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"Under the Red Robe", Stanley J. Weyman
As with "Scaramouche", this was a book that I was a bit disappointed by when I first read it, having originally been excited to find a copy of after having seen and enjoyed the film version ("Under the Red Robe", 1937: It was a period of plot and counter-plot, of reckless gallantry and ruthless oppression ... the time of D'Artagnan, of Cyrano De Bergerac, of Gil De Berault, the "Black Death"). Doubtless I was hoping for a novelisation of what I've just seen, which this of course isn't -- although I seem to remember that it's rather closer in spirit than "Scaramouche".
But again, sufficient years have now elapsed that I have long since forgotten almost everything about the film save a vague favourable impression, and I am able to approach the novel on its own terms. And right from the start you realise that the author is doing something unexpected (and doing it very well): the protagonist, Gil de Berault, is quite recognisably *the villain* in this scenario, although of course he doesn't see himself that way.
It's the classic set-up of a naive young foreigner being fleeced by a hard-bitten professional who makes his living in a disreputable establishment by playing at cards for high stakes -- and cheating; he admits quite openly that he won by being able to see his opponent's cards in the mirror behind him. He then deliberately pushes his victim into a duel, outmanipulating the Marquis who tries to intervene, and puts a sword-thrust through his body after the young man has spared him when he himself was at a momentary disadvantage: "if I let this pass I must leave Paris and the eating-house, and starve".
It subsequently transpires that he has faith that he is skilled enough to do this and end the fight without intending to kill his victim: "a high chest-thrust carefully delivered". But we and all the onlookers take it for granted that we have just witnessed cold-blooded murder; Gil's narrative voice is bitter and cynical, despite the momentary qualms of conscience that he dismisses, and the scenario is familiar from a dozen other historical novels. The difference is that in this case the protagonist is not the older man stepping in to try to stop the young idiot from playing into the villain's hands, nor the naive boy who falls victim to a hardened gamester with an ugly reputation. We're seeing events from the point of view of the man who has set the whole thing up, and who surveys everyone around him with contempt.
But even Gil de Berault meets his match when it comes to Cardinal Richelieu ("smiling villainously, while he gently smoothed the fur of a cat"... but this was fifty years pre-Bond!), on whose support he has counted to spare him from the penalty for his deeds, but who has no intention of saving him this time from the gallows. The best Gil can manage, after humiliating himself to plead, is to get his sentence commuted on condition he carries out a spying mission for the Cardinal instead. His task is to gain the confidence of a family of rebel nobles, get admission into their home, and betray them. It's dangerous, because if his aims are discovered he will probably be torn apart by the infuriated locals, and dishonourable -- but then with his lifestyle honour is a luxury that no longer means much.
So he sets off cynically to win his own freedom by using all his cunning to deliver another man to interrogation and torture or death, Initially the infiltration mission does in fact have strong overtones of a James Bond thriller about it, however anachronistic the comparison might seem. He finally makes it into the chateau by contriving to get himself beaten up and appealing to the sympathies of the ladies of the house, but the treatment he receives there and the forgotten promptings of his own better nature begin to undermine his purpose, and he has to remind himself of who he is: After all, this was a little, little place; the people who lived here— I shrugged my shoulders. France, power, pleasure, life, everything worth winning, worth having, lay yonder in the great city. A boy might wreck himself here for a fancy; a man of the world, never.
Except that he finds himself outfoxed by the woman he is more than half falling in love with, and vows to prove her wrong... and then a force of soldiers arrive on the same mission as his own, and he finds his loyalties thoroughly confused -- though some things never change (Murder? Merely because I had planned the duel and provoked the quarrel? Never had I heard anything so preposterous...)
The one principle on which he still prides himself is that he is always loyal to the hand that pays him, and in this case that is the Cardinal -- so when the question is put by one of his supposed allies as to whether he is playing the traitor to his master or to the two women, it cuts a good deal closer to the bone than he is prepared to admit. My God, how, after this, could I do what I had come to do?... how could I meet her eyes, and stand before her, a Caliban, a Judas, the vilest, lowest thing she could conceive?
And yet, forced by circumstances, he *does* -- again an unexpected outcome in this genre -- and ends up escorting the prisoner and his sister back to Paris. There is some odd plot-play with masks that I can't make out, because it never seems to come to anything; I naturally assumed that the heavily masked woman was, yet again, swapping identities with her sister-in-law or with someone else, but in fact it transpires that (so far as I can tell) she is exactly who she says she is at all points during the journey, so the mask seems completely pointless. And I suspected the slender, fair-haired masked rescuer, whom the prisoner is so adamant that Gil must not unmask, likewise of being Mademoiselle or Madame in disguise, but in fact we never do discover his identity, and apparently he actually is a man, so again this is an odd hanging plot point introduced to no apparent purpose: we never find out who he is (even though we are explicitly told that Gil himself would recognise him if the mask were removed) and the episode plays no part in any further events. Unnecessary and very odd.
