Like The Three Musketeers and its sequel, Vingt Ans aprés (Twenty Years After), Dumas wrote Bragelonne in collaboration with Auguste Maquet. It first appeared as a serial novel, published in the Parisian newspaper Le Siècle from October 20, 1847, to January 12, 1850; the writing and printing of its installments was temporarily interrupted as a result of pressures generated by the many other works Dumas was composing at the same time, as well as by the Revolution of 1848 and by Dumas’s efforts to win election to the French parliament.² Almost simultaneously with its serial publication, the novel was published in book form (from 1848 to 1850) by Michel Levy Frères. The inclusion of the Man in the Iron Mask story in Bragelonne was not, however, the first reference to the tale in Dumas’s writings. Dumas had already inserted a discussion—written by Arnould—of the Mask legend in his essay collection Les Crimes célèbres (Celebrated Crimes) published in 1839 and 1840. In Une Année à Florence (A Year in Florence), a volume of travel writings he published in 1841, and again in his Louis XIV et son siècle (Louis XIV and His Century) in 1844 and 1845, Dumas reprised much of that same text. In all three of these earlier works, though, what we have is not an account of the Mask’s life, but an attempt to sort out which of the various hypotheses about his identity was the most plausible.

It is not at all surprising that Dumas, like Vigny, Hugo, and other writers of their day, would be drawn to the story of a masked prisoner held in isolation and accorded special consideration and respect by his jailors. As Victor H. Brombert demonstrated in his study The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition, the prison occupied a significant place in the Romantic imagination. On the one hand, it offered Romantic writers the opportunity to exploit some of the dark atmospherics and melodramatic villainy traditionally associated with the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and others. On the other hand, it also provided them with a space in which to explore the inner being and the superior nature of an exceptional individual. Dumas’s early novels, from Le Chevalier d‘Harmental to Georges, already included prison episodes. So did The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After. But Dumas’s most famous fictional prisoner prior to The Man in the Iron Mask was, of course, Edmond Dantès, better known as the count of Monte Cristo—a name Dantès adopted after his escape from the Château d’If. There are some superficial similarities between Dantès and the Mask. Both men are held in solitary confinement. Both are eventually visited in prison by priests and are finally able to leave their cells as a result of that encounter, although the circumstances of their flight are totally different. Far more important than these rather facile parallels is the fact that both men are innocent victims of arbitrary decisions designed to protect another individual’s political and personal future. Those decisions lead not only to the prisoners’ unjust incarceration, but also to the erasure of their identity (Dantès’s name is replaced by a number so as to prevent others from locating him, and the Mask—whom we eventually learn is Louis XIV’s twin brother, Philippe—is given the name Marchiali and is later [in chapter 52] forced to wear an iron mask) .³ Beyond that, however, the stories Dumas tells about Dantès and the Mask are more different than they are alike. Dantès uses the wealth he acquires after his escape from prison to undertake an elaborate scheme of revenge against those who wronged him. Philippe is returned to prison after a very brief period of contact with those who are responsible for his fate and is subject to even greater isolation.

The story of the fictitious masked prisoner might have been little more than another of the many interpolated episodes found in Dumas’s Musketeers trilogy (for example, Milady’s sequestration in and escape from her brother-in-law’s castle in England) were it not so clearly an illustration of the political and historical struggles that are central to Bragelonne.⁴ Indeed, in this final volume of the trilogy generally, and in The Man in the Iron Mask in particular, the focus is not only on the eponymous Viscount Bragelonne, son of the Comte de la Fère (known in his Musketeer days as Athos), but also on the rise to power of King Louis XIV⁵ Long subject to the tutelage of his mother, Anne of Austria (widow of Louis XIII of France), and of his prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin (successor to Cardinal Richelieu), young Louis has also had to overcome the efforts of a faction of rebellious French aristocrats known as La Fronde who wished to place his uncle Gaston d’Orléans on the throne. In his minority, then, the young king not only lacked control over his political destiny but also was subject to personal humiliation. He likewise had little influence over royal finances that were managed principally by Nicolas Fouquet, the surintendant (superintendent) of finances, who was named to that post with the support of Mazarin.

