Dumas dates
1 June 2025 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeDates and ages (probably mutually inconsistent)
Athos tells Raoul on their arrival in Paris that he spent seven of the sweetest and yet most bitter years of his life in his old lodgings on the rue Férou (including the further years after d'Artagnan's promotion?)
He appeals to Porthos during the confrontation at the Place Royale on the grounds that "we slept ten years side by side", presumably referring to the length of time over which the two of them served together as musketeers.
D'Artagnan reminds Aramis, when the latter laments his thirty-seven years, that he, d'Artagnan, was formerly two or three years Aramis' junior, which would make Aramis on the contrary well over forty :-p
At the period of "The Three Musketeers" when d'Artagnan goes to find what has become of the three friends he lost along the route to England, Aramis is described as being "a handsome young man of twenty-three or twenty four". In this same chapter he tells d'Artagnan that he was about to turn twenty when his intention to take holy orders (although since he also says he had been in the seminary since he was only nine years old, one has to wonder how much of a choice he was ever given in the matter!) was forestalled by receiving a mortal insult, upon which he then spent a year assiduously mastering swordplay and killed his man at the first thrust of the ensuing duel. It was during this year that he met Porthos; he possibly met Athos only after the scandal of the duel, but the two of them persuaded him to become a musketeer, presumably having now turned twenty-one. His father had apparently been killed "at the siege of Arras" (presumably neither the siege of 1640 nor that of 1477!)
On the other hand, at the start of the book we are told that neither Porthos nor Aramis had ever seen Athos laugh in "the five or six years during which they had been the closest of companions", which is obviously inconsistent with Aramis' stated age. And we know that d'Artagnan becomes lieutenant after the siege of La Rochelle at the age of twenty -- which is at least historically consistent for once with his having been eighteen at the start of the book in 1626 -- so Aramis probably *is* still in his early twenties, and at any rate clearly cannot have been a musketeer for over five years at the beginning of the novel :-p
Athos tells Raoul on their arrival in Paris that he spent seven of the sweetest and yet most bitter years of his life in his old lodgings on the rue Férou (including the further years after d'Artagnan's promotion?)
He appeals to Porthos during the confrontation at the Place Royale on the grounds that "we slept ten years side by side", presumably referring to the length of time over which the two of them served together as musketeers.
D'Artagnan reminds Aramis, when the latter laments his thirty-seven years, that he, d'Artagnan, was formerly two or three years Aramis' junior, which would make Aramis on the contrary well over forty :-p
At the period of "The Three Musketeers" when d'Artagnan goes to find what has become of the three friends he lost along the route to England, Aramis is described as being "a handsome young man of twenty-three or twenty four". In this same chapter he tells d'Artagnan that he was about to turn twenty when his intention to take holy orders (although since he also says he had been in the seminary since he was only nine years old, one has to wonder how much of a choice he was ever given in the matter!) was forestalled by receiving a mortal insult, upon which he then spent a year assiduously mastering swordplay and killed his man at the first thrust of the ensuing duel. It was during this year that he met Porthos; he possibly met Athos only after the scandal of the duel, but the two of them persuaded him to become a musketeer, presumably having now turned twenty-one. His father had apparently been killed "at the siege of Arras" (presumably neither the siege of 1640 nor that of 1477!)
On the other hand, at the start of the book we are told that neither Porthos nor Aramis had ever seen Athos laugh in "the five or six years during which they had been the closest of companions", which is obviously inconsistent with Aramis' stated age. And we know that d'Artagnan becomes lieutenant after the siege of La Rochelle at the age of twenty -- which is at least historically consistent for once with his having been eighteen at the start of the book in 1626 -- so Aramis probably *is* still in his early twenties, and at any rate clearly cannot have been a musketeer for over five years at the beginning of the novel :-p