Twenty Years After

Twenty years on, d'Artagnan is a lieutenant going nowhere, Athos has a son, Porthos wants a title and Aramis is an abbé — and the four are set against each other by Mazarin, the Fronde and an English king on his way to the block. Dumas wrote the sequel the year after The Three Musketeers, and made the old comradeship the thing at risk rather than the thing assumed. The son of Milady is waiting, and the debt is his to collect. Fifty-nine plates by painters from Watteau to Ingres follow the novel's seventeenth-century world of courts, camps and divided loyalties, the France of the Fronde in the pictures of the age.