Farewell my Musketeers, till we meet again!

Caution: contains spoilers for both books and movies…

I shed a tear for Porthos and I shed a tear for Mousqueton.  I cried my eyes out even before I even read the chapters concerning Athos.  It’s not like I didn’t know about the end of those great men; I’d had deep discussions about it with fellow readers, and often wondered about Dumas’ decision to separate them in such a way.  Truth be told, I had not read the book (The Vicomte de Bragelonne) until now, because I loved the movie The Man in the Iron Mask so much, and when I learned that the book was very very different, to the point of never having the four musketeers meet at the same time, I was utterly afraid that it would bring about a nasty disappointment for the end of the magnificent saga.  Granted, the book is not easy to come across in some places of Mexico, but I still did try to delay finding it as much as I could.

See, here’s the deal, and I’m aware that these words coming from a writer seem contradictive, but the movie is much much better than the book.  It has a few horrible mistakes, but even then it also salvaged some of the most important points that nostalgia asked the book to cover and didn’t.

Before I go into that, I have to point out three things:  one, although I do not agree with how some of the characters were portrayed, I fully accept that the acting was phenomenal; two, I absolutely hated Louise de la Valliere, and that particular book within the book drove me insane; and three, the actual reason I prefer the movie is the image of the musketeers putting their heads and their swords together for one final great cause (namely the final scene in the Bastille).

All right, so I shall start with the actors… or rather, I will start with my most important question to date:  why can’t anybody get Athos right? Athos, the most beautiful, noble, poignant man on Earth, why is it so hard to portray him as *that*? (I’m talking about 1993 to the day, cos that’s when I was introduced to the saga.  I have seen pictures of the earlier actors, and am willing to admit that Van Heflin or Powys Thomas might change my mind if I ever come across their Musketeer movies). Today, everywhere you look, there is always this cocky, arrogant dude; drunken a great deal of the time, and very mean to the servants…  Now, Kiefer Sutherland did a good enough job, somber and full of grief and very strong and powerful, and he got the noble part down right!  His acting was especially good, it was only his looks that did not agree with me (he *is* a handsome fellow, I’ll give you that, but he’s just not Athos); for me, Athos is all about the black hair and dark* eyes.

(Super-quick side note: yes, the 1993 Disney movie will always be high in my esteem, nothing I say here will take away anything that that movie ever gave me.)

Athos is a perfect model of man and literary character, even though today, as I *am* a bit more mature than I ever was in my teens, I am able to see beyond the tragic-hero facade and notice that the reality of the age (the time period, not his or my age) tended to create heroes from men that would relentlessly kill someone if they made fun of their swords or clothes or beards.  To die in a duel was as magnificent as to die in combat, so, just to make sure the Universe gets this right, when I say Athos is the perfect man, I do not mean I want a man who will fight anybody for just any reason just like that.  Defending me form something big would be cool, but not fighting someone because they made fun of his shoes or something, got it? Right, moving on.  For these, characters, the Three Musketeers, it was all about keeping their head up, even if the nasty things other people told them were true.  I suppose it was mostly like that for every other man of the time.  Considering that, they were noble and valiant, and as literary figures, work phenomenal!

Oh, and John Malkovich, whoa there!  He is a magnificent actor, no question about that, but in what head was it ever imagined that he was beautiful and noble and somber?  Well, he is a good final-days Athos, which basically means the last two months of his life, when he suddenly gets old and dies at 62, right after hearing that Raoul died…  Other than that, no.  I still love him as an actor, mind you all, but no. Just, no.

Oh!  And there is a brand new series that I’ve been meaning to watch (and for me “brand-new” could be anything from out yesterday to a cool show from the eighties that I just discovered, so bear with me here), The Musketeers, from the BBC.  I saw the pilot the other day, and found so good that I can say that I will give Tom Burke a chance.  Capaldi is this close to dethroning Tim Curry, too, so yay!  The others are not bad at all, and I’m quite keen on watching this first season that just ended.  Then I might have a little second part to this entry, who knows.

