powerful religious order, has learned that a prisoner in the Bastille, entered under the name Marchiali, is the king's twin brother Philippe, hidden from birth to prevent a disputed succession. Visiting the prisoner with the governor Baisemeaux, Aramis tells Philippe who he is and offers him a choice: a thousand pistoles and a free, obscure life in the marshes of Poitou, or the throne of France. After ten minutes alone under the trees, Philippe chooses the crown. During the splendid fête that the superintendent of finances, Nicolas Fouquet, gives the king at his chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, Aramis and the unknowing Porthos lower the sleeping Louis through a trap in the floor of the Chamber of Morpheus and carry him to the Bastille, while Philippe takes his place. The substitution fails because of Fouquet's honor. When Aramis confides the plot, Fouquet, horrified that his guest and sovereign has been seized under his roof, gives Aramis four hours' start and the refuge of Belle-Île, then rides to the Bastille and frees Louis. At Vaux the twins confront each other before their mother, Anne of Austria; d'Artagnan arrests Philippe, and the king orders that he be taken to the island of Sainte-Marguerite with his face covered by an iron vizor. Louis repays Fouquet by having d'Artagnan arrest him at Nantes; when Fouquet flees, d'Artagnan rides him down until both horses fail and the musketeer faints, and Fouquet, free to escape, revives him and walks back with him to the barred carriage. Aramis and Porthos hold Belle-Île against the royal troops, retreat to the grotto of Locmaria, and fight there until Porthos, setting off a mine of gunpowder barrels, is crushed beneath the falling rock; Aramis escapes by sea to Spain. Athos, whose son Raoul has gone to die in the Duc de Beaufort's African campaign at Gigelli after losing Louise de La Vallière to the king, wastes away at Blois and dies in a vision of his son's ascending soul just as word of Raoul's death arrives. In an epilogue Aramis returns as the Spanish ambassador, the Duc d'Almeda. Years later d'Artagnan, commanding the siege of a Dutch town, receives his marshal's baton at the moment a cannon ball strikes him, and dies with the names of his three friends on his lips. The French original ran in Le Siècle from 1847 to 1850; English editions split the novel into several volumes, of which this is the last.

Top Lessons

• Honor that costs everything

  Fouquet knows that Louis XIV means to ruin him, and Aramis has made it possible for him to keep everything. He refuses because the king was his guest under his roof. Dumas makes the most lavish man at court the one who will not profit from treason, and shows that his choice wins him only prison.

• The choice in the forest

  Aramis gives Philippe ten minutes to choose between a hidden, free life in Poitou and the throne. Dumas describes the prisoner praying under the night sky and then turning hard with pride and desire. The scene lets readers ask whether Philippe's right to the crown and his wish for it are the same thing.

• Friends divided by loyalties

  In this last book the four musketeers no longer stand together: d'Artagnan serves the king, Aramis plots against him, Porthos follows Aramis blindly and Athos withdraws into grief. Dumas lets each keep his own idea of duty without ceasing to love the others.

• The ends of heroes

  Porthos dies by strength, Athos by grief, d'Artagnan at the moment of his greatest honor, while Aramis survives as a diplomat. Dumas gives each death its own meaning and closes the long series with the passing of an age of swordsmen into the age of ministers like Colbert.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The most medically interesting chapters describe the decline of Athos after Raoul leaves for Africa. Dumas presents grief as a bodily illness in the older sense: Athos shortens his walks, refuses food, and develops what the Blois physician sees as a slow, self-feeding hectic fever; the doctor names fever, consumption and decay, warns that remaining so is a kind of suicide, and finds his remedies useless. A later crisis of fever is treated with two bleedings, the standard practice of the period, which leave Athos very weak before his death. A modern reader may think of complicated grief or depression with self-neglect, but that is an interpretive reading; the novel frames it as a father's soul waiting to follow his son. Elsewhere Porthos suffers a sudden, unexplained weakness of the legs that he treats as a mystery and that foreshadows his death, Louis XIV wounds himself raging against his cell in the Bastille, and d'Artagnan dies of a cannon-ball wound to the chest.

• Chapter XLV, The Ancestors of Porthos

  Porthos recalls episodes of sudden weakness in his legs, which he cannot explain and which recur in the grotto at Locmaria.

• Chapter LVI, The Old Age of Athos

  The Blois physician secretly observes Athos, notes the hectic flush and fixed gaze, and confronts him about his refusal to eat and his hidden grief.

• Chapter LVII, Athos's Vision

  A fever rises to the chest and head; the physician bleeds Athos twice and declares him saved, after which he passes into a visionary state.

• Chapter LVIII, The Angel of Death

  Athos dies peacefully as he sees Raoul's soul rise, just as the messenger from Africa arrives.

• The Death of D'Artagnan

  A cannon ball strikes d'Artagnan in the chest during a siege in Holland; he dies within minutes holding the baton.