I saw with delight The three Musketeers. D’Artagnan, the recent film by French director Martin Bourboulon, with Quebecer Nicolas Bolduc as cinematographer. I’ve always loved this vigorous swashbuckling story and have long been an avid western fan. This adaptation of the work of Alexandre Dumas, which borrows from both genres, therefore delighted me.
In interview at Duty, Bolduc said he wanted, with this film, “something dusty, dirty, weathered”. The success in this regard is clear. The heroes “are dirty and unshaven like Sergio Leone cowboys”, writes the critic Éric Neuhoff in Le Figaro. The work, however, remains full of splinters. If the image is dark, adds the critic, “boredom is banished there” and “there is plenty of breath”. In The dutyFrançois Lévesque will talk about“high-end entertainment, both robust and elegant.
I fully share these judgments, which is why I am sorry to see that Quebecers have largely shunned this film in favor of a few insignificant American blockbusters. Mario Bros. now speaks to us more than D’Artagnan? I call it a downgrade.
According to Claude Schopp, specialist in the work of Alexandre Dumas senior, the author of three musketeers, a novel published in 1844, wanted to “instruct while entertaining”. He did not write so much historical novels, explains Charles Dantzig in his Selfish Dictionary of French Literature (Le livre de poche, 2009), only “novels with history”, in order to retain complete narrative freedom. Dumas, adds the critic, “has a sense of storytelling” and “his great quality is enthusiasm”.
With him, it moves, especially since the substance is accompanied by hints of subtle humor. In Bourboulon’s film, for example, D’Artagnan, in pursuit of the perfidious Milady during a ball at Buckingham Palace, incorporates a few dance steps into his pursuit to create an illusion. Dumas would have liked that.
There’s more. The most famous work of Dumas, under exteriors that are both chivalrous and gay, has a philosophical depth. In 2014, the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier presented an adaptation in an energetic staging by Frédéric Bélanger. On this occasion, the philosopher Normand Baillargeon wrote an accompanying text, included in his book On the agora (Bush poets, 2017).
For Baillargeon, The three Musketeers is a great book about friendship. Not friendship based on interest or shared pleasure, but intimate friendship, based on mutual admiration. The complicity between the musketeers, writes Baillargeon, rests “on a great respect for certain qualities which they recognize in the other and which inspire them: courage, honesty, fidelity, for example”. It is a friendship made up of a “desire for knowledge and improvement”.
And the work of Dumas, so warm, so lively, allows the reader, magic of literature, to become friends with the characters he accompanies and to say with them “all for one”, discovering a part of the world and of himself.
The philosopher André Comte-Sponville also shares this attachment to the musketeers. In There key to fields and others impromptu (PUF, 2023), his most recent collection of essays, he even asserts that “all books [qu’il a] writings, these thousands of pages, it was only to give Athos the philosophy it deserves…”
The melancholic temperament of the philosopher is no longer a secret for his faithful readers. In a gripping essay simply titled Mom, Comte-Sponville draws a heartbreaking portrait of his mother, unhappy and alcoholic, who made him believe, despite herself, that joy was factitious and that sadness was the truth. Only a long association with certain geniuses of philosophy – Epicurus, Spinoza, Pascal and Montaigne – enabled the author to understand that “it is not the truth that is sad, but our inability to accept it as it is “.
It is not surprising, under these conditions, that Comte-Sponville finds in Athos “the melancholic hero par excellence”, a friend to whom he devotes a splendid essay here. In the presence of his friends, writes Dumas, Athos often smiles, but never laughs. Betrayed by the woman of his life whom he ended up killing, he drags an insurmountable despair. D’Artagnan nevertheless raves about his greatness of soul, to the point of considering him “the perfect man”.
Comte-Sponville rightly sees the nobility of the character in his “courage of despair”. Having nothing left to lose, he fears nothing, not even death, which makes him absolutely free.
Philosophy, Comte-Sponville concludes, teaches this, but literature, when it is great, brings it to life. And Mario Bros., he doesn’t know what we’re talking about.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.