Swash and buckle aplenty

A feeble king and his scheming minister, a hunchback noble and the Daughters of Repentance, a botched assassination and a walled-up prisoner, some comic horse-sex, cross-dressing valets, a handful of gay jokes, a dwarf, and a literal éminence grise. The latest instalment of Game of Thrones? No, actually: a sequel to The Three Musketeers.

December 1628, mere weeks after the great siege of La Rochelle, and attention has now turned to the goings-on in Italy, where France is being outmanoeuvred by Spain and the Austrian Habsburgs. The childless Louis XIII is forever said to be at death’s door; Queen Anne still mourns her departed lover Buckingham; the Queen Mother plots to put her second son upon the throne; and Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duke of Richelieu and of Fronsac, is, as usual, trying to keep his head atop his shoulders in the most difficult of circumstances.

Into all this strolls the Comte de Moret, aka Antoine de Bourbon, ‘natural son’ of Henri IV and therefore Louis’s half-brother (yes, another brother). He’s in disguise for now (of course), but to cut a long story short — i.e. 600 pages later — they do eventually invade Piedmont, the Comte in the heroic lead. And here the novel ends — quite accidentally, on something of a cliffhanger — because the paper it was churned out for went bust.

Serialised from 1865–66, The Red Sphinx is Alexandre Dumas’s unabashed attempt at recapturing certain former glories. With its cantering pace and patchwork of court gossip, official correspondence, ‘gallantry’ (that is, sex), operatically fortuitous timings and 13-page historical sidebars, it is basically a mash-up of every other Dumas novel, with all the subtlety and nuance of a Verdi opera worked over by the Daily Mail. (I stopped, in fact, to check it wasn’t just a cheeky franchise spin-off.)