Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers: From the Valois to the Bourbon Dynasty
100 Days of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers
100 Days of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers
June 1 - August 31, 2024
All for One and One for All: "The Three Musketeers" at 180
June 4
Historical post 5 of 10
Court painters are such an essential aspect of this narrative - three cheers for Bottega di François Clouet (1510-1572) who in 1561 painted this AMAZING PORTRAIT of Catherine de’ Medici with her three son - the future kings Francis II, Charles IX, Henry III - AND a daughter named Marguerite, decorously placed in the background!!!
Margaret of Valois (1553- 1615) - known to posterity as La Reine Margot or Queen Margot - was the daughter of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici, a Catholic Valois princess whose marriage to the Huguenot (Reformed Calvinist French Protestant) Henry III of Navarre was supposed to reconcile the raging contradictions between French Catholics and Protestants which let to several religious wars through the 16th century… Did this diplomatic effort work?! It failed catastrophically…
Thousands of Huguenots came to Paris for the wedding festivities of their beloved king - to be murdered in one of the most horrific events of the Wars of Religion known as St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572. The name of Catherine de’ Medici was forever associated with this atrocity…
With three Valois kings dead - Margaret and her husband to the rescue… The Protestant Henry III of Navarre was baptized into the Catholic faith in order to become the king of a majority Catholic country. His immortal “Paris is Worth a Mass" - meaning to rule France from Paris is so alluring that going to Catholic mass is a small price to pay for the honor - was repeated by Earnest Hemingway when he converted to Catholicism in Paris in 1927 in order to marry his Catholic second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.
Now Henry IV of France (1553-1610), known as the Good King Henry or Henry the Great, Henry ruled 1589 to 1610 and was genuinely beloved by most of his subjects - with the exception of his wife!!! Their childless marriage was annulled and thus ended all possible connections of the Valois dynasty to the French throne. Henry VI was the father of the Bourbons - of whom I wrote extensively in my previous post!!! They are the final French ruling dynasty…
But what about babies, you ask?! Are you seated again?! The second wife of Henry IV was ANOTHER MEDICI girl - Marie de' Medici (1575-1642) who became Queen of France and Navarre and between 1610 and 1617 served as regent - with sometimes catastrophic results - to their son - the hero of The Three Musketeers - Louis XIII!!! Finally!!!
Needless to say - Dumas wrote THREE novels about this time period:
La Reine Margot or Marguerite de Valois (1845)
La Dame de Monsoreau (1846)
The Forty-Five Guardsmen (1847)
ALL written while he was churning out The Three Musketeers AND its two sequels!!! The man was non stop!!!
Catherine de' Medici (1519-1589) with 4 of her children, who became kings and queen of France!!!
Margaret of Valois (1553- 1615), Queen of France, briefly
Henry IV (1553-1610), first Bourbon King of France
Marie de' Medici (1575-1642), his second wife - their son Louis XIII is one of the heroes of The Three Musketeers!!!