Like many others in that era who either purchased their positions at court or were appointed as a result of patronage, the Surintendant ostensibly served at the pleasure of the King.⁶ But in fact, because he is responsible for filling the state’s coffers and for funding the personal and political expenses of the Crown, the Surintendant wielded a great deal of power over the King’s affairs. Indeed, as keeper of the King’s purse, the Surintendant will play a key role in determining whether or not Louis can go to war with his enemies, support his allies, assert his personal authority, and bring the nobility to heel. Fouquet’s power and wealth, and the shadow they cast over the King’s authority, are most concretely represented here by the magnificent castle and elaborate gardens the Surintendant has had constructed at Vaux-le-Vicomte (located to the south and east of Paris).⁷That estate far outshines any of the King’s royal properties. (Louis would later order Versailles, not yet the elaborate palace familiar to thousands of visitors today, to be developed and decorated by some of the very same men Fouquet employed at Vaux.) Louis counts this ostentatious display of affluence and artistic patronage by a subject as yet another insult to his majesty, as Dumas clearly shows via repeated expressions of the King’s ire before, during, and after his brief stay at Vaux. It is, moreover, at Vaux that the entirely fictional attempt to replace Louis with his long-hidden, unknown twin takes place. Though unaware of that plot—indeed, he ultimately helps to foil it—Fouquet is nonetheless implicated in the undertaking because it transpires under his roof.⁸ The King—seconded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a man who is determined to undermine and then replace Fouquet—will spend much of the rest of the novel seeking to punish the Surintendant for this and other acts of lèse-majesté (offense against the dignity of the sovereign of a state), including the fortification of the island of Belle-Isle-en-Mer off the Atlantic coast of France.⁹

There is much in this story that is historically true. The King did visit Vaux and was angered by and resentful of the overt display of his subject’s wealth. Louis did act to remove Fouquet from office and to punish him for his fiscal mismanagement. Colbert did indeed succeed Fouquet and reorganize state finances. He also helped to develop the royal navy, establish a French textile-manufacturing industry, and create national tapestry-weaving workshops, among other things. Fouquet had purchased Belle-Isle and fortified it against the day when he might incur the King’s wrath and need a place of refuge. He also supported a group of artists and freethinkers—called the Epicureans in this novel—that included fabulist Jean de La Fontaine and the comic playwright Molière, whose Les Fâcheux (The Impertinents) was first performed for the reception of the King at Vaux. But as is true in all good historical fictions, these and other facts are at times modified or rearranged in Dumas’s text and are regularly interspersed with invented episodes and characters that gain their credibility from the context the real historical events and individuals provide. And it is in those fictional interstices that we once again encounter the formerly inseparable and unfailingly intrepid companions known to us as the Three (though in fact they were four) Musketeers.

Readers of The Three Musketeers will recall that at the end of that book d‘Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis all went their separate ways. Athos, whose real name is the Comte de la Fère, had decided to retire to his estate in the Loire region. Porthos was finally going to marry his benefactress and become a provincial landowner, while Aramis, true to his long-stated intentions, was at last going to take his religious vows and become the Abbé d’Herblay. D‘Artagnan alone, having finally been promoted to the rank of lieutenant in the King’s Musketeers, remained in service. Although once again re-united in Twenty Years After, by the time we find them in The Man in the Iron Mask, the four men have grown into late middle age and are no longer as closely allied as they once were.¹⁰ Athos is the father of Raoul de Bragelonne, whom he has raised with deep, if characteristically undemonstrative, affection and an unwavering sense of moral rectitude.¹¹Porthos, now widowed, has grown wealthy and has acquired considerable property but is still socially ambitious and is still endowed with a huge appetite and enormous strength. Good-hearted Porthos remains as naive as he is heroic or comical. Aramis has not only been promoted to the rank of bishop of Vannes, a city on the coast of western France, but has also become the general of the Jesuits, albeit by somewhat less than legitimate means.¹² That post gives him considerable clandestine power over a wide circle of religious and secular officials and individuals in all ranks of society and will play a crucial role in Aramis’s efforts to put Philippe on the throne of France. D’Artagnan is now the captain of the King’s Musketeers. Still quick-witted and a master swordsman, he is now more prone to reflection than he was in his youth and is, at times, an unhesitating critic of actions he deems ill-advised or misguided. As true to his own ideals as he is to the King’s service, d‘Artagnan will occasionally find it necessary to disagree with Louis and will even resign his post when he feels he has been wronged. Although they are not often together, d’Artagnan remains closest to Athos, who shares his sense of (now seemingly old-fashioned) loyalty and honor. Athos will also remonstrate with the King and risk his displeasure when he believes Louis has acted disgracefully. Indeed, the sword that the stalwart nobleman breaks over his knee in the King’s presence unambiguously announces his renunciation of fealty and will lead Louis to order his arrest (chapters 19-26).¹³

