The Man in the Iron Mask

Aramis, now bishop of Vannes and secretly general of the Jesuit order, walks into a Bastille cell and tells the young prisoner there what nobody else will: he is the twin brother of Louis XIV, hidden since birth by Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. The plan that follows, swapping the twins during Fouquet’s fête at Vaux-le-Vicomte, drives the closing section of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, which Dumas serialised between 1847 and 1850 and which English publishers usually split into three books. This is the last of them, and it is far bleaker than The Three Musketeers. Fouquet’s sense of honour wrecks the conspiracy, Porthos is killed at Belle-Île, Athos dies of grief, Raoul falls at Gigelli in North Africa, and d’Artagnan is struck down at the moment his marshal’s baton reaches him.