And then there is a final twist; two twists, of which the second is to my mind considerably the greater achievement. First of all it is revealed that the 'triumph' that Gil has been planning is a moral one: having brought his prisoner to the outskirts of Paris, he intends to vindicate himself by proving that although he *could* have delivered his victim up to Richelieu despite everything anybody could do to prevent it, he chooses not to. He will release him to flee the country, and return to the Cardinal to take the (probably fatal) consequences upon his own, Gil's, head.
And secondly, the author switches our perceptions and changes our sympathies again when Gil enters Paris only to find Richelieu out of favour, and on the point of exile and perhaps worse. Events have, seemingly miraculously, played into our hero's hands and virtue is rewarded; he is reprieved from his self-imposed penalty. Only this was a great man, if ever a great man lived, and they were all leaving him; and I— well, I had no cause to love him. But I had taken his money, I had accepted his commission, and I had betrayed him. And in our eyes the Cardinal all of a sudden is no longer an all-powerful sinister figure but a lion pulled down by jackals, with our sympathies at the last moment entirely reversed...
But all ends well. For Richelieu, for Gil -- who has entirely forgotten hin own fate for a moment in the palace drama -- and for the lady he loves, who can finally believe that he is as she thought she saw him at first. He is banished, 'at the King's pleasure' and by the Cardinal's gift: banished from the old life of vice to go into exile in the depths of the countryside, in the peace and beauty of her home as her husband and at her side. And "the great Cardinal, once more triumphant over his enemies, saw with cold, smiling eyes the world pass through his chamber. The flood-tide of his prosperity lasted thirteen years from that time, and ceased only with his death."
For a book about an infamous duellist, it's notably lacking in sword-fights, save for that opening scene that sets up the character. For a book about an embittered, dishonoured man, it is full of painful questions of honour. For a historical romance, it's perhaps more predictable, in that the characters duel with their wits and then fall in love despite themselves (although it has only just struck me that I don't think we, or Gil, *ever* learn the lady's name: she is always either 'Madame' or 'Mademoiselle', which does not in the least preclude the most intense sentiments between them :-) And as a period thriller/adventure full of twists and turns and sudden menace, it's fairly gripping. But it's definitely unusual for its era and genre in consciously portraying the protagonist as an antihero.
But again, sufficient years have now elapsed that I have long since forgotten almost everything about the film save a vague favourable impression, and I am able to approach the novel on its own terms. And right from the start you realise that the author is doing something unexpected (and doing it very well): the protagonist, Gil de Berault, is quite recognisably *the villain* in this scenario, although of course he doesn't see himself that way.
It's the classic set-up of a naive young foreigner being fleeced by a hard-bitten professional who makes his living in a disreputable establishment by playing at cards for high stakes -- and cheating; he admits quite openly that he won by being able to see his opponent's cards in the mirror behind him. He then deliberately pushes his victim into a duel, outmanipulating the Marquis who tries to intervene, and puts a sword-thrust through his body after the young man has spared him when he himself was at a momentary disadvantage: "if I let this pass I must leave Paris and the eating-house, and starve".
It subsequently transpires that he has faith that he is skilled enough to do this and end the fight without intending to kill his victim: "a high chest-thrust carefully delivered". But we and all the onlookers take it for granted that we have just witnessed cold-blooded murder; Gil's narrative voice is bitter and cynical, despite the momentary qualms of conscience that he dismisses, and the scenario is familiar from a dozen other historical novels. The difference is that in this case the protagonist is not the older man stepping in to try to stop the young idiot from playing into the villain's hands, nor the naive boy who falls victim to a hardened gamester with an ugly reputation. We're seeing events from the point of view of the man who has set the whole thing up, and who surveys everyone around him with contempt.
But even Gil de Berault meets his match when it comes to Cardinal Richelieu ("smiling villainously, while he gently smoothed the fur of a cat"... but this was fifty years pre-Bond!), on whose support he has counted to spare him from the penalty for his deeds, but who has no intention of saving him this time from the gallows. The best Gil can manage, after humiliating himself to plead, is to get his sentence commuted on condition he carries out a spying mission for the Cardinal instead. His task is to gain the confidence of a family of rebel nobles, get admission into their home, and betray them. It's dangerous, because if his aims are discovered he will probably be torn apart by the infuriated locals, and dishonourable -- but then with his lifestyle honour is a luxury that no longer means much.
