[Dngrsone]

Posting my notes without reading anyone else's comments. I will read them after this.


At the start of this writing, I am barely a fifth of the way through the book. I must admit, I am not really getting into The Three Musketeers, though I am certain I have read it before. I know I have seen a couple movie adaptations, and I may be confusing this book with some other similarly-themed novels like [i]A Tale of Two Cities[/], The Red Badge of Courage, and Les Miserables.

What strikes me immediately is the thought that the author does not know women. Be it the chauvinism at the time, many of these women do not act as I imagine they would/should. But then, perhaps it is I who does not know women so well, that I expect different of them than what is portrayed in this book so far.



I paused in my reading because of the insipid romance chapter between Buckingham and the Queen. I'm not much on romance, and after that chapter, I feel a need to cleanse my mental palate, if nothing else.

So, now one third of the way through, and I am absolutely disgusted that the Queen would just hand over a box full of jewelry to this man whom she has already insisted must not have any contact with her again.

Seriously, the woman is broke, and she just hands off a small fortune to a veritable stranger just to get him to leave? He would have been satisfied with the box alone! To top it off, the aforementioned were a gift from the king--does she not think that he would want to see her wearing it, at some point?

From what I am understanding from the translator's notes in this edition (Richard Pevear), this jewelry incident was an actual event, which I can only hope occurred in some other fashion that this woman blithely handing a box over just to get the besotted princeling to go away.



Now about fifty percent through, and I must say that D'Artagnan has very poor taste in friends. I mean, these men are far from the worst that humanity has to offer, but they are pretty generous with other people's money, property, and even lives.

Not that D'Artagnan himself is a paragon of sainthood (then again, if one looks at the biographies of actual saints... many aren't any better, now that I think about it).

I have decided by this point that I have not read this book before--I think I would have recalled such a detail as Athos killing his wife for being branded! I mean, seriously, he and his compatriots are little more than government-sanction Highwaymen themselves!

I have just realized that this novel is a very early form of Historical Romance!


SO... with some persistence I finally made it through. I am sure that my younger self would have enjoyed this book more than my current self has. I am... less tolerant, I suppose, of certain stereotyping and such.

At any rate, I finished, and I am glad it's over with, hah.

I had issues with the timing in one key part-- how did the Count de Winter get word about Milady's arrival so quickly? Yet I was not bothered enough to go back and reread that chapter to figure it out.

Then there is the whole scene with the Cardinal at the end... suddenly he and D'Artagnan are best buddies? How well should he really be received
in the Musketeers when their traditional enemy is his sponsor? If anything, I think the book would have been better ended without the "and they lived happily forever after" epilogue.


*** Edit: based on some of the comments so far, it seems to me like this may be one of those rare exceptions where the movie(s) is better than the book!

I am thinking that the only real constant character throughout this book is Buckingham. He at least doesn't appear to change much throughout.