Did not finish. The book isn't bad, but I live in 2026 and have the attention span of a goldfish and I just can't work up much interest in swashbuckling.
Here are some notes I wrote while reading, mostly about dueling:
The first thing that bothered me in this book was that the Musketeers seem to fight entirely with swords. It's like writing a story about four horsemen and then explaining that they travel everywhere by bicycle.
The Musketeers were basically the equivalent of the secret service for the French king. They were created in 1622, when the king gave some of his troops muskets. Shortly thereafter his rival - Cardinal Richelieu - created his own troop of muskets. The king and the cardinal dislike each other, so when they decided to put a bunch of heavily armed young men on the streets of Paris it's not shocking that fights ensued.
There's a lot of dueling in this book, and I went down a bit of an AI rabbit hole on the subject. Early 17th century France was something of a golden age for the practice. About 500 men per year were killed in duels, from a population of 20 million, for a death rate of 2.5 per 100,000. However, duels were fought almost exclusively by gentlemen aged 15 - 35. Since only perhaps 5% of the population were gentlemen, and only maybe 40% of them were prime dueling age, the death rate in this cohort was probably more like 125 per 100,000. For comparison, the murder rate in France today is about 1.4 per 100,000. In the U.S. it's around 6, but for young Black men it's around 70.
So called honor duels descended from the medieval practice of trial by combat. The legal basis for trial by combat was that God would not allow an innocent person (or their champion) to be defeated, so the fight was a way of calling on divine wisdom in cases that couldn’t be settled by human judgement. Over time evidence began to accumulate that instead of favoring innocent people, like he was supposed to, God was favored whoever the better fighter. One might also suspect that being good at killing people in combat was actually inversely correlated with innocence, which - if true - would have undermined the whole theoretical basis for the institution.
There's a scene in When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill where two girls are discussing dueling: “Why would anyone agree to a duel?” Marie asked. “You’re risking your life to make a point to someone you don’t like.”
I pretty much agree with Marie on this one, but with two small caveats. The first is that the men in a duel don't seem to have necessarily disliked each other that much. D'Artagnan challenges half the men he meets to duels - sometimes within a few seconds after first encountering them. Some of the men seem baffled but they still agree because if a gentleman is challenged to a duel he has to accept.
The second is that the duelists weren't necessarily trying to make a point to one another - they were trying to make a point to the rest of society. If I go outside and run into D'Artagnan (transported to Mexico City in 2026) and he challenges me to duel, as he almost certainly would, I would decline. Even if he spit on the ground in disgust and called me a cur and a coward, I would still have to say no. I think much of the difference is social. In 1626 if I said no everyone else in town would have agreed with D'Artagnan that I was contemptible, while if I agreed to the duel and killed him everyone would agree that I was brave and admirable. Four hundred years later the equation has changed. Today if you get into a duel people think you're insane and you'll go to prison. My sense is that even among people who do commit murder today - the cartels for instance - its more likely to be about interest than honor.
I’ve gotten a bit off track from the story of the Musketeers, but it doesn’t really matter. They run around getting into fights, wooing ladies, solving mysteries, and sometimes just bro'ing out.