So he sets off cynically to win his own freedom by using all his cunning to deliver another man to interrogation and torture or death, Initially the infiltration mission does in fact have strong overtones of a James Bond thriller about it, however anachronistic the comparison might seem. He finally makes it into the chateau by contriving to get himself beaten up and appealing to the sympathies of the ladies of the house, but the treatment he receives there and the forgotten promptings of his own better nature begin to undermine his purpose, and he has to remind himself of who he is: After all, this was a little, little place; the people who lived here— I shrugged my shoulders. France, power, pleasure, life, everything worth winning, worth having, lay yonder in the great city. A boy might wreck himself here for a fancy; a man of the world, never.
Except that he finds himself outfoxed by the woman he is more than half falling in love with, and vows to prove her wrong... and then a force of soldiers arrive on the same mission as his own, and he finds his loyalties thoroughly confused -- though some things never change (Murder? Merely because I had planned the duel and provoked the quarrel? Never had I heard anything so preposterous...)
The one principle on which he still prides himself is that he is always loyal to the hand that pays him, and in this case that is the Cardinal -- so when the question is put by one of his supposed allies as to whether he is playing the traitor to his master or to the two women, it cuts a good deal closer to the bone than he is prepared to admit. My God, how, after this, could I do what I had come to do?... how could I meet her eyes, and stand before her, a Caliban, a Judas, the vilest, lowest thing she could conceive?
And yet, forced by circumstances, he *does* -- again an unexpected outcome in this genre -- and ends up escorting the prisoner and his sister back to Paris. There is some odd plot-play with masks that I can't make out, because it never seems to come to anything; I naturally assumed that the heavily masked woman was, yet again, swapping identities with her sister-in-law or with someone else, but in fact it transpires that (so far as I can tell) she is exactly who she says she is at all points during the journey, so the mask seems completely pointless. And I suspected the slender, fair-haired masked rescuer, whom the prisoner is so adamant that Gil must not unmask, likewise of being Mademoiselle or Madame in disguise, but in fact we never do discover his identity, and apparently he actually is a man, so again this is an odd hanging plot point introduced to no apparent purpose: we never find out who he is (even though we are explicitly told that Gil himself would recognise him if the mask were removed) and the episode plays no part in any further events. Unnecessary and very odd.
And then there is a final twist; two twists, of which the second is to my mind considerably the greater achievement. First of all it is revealed that the 'triumph' that Gil has been planning is a moral one: having brought his prisoner to the outskirts of Paris, he intends to vindicate himself by proving that although he *could* have delivered his victim up to Richelieu despite everything anybody could do to prevent it, he chooses not to. He will release him to flee the country, and return to the Cardinal to take the (probably fatal) consequences upon his own, Gil's, head.
And secondly, the author switches our perceptions and changes our sympathies again when Gil enters Paris only to find Richelieu out of favour, and on the point of exile and perhaps worse. Events have, seemingly miraculously, played into our hero's hands and virtue is rewarded; he is reprieved from his self-imposed penalty. Only this was a great man, if ever a great man lived, and they were all leaving him; and I— well, I had no cause to love him. But I had taken his money, I had accepted his commission, and I had betrayed him. And in our eyes the Cardinal all of a sudden is no longer an all-powerful sinister figure but a lion pulled down by jackals, with our sympathies at the last moment entirely reversed...
But all ends well. For Richelieu, for Gil -- who has entirely forgotten hin own fate for a moment in the palace drama -- and for the lady he loves, who can finally believe that he is as she thought she saw him at first. He is banished, 'at the King's pleasure' and by the Cardinal's gift: banished from the old life of vice to go into exile in the depths of the countryside, in the peace and beauty of her home as her husband and at her side. And "the great Cardinal, once more triumphant over his enemies, saw with cold, smiling eyes the world pass through his chamber. The flood-tide of his prosperity lasted thirteen years from that time, and ceased only with his death."
For a book about an infamous duellist, it's notably lacking in sword-fights, save for that opening scene that sets up the character. For a book about an embittered, dishonoured man, it is full of painful questions of honour. For a historical romance, it's perhaps more predictable, in that the characters duel with their wits and then fall in love despite themselves (although it has only just struck me that I don't think we, or Gil, *ever* learn the lady's name: she is always either 'Madame' or 'Mademoiselle', which does not in the least preclude the most intense sentiments between them :-) And as a period thriller/adventure full of twists and turns and sudden menace, it's fairly gripping. But it's definitely unusual for its era and genre in consciously portraying the protagonist as an antihero.