As I think I might be done with Athos, I will speak of Louise de la Valliere, because I did thank her last time for the insights she gave me about love… the insight is this: do not be like Louise de la Valliere if you ever want to find love! Ever!  Granted, she never really said yes to Raoul, she was cornered into being called his fiancé, but seriously, all of that fainting is not cool.  OK, so I know women used to faint a lot in those days, cos if they ever got excited or scared they would utterly stop breathing because of their bodices (apparently that’s how men knew they were absolutely feminine, meh) (Pirates of the Caribbean taught us that in modern times, remember?), but no…!  All of that softness and innocence, even though she knew she was delivering her best friend in the world the worst pain of all, unbecoming!  Yes, softness and innocence are pretty nice in a young woman, but not while torturing someone else, cos she never even had the decency to talk to him about it and break her compromise…  Everything would have been different if she’d just told him she didn’t want to marry him, cos then later she was just being the victim, and that’s seriously wrong… As for Louis XIV and Phillippe, I said it then and I say it now: Di Caprio was the best choice ever to play those parts!  I like the movie better in that, because it really shows you more of the hidden brother, whereas in the book he’s just in and out (or rather out and back in) in just a night.  Shame, because that’s the moment when Dumas should have said Musketeers Unite! you know?  That’s the way I kind of play it in my head: after he’s taken back to the Bastille, all four of them go back and rescue him, and then the movie plays out a bit in my head and the saga is over.

But I have to go back a bit into how Louise and Louis partake into each other: he only falls for her because she’d admitted openly that he’s like the Sun for her.  She knows the dude’s a womanizer.  Did she ever think it was for real? True, that was a time when the most wonderful thing for a lover was to kiss the tips of the fingers of the other’s hands, so it takes them like forever to get physical, but still, didn’t she notice that he’d get tired of her eventually?  Well, but of course she noticed, since she did tell D’Artagnan that she’d have her punishment soon enough **right at Raoul’s grave, by the way**…  So, if she knew that, then why did she stick around?  Like I said, yes, she gave me insights all right: be honest when you love, with whatever type of love it is, and don’t go making people think that you feel more than you do… and learn to walk away if the situation gets bad.  Seriously, I do not agree with Raoul’s reaction: she was not worth it, at all!  Not worth living for, and definitely not worth dying for, either!  He should have walked away as well, walked back into his own life and into someone worthy of all he had to give… 

And those are actually the reasons I had been stalling reading this book for so long… because I knew I would not agree with the ending that Dumas had chosen for my friends from adolescence.  It hurts to know that even with all my complaining and rambling it is one of the best classics out there and that I have to make my peace with it anyways.  It hurts to know that I can’t even say that I didn’t like the book, because truth being told, I did like it almost as much as the previous two!  It is impeccably written and it draws out the psychologies of these great men in a way that another writer could not have done half as well.  It also depicts the time with no softening or misgivings.  Yes, he makes some mistakes with dates and places here and there, but if we consider it from the point of view of Literature rather that History, it satisfies both Story and History in an enchanting way.  In all probabilities, maybe he just didn’t dare to over-fictionalize that part of history (or rather legend), to the point of getting characters together for actions that didn’t really happen, and he might have had his reasons for that.  For whatever else, he knew these characters for years, and he might have also have kept their deaths apart because it would have hurt him too much otherwise if he hadn’t…  It is a known fact that he spared Aramis in a later revision of the text, so perhaps I could be right?  I myself cannot envision killing one or many of my characters in a major battle like that of the Bastille in the movie, and even Rowling went for showing as few as possible of her character’s deaths (some might disagree with me, but if we consider the amount of characters that died in that last battle at Hogwarts, I might also be right in thinking that she knew they had to go there but that it would be too painful to describe each event).  So, who knows?  Maybe there are letters in which he talks about this to somebody; maybe there is a diary with an alternate ending somewhere.  Maybe we will never know.  And just maybe I have to make my peace with it.

… and will probably have to repeat it as often as needed till I believe it.

So, for now,

“Athos –Porthos, farewell till we meet again!  Aramis, adieu forever!”

-D’Artagnan as he died…

Thanks for reading me today, in all my pain about my latest good-bye…  I wish you all a wonderful weekend and plenty of laughter and love.

Cheers!

*Or are Athos’ eyes blue…?  I have a serious problem with this…  You know that Elton John song, “Your song”?  “So excuse me forgetting, but these things I do, you see I’ve forgotten if their green or their blue…”? Well, that’s me all right, and they can be the sweetest eyes I’ve ever seen and I could go on a month and still have no idea what colour they are… really, just one more thing I have to make my peace with, only this time with myself!