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Monday
When I was growing up, we Bates boys sometimes regarded ourselves as Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan. As the eldest, I identified with Athos, the wily old veteran. Now that we have lost our Aramis, no longer can we say–as we once did– “All for one and one for all.”
Sons of a French professor who read us The Three Musketeers as children, we were such fans that we went on to read the sequels as well, Twenty Years After and The Man in the Iron Mask. In these later works, each of the four companions goes his own way, experiencing various adventures and sometimes even finding himself at odds with the others. But the feeling of inseparable unity, forged in their early acquaintance, subsists in spite of all differences. It is this sacred four that D’Artagnan invokes with his dying words at the end of Iron Mask. Here’s the scene:
Leaning upon the arms held out on all sides to receive him, he was able once more to turn his eyes towards the place, and to distinguish the white flag at the crest of the principal bastion; his ears, already deaf to the sounds of life, caught feebly the rolling of the drum which announced the victory. Then, clasping in his nerveless hand the baton, ornamented with its fleurs-de-lis, he cast on it his eyes, which had no longer the power of looking upwards towards Heaven, and fell back, murmuring strange words, which appeared to the soldiers cabalistic—words which had formerly represented so many things on earth, and which none but the dying man any longer comprehended…
While those words are not in fact cabalistic, they do invoke the special unity. So even though they don’t match our current configuration—three of us are still alive—they point to a mystical number that we all experienced as such. I therefore offer them up here in the spirit with which D’Artagnan delivers them, homage to a band of brothers whose roots sink deep:
“Athos—Porthos, farewell till we meet again! Aramis, adieu forever!”
To which Dumas adds:
Of the four valiant men whose history we have related, there now remained but one. Heaven had taken to itself three noble souls.
One noble soul in our case.
