The Three Musketeers

Athos is one of the three Musketeers who befriend d’Artagnan. A brooding, physically powerful, and often mysterious man, Athos embodies the novel’s clearest depiction of the ethical problem with the Musketeer force. When Athos was younger, he married for love. But his wife turned out to be a criminal, as shown by the fleur-de-lis brand on her shoulder. Rather than turn her in to authorities, or simply leave her, Athos instead used his standing as a nobleman and Musketeer to summarily decide to execute her. This shocking backstory is mostly unexamined by the novel’s other characters, who see Athos as a flawed but loyal man in the king’s service. Neither d’Artagnan, nor anyone else who learns what Athos did, judges him for it.

Through Athos’s characterization, Dumas asks readers to consider the limits of autocratic authority. Were Athos’s actions valiant justice, or were they simply murderous? To emphasize this moral quandary, Dumas recreates the scene from Athos’s past again at the end of the novel. This time, Athos is backed up by the other Musketeers, as they surround and subdue the wife he thought he had killed—who turns out to be Milady. She is the novel’s clear villain, but the way she is brought down is purposefully anticlimactic: There is no exciting battle sequence or feat of bravery necessary to kill this woman. Instead, readers watch as Athos’s cold-blooded attitude spreads to his comrades; even more disturbingly, once she is dead, all of Athos’s drive and ambition are gone. However well-executed his missions for the Musketeers have been, the only thing he has ever been motivated by is his desire to kill the woman he once married.

Another of the three Musketeers, Porthos often functions as a comic relief character. Though as brave and adventurous as his comrades, he also is quite fixated on the finer things in life: wine, fine dining, and social gatherings. Porthos carries on an affair with the wealthy Madame Coquenard, whom he loves but also uses to fund his various Musketeer needs. In funny scenes, Porthos is annoyed whenever her financial support appears to be lacking—he deplores her house and meager dinner offerings, and later, when she agrees to buy him a war horse, but ends up instead supplying d’Artagnan’s old and weathered pony. Fittingly, Porthos ends the novel by marrying the now widowed Madame Coquenard’s, thus getting access to the lifestyle he has always wanted.

The handsome, erudite, and graceful Aramis is the third of d’Artagnan’s Musketeer friends. Unlike Porthos, Aramis is a serious man, who rarely shares his feelings. Aramis is torn in two directions. Part of him wants to indulge his religious and intellectual side by joining a Jesuit order, as his studious nature is at odds with the macho requirements of life as a Musketeer. At the same time, Aramis is also having an affair with a well-connected woman, most likely the queen’s closest confidante—this behavior is expected of a dashing elite soldier, though Aramis never confesses to the affair out of a scrupulous sense of honor, his own and his lover’s. Aramis takes his responsibilities to other people very seriously. However, his loyalty to the Musketeers only goes so far: At the end of the novel, he leaves the Musketeers and enters religious life, never to be heard from again. This complete rejection of the Musketeer lifestyle is somewhat jarring—is Aramis fulfilling a lifelong dream, or horrified by having taken Musketeer authority to its ethical extreme by summarily executing Milady?

Milady is the novel’s central antagonist, a cold and beautiful woman whose life has been defined by crime. Milady is a subversion of 17th-century gender norms: She is violent, bloodthirsty, and cunning—qualities that in Dumas’s time code as masculine. Milady’s actions are truly bad; she commits murder, hires assassins, steals from church treasuries, and acts as a spy. Her ultimate goal is power, and she has no compunctions about using any means to get to her intended end.

Milady’s antagonism is complicated by the fact that she works for Cardinal Richelieu. For example, when she manages to trick Felton into assassinating the Duke of Buckingham, she is acting on the cardinal’s orders, muddying how responsible she is for this murder. However, Milady has weaknesses: She is often vengeful and petty in ways that harm her cause. For example, when she believes that the Comte de Wardes is unfaithful to her, she asks d’Artagnan to kill him—a dramatic misreading of d’Artagnan’s character, which is an atypical mistake. Later, she poisons and kills d’Artagnan’s lover Constance for no apparent reason other than to make d’Artagnan suffer—another miscalculation that ends up costing Milady her life.

Milady is revealed to be Athos’s wife, whom he ostensibly killed for being branded on the shoulder with a fleur-de-lis—a permanent mark given to criminals as punishment. Milady goes years without consequences, but she is no match for the teamwork of the Musketeers. When they finally find her, they hold a vigilante trial for her and then have her executed. Twice undergoing extrajudicial punishment at the hands of the Musketeers makes Milady oddly sympathetic, allowing Dumas to ask readers to consider whether even this heroic and elite military unit should have this kind of power.