I seldom get sick but, when I do, I become a wimp. Generally my illnesses take the form of stabbing sinus pain, and I retreat into a cocoon of misery and imagine myself about to die. As is appropriate for my melodramatic self pity, my mind invariably fixates upon a literary scene composed during France’s period of high romanticism: the death of Porthos in Alexander Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask (1847).
Porthos is one of the four musketeers, the large one who is a little dim and who eats and womanizes with gusto. I read all of Dumas’ musketeer books when I was a boy: The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later (which contains The Man with the Iron Mask.) A family infirmity plagues Porthos’s family—at critical times the legs of his forefathers have given out, leading to their deaths—and Porthos is struck by this condition just as he and Aramis are on the verge of staging a successful escape.
It has been decades since I read the episode. Nevertheless, it has become my go-to image for illness. I imagine myself cut off at the knees, as Porthos is, and buried by a mound of rubble. As my best friend calls out to me, the breath leaves my body.
Does the scene help me get through the illness? I guess it allows me to see myself as heroic in my suffering, a great man brought low by an unaccountable but characteristic inner weakness. It’s not much consolation but it’s what I have.
As you read Dumas’ florid prose, you might find yourself laughing at me. That’s fine. I laugh at myself when health has returned and I look back. If I was going to choose a death scene, couldn’t I have picked one that was better written, say from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych? But it’s not always up to us which works we turn to. When I’m thoroughly miserable, the work that pops up is one that I thrilled to as a child.
Here is Dumas’ account:
As for Porthos, after having hurled the barrel of powder amidst his enemies, he had fled, as Aramis had directed him to do, and had gained the last compartment, into which air, light, and sunshine penetrated through the opening. Scarcely had he turned the angle which separated the third compartment from the fourth when he perceived at a hundred paces from him the bark dancing on the waves. There were his friends, there liberty, there life and victory. Six more of his formidable strides, and he would be out of the vault; out of the vault! a dozen of his vigorous leaps and he would reach the canoe. Suddenly he felt his knees give way; his knees seemed powerless, his legs to yield beneath him.
“Oh! oh!” murmured he, “there is my weakness seizing me again! I can walk no further! What is this?”
Aramis perceived him through the opening, and unable to conceive what could induce him to stop thus – “Come on, Porthos! come on,” he cried; “come quickly!”
“Oh!” replied the giant, making an effort that contorted every muscle of his body – “oh! but I cannot.” While saying these words, he fell upon his knees, but with his mighty hands he clung to the rocks, and raised himself up again.
“Quick! quick!” repeated Aramis, bending forward towards the shore, as if to draw Porthos towards him with his arms.
“Here I am,” stammered Porthos, collecting all his strength to make one step more.
“In the name of Heaven! Porthos, make haste! the barrel will blow up!”
“Make haste, monseigneur!” shouted the Bretons to Porthos, who was floundering as in dream.
But there was no time; the explosion thundered, earth gaped, the smoke which hurled through the clefts obscured the sky; the sea flowed back as though driven by the blast of flame which darted from the grotto as if from the jaws of some gigantic fiery chimera; the reflux took the bark out twenty toises; the solid rocks cracked to their base, and separated like blocks beneath the operation of the wedge; a portion of the vault was carried up towards heaven, as if it had been built of cardboard; the green and blue and topaz conflagration and black lava of liquefactions clashed and combated an instant beneath a majestic dome of smoke; then oscillated, declined, and fell successively the mighty monoliths of rock which the violence of the explosion had not been able to uproot from the bed of ages; they bowed to each other like grave and stiff old men, then prostrating themselves, lay down forever in their dusty tomb.
This frightful shock seemed to restore Porthos the strength that he had lost; he arose, a giant among granite giants. But at the moment he was flying between the double hedge of granite phantoms, these latter, which were no longer supported by the corresponding links, began to roll and totter round our Titan, who looked as if precipitated from heaven amidst rocks which he had just been launching. Porthos felt the very earth beneath his feet becoming jelly-tremulous. He stretched both hands to repulse the falling rocks. A gigantic block was held back by each of his extended arms. He bent his head, and a third granite mass sank between his shoulders. For an instant the power of Porthos seemed about to fail him, but this new Hercules united all his force, and the two walls of the prison in which he was buried fell back slowly and gave him place. For an instant he appeared, in this frame of granite, like the angel of chaos, but in pushing back the lateral rocks, he lost his point of support, for the monolith which weighed upon his shoulders, and the boulder, pressing upon him with all its weight, brought the giant down upon his knees. The lateral rocks, for an instant pushed back, drew together again, and added their weight to the ponderous mass which would have been sufficient to crush ten men. The hero fell without a groan – he fell while answering Aramis with words of encouragement and hope, for, thanks to the powerful arch of his hands, for an instant he believed that, like Enceladus, he would succeed in shaking off the triple load. But by degrees Aramis beheld the block sink; the hands, strung for an instant, the arms stiffened for a last effort, gave way, the extended shoulders sank, wounded and torn, and the rocks continued to gradually collapse.
Porthos! Porthos!” cried Aramis, tearing his hair. “Porthos! where are you? Speak!”
“Here, here,” murmured Porthos, with a voice growing evidently weaker, “patience! patience!”
Scarcely had he pronounced these words, when the impulse of the fall augmented the weight; the enormous rock sank down, pressed by those others which sank in from the sides, and, as it were, swallowed up Porthos in a sepulcher of badly jointed stones. On hearing the dying voice of his friend, Aramis had sprung to land. Two of the Bretons followed him, with each a lever in his hand – one being sufficient to take care of the bark. The dying rattle of the valiant gladiator guided them amidst the ruins. Aramis, animated, active and young as at twenty, sprang towards the triple mass, and with his hands, delicate as those of a woman, raised by a miracle of strength the corner-stone of this great granite grave. Then he caught a glimpse, through the darkness of that charnel-house, of the still brilliant eye of his friend, to whom the momentary lifting of the mass restored a momentary respiration. The two men came rushing up, grasped their iron levers, united their triple strength, not merely to raise it, but sustain it. All was useless. They gave way with cries of grief, and the rough voice of Porthos, seeing them exhaust themselves in a useless struggle, murmured in an almost cheerful tone those supreme words which came to his lips with the last respiration, “Too heavy!”
After which his eyes darkened and closed, his face grew ashy pale, the hands whitened, and the colossus sank quite down, breathing his last sigh. With him sank the rock, which, even in his dying agony he had still held up. The three men dropped the levers, which rolled upon the tumulary stone. Then, breathless, pale, his brow covered with sweat, Aramis listened, his breast oppressed, his heart ready to break.
Nothing more. The giant slept the eternal sleep, in the sepulcher which God had built about him to his measure.