As the story takes shape, with Mazarin now dead, Louis is determined to take personal control of his realm and his government. Although outwardly respectful of both his mother (the dowager queen mother) and his wife, Marie-Thérèse of Austria, the King loves neither woman and often seeks pleasure and affection in the arms of one of his many mistresses.¹⁴ Neither does he have warm feelings for his younger brother, the duc d‘Orléans (most often designated by the honorific title Monsieur), whose frivolous and expensive lifestyle and doting coterie of male companions offends the King. Louis is, however, very much enamored of Monsieur’s beautiful and charming wife, Henriette d’Angleterre, called Madame, whom he takes for a time as his mistress.¹⁵ The frustrations and disappointments endured during his youth as well as a determination to wrest power from his ministers and to suppress aristocratic insubordination make Louis appear tyrannical, petulant, and egotistical on more than one occasion. Young, handsome, and endowed with a clear vision of who he is and what he represents,¹⁶ the King has not yet fully mastered the art of governance or acquired the wisdom that comes with time. Dumas thus shows us here what Louis wants to be and how he grows into the powerful, absolutist monarch he will later become. At the same time, Dumas introduces the story of Philippe, Louis XIV’s (historically unattested) identical twin, who is born some eight hours after his brother and who becomes the innocent victim of what their father, Louis XIII, judged to be an imperative raison d’état (an act justified by and/or undertaken to protect the interests of the state).

Closely intertwined with the reception of the King at Vaux and the issue of political rivalry and authority raised by that visit, the character of Philippe adds the question of legitimacy to the fictional-historical mix. Although we learn that Louis is the first-born twin, it appears that some seventeenth-century doctors believed it was the latter-born infant who was the first to have been conceived—a concept somewhat curiously akin to today’s human resources slogan “first in, last out” or “first hired, last fired.” The resulting uncertainty about which child could legitimately claim the right of primogeniture, and thus the throne, has the potential to spark not only a particularly nasty contest between the siblings, but possibly also civil war.¹⁷ It was just such an eventuality that Louis XIII hoped to avoid when he sent the second-born twin away to be raised by a wet nurse and a tutor in the quiet obscurity of the provinces and in total ignorance of his parentage and of the court. Nonetheless, with an inevitability typical of “fate” and of narrative plots, Philippe does, in time, glean some vague bits of information about his origins. It is the fear that he might learn more about his identity that leads to his initial imprisonment as a solitary, renamed inmate of the Bastille.

Twins, doubles, and doppelgängers were a frequent Romantic motif. Indeed, whether used to examine individual, familial, or collective breakdowns or schisms, or to explore social, sexual, or national politics—or some combination of these—the trope of duality and division, of identity in crisis, resonated in a particularly meaningful way with French writers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Dumas himself featured twin brothers Gaultier and Philippe d’Aulnay in his 1832 play La Tour de Nesle. Alfred de Musset’s most celebrated drama, Lorenzaccio (1834), provides another example of a treatment of the topic of duality or division, and George Sand’s novels Indiana (1832) and La Petite Fadette (1849) and Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) offer still others.¹⁸ Dumas’s use of the theme in The Man in the Iron Mask is, as we have seen, imbued with political meaning. It calls into question not only the legitimacy of an individual ruler, Louis XIV, but also of absolutist monarchy, and it points to a “crime”—the sequestration of Philippe and the suppression of his claim to the throne—as the point of origin for that King’s reign and that form of government.

