[issybird]

Originally Posted by Catlady

This is a book that seems to need a female-centric retelling--especially Milady's story. Suppose the story she tells Felton is largely true. Suppose she's being persecuted not for anything evil she's done, but merely because she's fought back against cruel and stupid men. Why can't she be the heroine? Why can't there be a version of the story where she triumphs?

Originally Posted by gmw

I was thinking along much the same lines. I'm not sure a retelling could viably save her from murder (it would no longer be the same story), but it may make the tragedy of her death more apparent and perhaps find a way of interpreting the death as a form of a triumph. I am not sure it is necessary to change that much (such as making the story she tells Felton true), but simply have her choices made more apparent - because it seems to me that women in those times had precious few choices.

For me, her story already was one where she triumphed, her death notwithstanding. Although I admit I'd have liked her to get away, just to imagine further intrigues and a future standoff. Again perversely, I could appreciate the cruelty of her death because if there was any sense in which I regarded the Musketeers as men of any principle whatsoever, that was the end of it.

Originally Posted by Catlady

I think the main reason Constance had to be killed off was not that she was married (it would've been easy enough to have her husband conk out), but to show one clear crime that could be attributed to Milady and thereby justify her execution. We have only secondhand reports of her perfidy otherwise, I think.

Originally Posted by gmw

I was thinking that maybe Dumas had killed her off to get ready for the sequel (leaving d'Artagnan free for a new romance), but I see the sequel is set twenty years later so it would have been easy to have bumped her off between books. With that excuse out of the way, I think your explanation makes the most sense to me.

I have to agree that Catlady's explanation makes sense. I always had Constance pegged as someone who'd be sacrificed as there wasn't a story going forward and because morality was mostly incumbent on a woman, so I wasn't surprised by her death nor did I think of it in terms of Lady de Winter's evilness. She was just the agent for bumping her off, a necessary death.