The Real d’Artagnan
The portrait Dumas paints of d’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers is iconic: a penniless young Gascon who sets off for Paris on a horse that has seen better days, armed with his father’s sword, an ointment his mother made that “miraculously heals any wound that doesn’t reach the heart”, and a letter of recommendation to M. de Trèville, captain of the King’s Musketeers. From such humble beginnings are heroes made. But, how accurate a portrait is it?
For The Three Musketeers (1843-44) and its sequels, Dumas drew upon the work – some call it scurrilous – of Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644-c.1712), a pamphleteer and man of letters who may have personally known the historical d’Artagnan, Charles de Batz-Castelmore. Courtilz’s Mèmoires de Monsieur d’Artagnan first saw publication in Cologne, in about 1700; it was a bestseller in its day, running into three editions. Amid its rumor and gossip, under its skin of story-teller’s tricks, was a skeleton of fact – much of which one can easily verify through the records of the day, and by letters and dispatches archived in places such as the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Hey, have you heard? Archie Andrews is going to marry Veronica Lodge. Good for him; I always had this thing for Veronica. I hope Archie isn’t in this only for the Lodges’ money. In celebration of this momentous moments of moments, I’m going to write about the Hittites.
Recently I received a bit of a surprise when I went to a local library that has long been one of my ambush zones for the acquisition of unsuspecting books. All those lovely 25 cent mass market paperbacks with the stickers on the spine, all those nicely broken-in trades, all those hardbacks with the covers mylared over and glued down, were gone. Vanished. Whisked away on an electron breeze to inhabit the alternate world of the internet.
Star Trek (2009)
In brainstorming topics for my ‘getting back on the horse’ return post here at Black Gate after my absence of a few months — I’ve come up with a few mildly interesting ideas. Firstly, I thought about looking at the nature of escapism, how it shouldn’t have the unfair pejorative connotation it does, and how it certainly isn’t limited to works of prose or film or video games designed solely to entertain. Then too I was considering a weird phenomenon I’ve only really just been made conscious of, that of how utterly mainstream fantasy, or, let’s say ‘the fantastic,’ has become just in the last few decades — and I mean aside from the obvious stuff like the popularity of fantasy and science fiction books and movies, but everything from television commercials and product packaging to childrens’ toys and popular expressions bear out the reality that the once distant worlds of speculative fiction are now familiar place names in the cultural atlas of modern life.
This week we lower the drawbridge at Black Gate headquarters and invite you to head out to Clarkesworld magazine for your weekly genre fix. Clarkesworld has just published a lengthy article on the profound effect that fantasy gaming has had on fantasy writing. Written by Justin Howe and Jason S. Ridler, the piece is titled “Of Dice and Men: Modern Fantasists and the Influence of Role-Playing Games.”