The character of Philippe also raises the subject of parenthood, and it is that topic which, at least in part, ties the sacrificed Prince’s story to that of the larger novel’s titular character, Viscount Raoul de Bragelonne.¹⁹ Who decides what is best for a child? What happens when a child is unwillingly separated from its parents and/or does not know who they are? These and other, similar questions come up frequently in Dumas’s work, as can be seen in Antony, Richard Darlington, La Tour de Nesle, and Kean—early plays whose protagonists were illegitimate or abandoned as children. Like Philippe, Viscount Bragelonne is raised in the provinces, away from court. Brought up by Athos, who is his father and the comte de la Fère, Raoul is unaware of his mother’s identity, as is Philippe. And like Philippe‘s, the young Viscount’s life takes a major turn when he reaches adulthood. Sadly, both men’s lives will end in tragedy, and both can be seen as victims of Louis XIV Philippe, as we know, will spend most of his life alone and abandoned, in prison. He will be confined even more cruelly after the abbé d’Herblay (Aramis) fails in his attempt to put him on Louis’s throne. Raoul, who believes Louis XIV has stolen the affections of Louise de La Vallière, the fiancée he loves with an abiding passion, will go eventually off to war in North Africa, where he will die heroically in what is a thinly disguised act of suicidal despair. Athos, whose emotional ties to his son are so profound that they transcend time and space, will have a premonitory vision of his son’s demise even before it is reported to him. He will die of grief once his unhappily prophetic dream is confirmed .²⁰ The two men will be buried together outside a small chapel on Athos’s estate. The entire episode—from Raoul’s decision to leave for Africa to the interment of father and son—is intensely moving and rings psychologically true. What is more, this illustration of the sympathetic bonds uniting parent and child offers a stark contrast to the absence of feeling that marks the Queen Mother’s response to the second “disappearance” of her son Philippe.

Indeed, the women in this novel are, with few exceptions, most often presented in an unflattering light. Like Anne of Austria, the Duchesse de Chevreuse has abandoned a child—Raoul de Bragelonne—and seems to have set political intrigue and self-interest above more traditionally female pursuits and values. Both women’s bodies have been marked by signs of the physical (and moral) corruption that seemingly results from their desire for power.²¹ The Queen Mother suffers the acute pains of breast cancer, a disease whose symbolic significance is as undeniable as is its historical veracity (see chapter 4, where we learn that her pains first struck on the King’s birthday). The once-alluring Duchesse has become an unattractive crone. The Queen, Marie-Thérèse, wed to Louis only a year earlier, is largely neglected by her husband and ought to be deserving of our pity, but does not generally inspire great sympathy. She is overshadowed by Louis’s various mistresses, including her sister-in-law Henriette, a vivacious coquette who would eagerly rob the Queen of both the King’s affections and the primacy of her position at court. Dumas shows Louise de La Vallière to be a more amiable and more sincere person than any of these women. Orphaned, afflicted with a slight limp, and lacking both wealth and pretension, she is truly in love with the King and seeks no personal advancement or gain from their relationship. ²² Louise is, at first, subject to the scorn and ridicule of those at court who discover the secret of her liaison with Louis. Later, her fall from the King’s graces will be clearly signaled in the novel. Dumas makes it seem as though this trajectory is not only a necessary concession to history and the result of Louis’s constantly shifting affections, but also a form of punishment for Louise’s “infidelity” to Raoul.²³

Women are not, however, the only characters in this novel who are depicted in an unfavorable manner. Dumas also shows contempt for male characters who fail to measure up to the example set by the Musketeers of the generation of Athos and d’Artagnan—men who lived by a code of loyalty, bravery, and honor (see chapter 11). Scenes and comments scattered throughout The Man in the Iron Mask make it clear that Dumas considers those valiant men of an earlier age the worthy descendants of the mythic heroes celebrated by Homer but views their successors as venial, self-interested, and/or cowardly courtiers. (He may well have been thinking about the politicians and government functionaries of his own day in so doing.)

