If I've learned anything so far in The Great Book Adventure, it's that expectations will get you absolutely nowhere when reading classic literature. It seems that people will take whatever they want from books and apply them however they want, simply ignoring the parts they don't like. This can lead the prospective reader far, far astray. Nowhere have I found this more true than in Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers.
Take, for example, the Musketeers' motto: all for one, one for all. I can't count the number of times I have heard that trumpeted as a theme for unification. It has a nice ring to it and is filled with noble sentiment, and it imbues the musketeers with much the same. The problem, of course, is that it's only been brought up once in the two-thirds of the book that I've read. I'm not sure why, but I always thought they used it as a sort of rallying cry. You know, before each encounter with the Cardinal's men, they would circle up in a frilly French huddle, put their hands together and cry out "all for one, one for all!" As I read, I keep waiting for that moment, waiting for them to dash into action as a team. Of course, to do that, the four main characters would have to stay together longer than five minutes.
Long about chapter 20, when d'Artagnan and the three musketeers set out on a mission to deliver a letter from the Queen of France to the Duke of Buckingham in London, things looked promising. I thought for sure I was in for a good bit of adventure, with duels and battles along the way. It panned out that way only sort of. There were three attacks, apparently by the Cardinal's men, but at each one, rather than stand together, they left someone behind. First, Porthos gets sidetracked in a duel, then Aramis gets shot in an ambush and left at a roadside inn, and finally Athos gets accused of being a counterfeiter and is attacked. Each time, d'Artagnan leaves his friends to fate, dashing off with whatever members of the dwindling party are left to follow him. By the time he makes the crossing to England, it is only his ever present servant Planchet who is still with him. This is a long way from the ideal of brotherly togetherness I came into this book expecting, but as I said, expectations will get you nowhere in classic literature. This, I find, is becoming more and more true as it relates specifically to d'Artagnan.
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