Where I Continue my Dumas Education

Queen Margot, or Marguerite de Valois by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dumas just jumps in. You've gotta be ready.

I didn't know who anybody was, and I didn't know much about Huguenots in France, or really any of the court, so the beginning was a little tough. But before long I got my feet under me, and after that it read like any of the D'Artagnan romances. Nobody is quite as cool as D'Artagnan here, but there are a lot of interesting characters just the same. And lots of plotting and sneaking around the Louvre.

Overall, I really enjoyed it, though parts of it were very disturbing. I'm not 100% certain that Dumas meant for me to be upset; the matter-of-fact way that the King of France ordered the murder of France's protestants (referring to the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre) and the way so many main characters joined in like it was a weekend outing was horrifying. Innocents are used terribly in the novel, and it *feels* like Dumas meant us to see it as a judgment on the monarchy, but I dunno. I'm not sure he saw it as morally indefensible as I did. I wish I could ask him...

The light-hearted affairs here amused me. Nobody is happily married. Everyone at court is in love with someone besides their spouses, and they go to great lengths to see each other or exchange notes. It gets terribly serious by the end, but in the middle it seems like nobody's gonna actually get caught sleeping around. It feels pretty comical until it becomes tragic.

In many ways, I found the emotional life of the characters to be foreign: friends become bitter enemies in a heartbeat, then friends once more [spoiler! sorry...]; innocents are sacrificed without any sign of remorse; horrific crimes forgiven and never referred to; characters risk serious consequences to embark on affairs with men or women they barely know; everyone lies and often gets caught without the least embarrassment; heartfelt religious convictions are fought for then renounced with little drama; and alliances are made and unmade without any deep soul-searching. I guess all of these matters of life-or-death are treated lightly by the characters in a life is cheap so eat drink and be merry kind of way, and it was like watching enigmatic courtiers in a fairy kingdom.

It was all very odd, and I liked it.

The prose is the same ornate but breezy style familiar to readers of Three Musketeers or Count of Monte Cristo, and the plot is an engaging combination of fact and fiction. Dumas readers will find a lot to enjoy in this novel, and if they're like me they'll learn a bunch of new names from history.

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