Dumas’ Electric Musketeer
Alexandre Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844) first introduces us to d’Artagnan, a young man up from the provinces to Paris, hoping to join the Musketeers of the Royal Guard, befriended by the greatest Musketeers of the age, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the three of the book’s title. The quartet have a series of swashbuckling adventures together, and at the end d’Artagnan, having foiled the machinations of the villanous Milday, is accepted into the Musketeers. The book was a huge success, and remains one of the most famous and recognised novels of the century. You may not have read it, but you know it: you know the story, and the characters.
Dumas first sequel, Vingt ans après (‘Twenty Years After’ 1845) takes up the story two decades after the adventures in the first, with the four friends meeting up again and travelling to England to try and save Charles 1 from revolution and execution. The Musketeers fail in this, although they come close: in Dumas’ version of the execution of Charles, Athos is hiding beneath the scaffold, and it is to him that Charles speaks his famous last word: ‘remember!’
Another sequel followed, the enormous Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard (1847-1850), 2000 pages, give or take: taking the four friends, now elderly and with sons of their own (the titular vicomte is Athos’s son, for instance) through their last adventures. In the first portion of the book the mission is: help the deposed Charles II — in Dumas’ novel, reduced to penury and travelling about France in disguise — get his throne back. To do this d’Artagnan conceives a plan: to raise the relatively modest sum of 40,000 louis, with it hire a small band of soldiers, travel to England, kidnap George Monck and compel him to restore the monarchy. (He doesn’t realise it, but Athos has also travelled to England with a — different — plan to restore Charles’s kingship: it transpires that when Charles I said ‘remember’ he actually meant ‘remember there’s a million pounds in gold buried in an abbey in Newcastle, go dig it up and use it to restore my son to the throne, but wait ten years, why not’). This is how Dumas describes d’Artagnan riding out, at the start of his mission:
Pour commencer, d’Artagnan se mit en route par le plus beau temps du monde, sans nuages au ciel, sans nuages à l’esprit, joyeux et fort, calme et décidé, gros de sa résolution, et par conséquent portant avec lui une dose décuple de ce fluide puissant que les secousses de l’âme font jaillir des nerfs et qui procurent à la machine humaine une force et une influence dont les siècles futurs se rendront, selon toute probabilité, plus arithmétiquement compte que nous ne pouvons le faire aujourd’hui. [Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847–51) ch 21]
Setting out, D’Artagnan began his journey with the best possible weather, without a cloud in the sky — and without a cloud on his mind, joyous and strong, calm and decided, greatly resolved, and consequently carrying with him a tenfold dose of that potent fluid which the shocks of mind cause to spring from the nerves, and which induce in the human machine a force and an influence of which future ages will render, according to all probability, a more arithmetical account than we can possibly do at present.
What is this, fluide puissant, this ‘potent fluid’? In his edition of the novel, David Coward says: ‘Dumas seems to have in mind something like adrenaline’. Something like because adrenaline itself was unknown in the 1840s (it was first identified in 1894, by English physiologists George Oliver and Edward Schafer, who observed that processed adrenal extract had a salutary effects in treating Addison’s disease; adrenaline itself was first isolated, and called ‘epinephrine’, by American pharmacologist John Abel in 1897; working separately, Japanese pharmacologist Jōkichi Takamine patented a purified extract from the adrenal glands as ‘adrenaline’ in 1901).
But I don’t think this is right. I think Dumas means: electricity. It was Descartes’ view that electrical or galvanic energy was some kind of special kind of superfine fluid, vortices of which created localised electrical effects. He explained magneticism in the same way: postulating a vortex of fluid matter around each magnet, the matter of the vortex entering by one pole and exiting by the other. This ‘fluide électrique’ was later theorised as a cosmic force, in essence spiritual, as with Louis Élisabeth de La Vergne de Tressan’s Essai Sur Le Fluide Électrique, Considéré Comme Agent Universel (1786). It was thought possible to tap-into this cosmic force, to cathect it into the soul and fire-up energising electrical puissance that passed through the corporeal body. Jean-Pierre-François Lesguillon’s long poem Emotions (1833) talks of an electrical ‘fluide puissant’ that stirs up the strength and vigour of the body:
[C’est] le feu qui nourrit l’univers!
Viens grossir ce foyer immense, d’où ruisselle
Un fluide puissant, galvanique étincelle,
Qui, de l’ame assoupie éveillant les accords,
Évoque les esprits inhumés dans les corps:
Qui, comme un sang nouveau dans les veines lancée,
Ressuscite la vie et souffle la pensée,
Et, rappelant la force en des membres éteints,
Alimente leur flamme à des soleils lointains. [Emotion, 54][It is] the fire that feeds the universe!
Let it come swell this great centre, from which flows
A powerful fluid, a galvanic spark,
Which, awakening the chords of the sleeping soul,
Evokes the spirit buried in our bodies:
That, like new blood launched into the veins,
Resurrects life and breathes thought,
And, recalling strength in extinguished members,
Feeds their flame to distant suns.
This is what Dumas is saying in this passage: d’Artagnan is old, but still vigorous, brave, strong. He has spent many years as the captain of the royal guard, but has now left the king’s service to pursue this new adventure. As he sets out, electrical energy kindles in his soul, and passes through his body, ten times as powerful as that experienced by ordinary mortals. Dumas is saying that his heroic Musketeer literally is electric.
