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Finished at last. The book didn't get any shorter in the last part, not for me. (Not much in what follows that others haven't already said, but here's my version...)
Two of our heroic figures (Porthos and d’Artagnan) are courting married women, but later everyone is aghast at Milady's accidental bigamy. Okay, no real surprise here, this double standard still stands strong.
Apparently it's a big joke, a great wheeze, that Porthos should seduce a married woman (with, apparently, no actual affection for her), and thereby induce that woman to steal money from her husband for the purpose of gross and flamboyant waste by Porthos.
But when Charlotte Backson (Milady-to-be) seduced a man and together they decide on a once off theft to fund their escape from the judgemental eye of the community, well this is - apparently - a different thing altogether. Firstly, the man is seen as forced into it, how could he possibly be responsible for his own actions when he was the one seduced? (Not much has changed here either, I guess: men still try to claim they are not responsible for their actions around women.) And secondly, the branding of the thief with the fleur-de-lis is enough that a future husband immediately wants to hang the girl! (This is appalling! How is it that a story with this as a central premise became, and remained, so popular?)
After seeing so much loutish behaviour from our musketeers and guard, I was on Milady's side and sad to see that she did not escape. I was sorry to see Mme Bonacieux killed - not for d’Artagnan's sake, but because she was strong, brave and principled (at least, noticeably more principled that the main protagonists).
I found that in the final scenes between Mme Bonacieux and Milady, that Mme Bonacieux was not entirely consistent with how she had been earlier - having become more girlish and silly in comparison to the young woman that had guided Buckingham to the Queen.
The final scenes with Milady (at least in this Pevear translation) I did not find inconsistent - as some others have noted - or not badly so. In these scenes we don't get to see what's happening from her point of view, but it is possible to imagine that each of her actions - even the apparently fearful or desperate ones - are being tried as deliberate experiments to see if there is any way to escape. (We see some of this sort of behaviour, from Milady's perspective, while she is a captive in England.)
But, having said that, I would have liked something a bit stronger in character to have come out at the end. After all, it is Milady that is left to carry the blame for everything in this story (however undeservedly), even the cardinal gets painted in a gentler light come the end. It seems to me that a stronger stand by Milady at the end would have been better for the story, not least because the scene as it stands - with six men (not counting lackeys) picking on a lone woman - leaves an very unsatisfactory feeling in a story that I thought was about gallantry and chivalry.
All up? I'm pleased to have read it at last. I have been meaning to for years. But the characters I see in this story are not the characters I envisaged from childhood versions of musketeers. These are not men to admire or look up to. These are thugs; people you'd cross the street to avoid rather than risk drawing their eye. And the story is not some chivalrous adventure, it's a murky, messy, mix up of several adulterous and manipulative relationships. There is no honour to be had in any of this, which is, I suppose, how we ended up with the protagonists we did.
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