二十年后

Twenty years earlier, three men and a young man had hanged a woman together in a fortress. Her name was Milady, the Queen's most dangerous double agent, and the former wife of their mutual friend Athos. One of the executioners was d'Artagnan, then a young lieutenant of the Musketeers, riding high. They thought the matter was closed.

This is that sequel: Twenty Years After, published serially in 1845 under its original title Vingt ans après. It is the second book in Dumas's D'Artagnan Romances, following The Three Musketeers, the novel that made the world fall for the four swordsmen, and leading into The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Dumas lived from 1802 to 1870, and this trilogy is what lifted him from a popular serial writer into literary history — Twenty Years After is also the most restrained his pen ever got within the historical-adventure genre.

The story unfolds around 1648, as the Fronde tears Paris in two: on one side, Cardinal Mazarin and Queen Anne holding the throne together for the boy king Louis XIV; on the other, furious nobles and commoners raising barricades and slings in the streets. The four musketeers land on opposite sides of that same storm. D'Artagnan is still a lieutenant, twenty years of stalled promotion having worn him into a soldier who can endure anything. Athos, the oldest and most aristocratic of the four, has retired to the country to raise his ward, Raoul. Porthos has made a respectable fortune but still craves a title. Aramis has dressed himself up as an abbé, sword still hanging under the cassock. What has changed most isn't the politics — it's the men themselves. They fell asleep young and woke up middle-aged.

Mazarin is the cardinal who took over after Richelieu died, greedier than his predecessor and far less sure of himself. At the height of the Fronde, he hears the old story of four men who once brought a king back safely from London, and sends for d'Artagnan at once: go and find them. D'Artagnan takes the order and sets off, drawing his old friends out of retirement one stop at a time. Dumas writes this stretch like a series of panels: each reunion gets its own image, its own posture, one unchanged gesture that tells you exactly who you're looking at before a word is spoken.

The trouble is that twenty years of politics have set them on opposite sides of the wall. Athos and Aramis are secretly aligned with the nobles rising against Mazarin; d'Artagnan and Porthos draw Mazarin's pay. The friendship hasn't broken — they can still sit down at night and share a bottle — but by day their swords point in opposite directions. This is where Dumas's craft really shows. He never lets the four men come to blows, and he never lets them patch things up out of convenience either. Instead he places the two camps across the barricades from each other in Paris, and holds the writing so tight that a glance or the passing of an object does almost all the talking.

Mazarin quietly puts d'Artagnan and Porthos on a ship to London to work the Cromwell camp. Athos and Aramis, commissioned by the other side, risk their lives slipping into the cell of the captured King Charles I. On this side of the Channel, court intrigue; on the other, a king waiting to lose his head. Dumas twists the two threads into one rope, and the crossing itself becomes the novel's big lift in pace.

Gray waves roll past the hull. On deck, two old soldiers talk with their backs to the English coast — behind them stand a few swordsmen disguised as servants, something bulging at each of their waists.

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The four are meant to reunite in London and save Charles I, but a young man keeps sabotaging them from the shadows — every time they're about to succeed, he's already blocked the road. He never gives his name, only a pair of eyes cold enough to unsettle anyone who meets them. He is Mordaunt, Milady's son, whose mother the four men executed when he was still a child. Since then he has drifted under a false name and thrown in with Cromwell's camp, waiting for exactly this moment. This is where the whole novel truly winds itself tight: the aftershock of that execution in book one, arriving to collect twenty years later.

In January 1649, Charles I is marched to the scaffold outside Whitehall anyway. History gives the four men no favors — they fight to their last breath and still can't rewrite that stroke of the axe. This is the book's true color: a novel about being unable to turn back fate. It isn't that the four aren't strong enough — the wall is simply too thick, the king's number was already up, and that is how that stretch of English history actually went. Dumas doesn't let them win. He lets them fight, and then writes the blow exactly as it fell.

The four scramble aboard and flee back to France, and Mordaunt follows them onto the ship. After a fight to the death, Athos throws the avenger into the Atlantic with his own hands. It's the most brutal struggle in the book, and the moment a debt of blood twenty years overdue is finally paid. Dumas doesn't write it as the pleasure of revenge — he lingers, at length, on the pause before Athos draws his sword. This is the man who once cast a vote in that fortress, and now settles the account alone.

When they return to France, the Fronde is at its height. Barricades rise across Paris, and nobles and commoners alike storm the palace in protest. The same storm sweeps the four men up again. This time Aramis plans a daring jailbreak to free a prisoner from Mazarin's hands. In one night, four men in their forties climb the same wall together, shoulder to shoulder, one more time.

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At the end, young Raoul says goodbye to his adoptive father Athos and rides off to make his own way in the army. It's a thread left for the next book, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, and also a rare breath of middle age for Athos's generation: sending a son off is an admission that you are forty now. The book closes where the four men have joined hands again and the Fronde still hasn't settled — it ends without a period.

On the surface this is a sequel; look closer and it's a book about time and middle age. Dumas hands the reader a cruel question: can the loyalty forged in youth survive twenty years of politics, marriage, thickening waistlines, and old blood debts? His answer is neither yes nor no — it's yes, but each man has to pay for it separately. The Mordaunt thread carries a second meaning of its own: the bullet you buried with your own hands twenty years ago, someone will eventually dig up and hand back to you, even if it takes a whole generation.

Dumas's method with history is worth a note of its own. He twists two real threads together, the Fronde and the English Civil War, and threads fictional characters through the skeleton of documented fact. You read and register that this really happened, and in the same breath notice a swordsman has been slipped into the middle of it. That half-true, half-invented charge is what makes it grip you tighter than the actual history books do.