The superiority of those who served the crown in the days of Louis XIII and Richelieu is clear even in the case of Porthos, whose character here, as it was in The Three Musketeers, is composed of equal parts of courage and principle on the one hand and vanity and ambition on the other. Dumas loves this giant of a man, who out of friendship for the Abbé d’Herblay (Aramis) is misled into believing that he is doing a noble deed and instead finds that he has conspired to replace Louis with Philippe. He is a loyal and valiant sacrificial victim, and Dumas gives him a titan’s burial when the grotto in which he and Aramis have taken temporary refuge on Belle-Isle falls down on him while Aramis makes good his escape from the King’s forces (see chapters 76-79). In fact, Dumas told his son that he was so upset after composing the pages where he describes the death of Porthos that he could not resume writing for days. Yet Dumas continues to poke gentle fun at Porthos in this novel as he did in The Three Musketeers. He once again highlights Porthos’s unflagging appetite for food and love of clothes and makes much of his preoccupation with titles—now called M. le Baron du Vallon de Pierrefonds, he hopes to be named a duke.

Indeed, whereas in The Three Musketeers Porthos at times lacked a single, presentable suit of clothes, he now has acquired a vast wardrobe whose sole purpose is to guarantee that he will always be in fashion and will be prepared for any occasion. It is amusingly ironic, then, that when he is invited to Vaux, Porthos complains he has nothing to wear. He explains this paradoxical situation to d‘Artagnan by disclosing a longstanding objection to be measured by a tailor. Rather than subject himself to being touched by a social inferior—something he considers demeaning for an aristocratic gentleman like himself—Porthos has, over the years, sent his valet, Mouston (called Mousqueton in The Three Musketeers), to be fitted in his place. At first, this meant encouraging Mouston to eat more food so that he would match his master’s girth. Now, however, the valet has grown more rotund than his master, and the already-made suits are too large for Porthos to wear. In an effort to resolve the problem and assuage Porthos’s ego, d’Artagnan takes his friend to see the King’s own tailor, a man who will prove to be too busy to address Porthos’s sartorial needs. As it happens, though, the comic playwright Molière is also present at the tailor‘s, and he agrees, with a wink to d’Artagnan, to attend to the problem. Dumas makes it clear from the description of the subsequent scene that we are to consider this event the (clearly apocryphal) inspiration for what would become Moliere’s 1670 comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman) .

The occasion also has a darker side, however, for it is during his visit to the tailor that d‘Artagnan unexpectedly encounters Aramis, who—rather surprisingly in d’Artagnan’s opinion—has been chosen by Fouquet to oversee the final details concerning the reception of the King at Vaux. Aramis has come in search of information about the clothes Louis will be wearing during the festivities there; he has brought with him the celebrated painter Charles Le Brun, who, Aramis claims, needs a sample of the cloth from which the King’s clothes are to be made so that the portrait of Louis commissioned by Fouquet will be an exact copy of the royal guest’s appearance at the time of his stay at Vaux. D‘Artagnan is immediately suspicious of this explanation, but to his great frustration, he cannot yet imagine the real purpose behind Aramis’s strange request. The two men spar verbally with each other, each hoping to outwit the other and penetrate his opponent’s secrets. It will be only much later—too late—that d’Artagnan will finally understand the hidden purpose behind this outwardly flattering and seemingly benign reproduction/reflection—this doubling—of Louis’s person. The captain of the Musketeers will show greater perspicacity when he later sees Philippe in Louis’s clothes in Louis’s bedroom at Vaux and recognizes that the man is not his king.

Indeed, much of this novel is concerned with secrets, deceptions, evasions, negotiations, and misrepresentations. Such things are, of course, the building blocks of narrative incident and are manna to authors of serial literature who seek to prolong the development of their stories. Aramis, the most enigmatic and sinister of the former Musketeers who reappear in The Man in The Iron Mask, is at the heart of many of the double-dealings in this book. He knows that knowledge, like royalty, is power, and power is what he seeks. Many of the secrets he and others reveal or conceal to suit their purposes are of a compromising or dangerous nature. They concern such things as the birth of the twin princes (a state secret) and the existence of hidden doors and passageways that allow lovers to meet or crimes to take place. Aramis has, for example, built a secret opening into the floor of his room at Vaux. Masked by the design of the ceiling fresco in the King’s bedchamber below, this hidden aperture allows him and Philippe to observe the royal bedtime ceremonials (le coucher du roi) and the members of Louis’s family and inner circle of courtiers without being seen (chapters 41, 42, 45, and 48). As a result, Philippe will be perfectly prepared to replace his brother in the morning after another secret passage allows for the substitution of one twin by the other and the removal of the King to the Bastille in a closed carriage.²⁴

