More 'Dumas dates'

[igenlode]

I went to considerable trouble to check up on the whereabouts and activities of Gaston d'Orléans in the years prior to the Fronde in order to ensure that I actually could describe him as sulking at Blois at this period (something we only see him doing in the books ten years later, in the opening of The Vicomte de Bragelonne). It occurred to me only while typing up Chapter One (oops -- I'm going to need to consider chapter titles...) that I possibly ought to check on the date of the remarriage of the mother of Louise de La Vallière, since I was setting my story a couple of years before canon (for various reasons, but mainly in order to feature a younger Raoul who would be close to the age of Nat in "Little Men"!) and wasn't sure quite when she had married the Marquis de Saint-Remy.
I was rather disconcerted to discover that Louise's father didn't even die until 1651, and was thus technically speaking still alive at the time of the novel, never mind the earlier date at which this story was set ;-)

But the error is quite definitely that of Dumas, who refers multiple times to the mother of Louise in Twenty Years After as "Madame de Saint-Remy", and canon trumps history every time. In Dumas' universe, Louise (born August 1644) is already seven in 1648 and has a stepfather -- and the events of 1661 are stated to take place ten years after those of 1649, which is how Louise manages to be seven in the first book despite being historically seventeen at the time of the second :-D