Earlier, Aramis made several clandestine visits to the Bastille. On one such occasion (chapter 24)—he was preparing to liberate Philippe with the uncomprehending assistance of Baisemeaux, the governor of the prison—he met Athos and d‘Artagnan there. They do not want Aramis to know that Louis has just ordered d’Artagnan to arrest Athos, nor does he want them to guess his business there. This is just one of several events that underscore the fact that Aramis’s interests are no longer closely aligned with those of his old friends and that new tensions and suspicions have crept into their once close-knit relationship. D‘Artagnan will, however, eventually discover what Aramis was doing at the Bastille. Although disapproving both of the plot and of the cruel misuse of Porthos’s naivete, because of their past friendship, the Musketeer will later try to provide Aramis and Porthos with an opportunity to evade arrest by the King’s forces that he has been obliged to lead to Belle-Isle. That effort will fail. He will, therefore, be more than a little surprised when, toward the end of the novel, he finds Aramis, now the duc d’Alameda and the Spanish ambassador to France, received with great ceremony and honor at Louis’s palace. The reader, too, may find this latest (re) incarnation of Aramis surprising and wonder why, of all the Musketeers, he alone survives at the end of the novel.²⁵ Aramis’s continued existence is, perhaps, a sign of the power he has acquired through his knowledge of the secrets of others and his role as general of the Jesuits. It may also be the clearest signal Dumas could contrive to mark the end of an age and a system of values—of that code of honor, loyalty, service, and courage espoused here by Athos, Porthos, d‘Artagnan (and Bragelonne). The battlefield death of d’Artagnan, which occurs at the precise moment he receives his long-postponed promotion to the rank of maréchal de France, might then be seen as the mirror opposite of Aramis’s resurrection—a passing of the bâton that marks the true start of Louis’s personal reign.²⁶

Though not as joyful or as action-packed as The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask is just as full of intrigue and high emotion as that earlier work was. Now, however, the tone is darker not only because our heroes have aged, but also because the personal and political circumstances surrounding their lives have grown more complex. D‘Artagnan’s furious pursuit of Fouquet across the countryside near Nantes—the Surintendant is hoping to avoid arrest—is so intense that the men’s superb horses die of exhaustion and they themselves can barely stand. Indeed, d’Artagnan is ultimately reduced to racing after his man on foot, stripping off his own clothes along the way. When d‘Artagnan faints after making his arrest, Fouquet, in a clear display of honor and generosity, refuses to run away. The two men express a deep respect for one another and together walk back to the spot where d’Artagnan had left the barred carriage that will transport Fouquet to prison (chapter 68) . This is not an example of the impetuous adventure or easy courage of reckless youth; it is a moving demonstration of mature heroism, integrity, and an almost fatalistic acquiescence to duty and authority. It is not entirely surprising that such elements of the novel are often sacrificed in modern cinematic refashionings of The Man in the Iron Mask.

A complex tapestry of fact and fiction and of the personal and the political, The Man in the Iron Mask serves as a moving and psychologically nuanced conclusion to the Musketeer trilogy. It does not matter to readers of this book that Dumas at times rearranges, invents, or falsifies historical fact. He makes us believe in his characters and the events that mark their lives. By some mysterious process of artistic alchemy and creativity, Dumas’s imagined history is transformed into History. We accept it as truth even when we know better. The agonies of love and death, the obligations of duty and honor, the trials and the triumphs of human existence all find a place in these pages and seem familiar to us despite the potentially distancing effects of the book’s seventeenth-century French setting and the slightly old-fashioned language of this translation. It is no wonder that it is Dumas’s version of the legend of the man in the iron mask that has survived and will continue to survive longer than any other.