* Okay, so, they're the three ''Musket''eers. Has anyone ever actually seen any of them using a musket?
** Actually, yes. At the siege of La Rochelle in the first book, they have breakfast in a newly captured bastion to discuss anti-Cardinal plans in a private place. The enemy sallies out to retake the bastion and our heroes buy time (they bet four other soldiers that they would stay there for an hour) using muskets taken from some dead guys. Muskets show up a few other times, too, but that's the most memorable.
*** They're shown to be really quite adept with muskets, especially considering how difficult it was to aim back then. In the above example of La Rochelle it's said quite plainly that every bullet they fired hit someone, which for that time is incredible marksmanship. They just use swords more often because most of the fighting they do is close quarters.
*** And because swords were the standard sidearm of the era. Carrying a musket in an everyday setting would have been roughly equivalent to carrying an assault rifle to the grocery store.
* When the Musketeers capture Milady near the end of the first book, why do they resort to taking the law into their own hands and subject her to a KangarooCourt and VigilanteExecution? Why didn't they hand her over to Richelieu, her boss, explain to him about all the awful things she's been doing, and have ''him'' eliminate her instead? Only ''one'' of the crimes she committed (i.e. the assassination of Buckingham) was done under his orders, with the rest done independently of him out of her own spite and pettiness, and Richelieu makes it clear that even ''he'' doesn't approve of her actions when d'Artagnan informs him of them, so he likely would've punished her had he found out earlier. Letting Richelieu get rid of Milady would've eliminated her evil without soiling the Musketeers' hands with murder, and would have made them a lot more heroic-looking in the process. Plus it would've given Mordaunt, Milady's son, an entirely different target for his revenge and spared the Musketeers a lot of grief and trouble in the second book.
** It was a legal proceeding, since Athos was acting in his position as le Comte. Richelieu may not have had legal standing anyway, since murdering Lord de Winter happened in England, they have no hard evidence that she poisoned the Anjou wine and not even an eyewitness to Constance's murder.
** In fact, when Athos accuses her of being branded, she thinks she has an out, because the branding had not been done by any tribunal. The only coincidence of this affair is their choice of executioner. Athos uses him because he's the local headsman, but he just happens to also be the guy who branded Milady for her very first crime of seducing and abandoning his brother. So they really were the only ones who could do it.
* Why are the musketeers so outraged about the duke of Buckingham's assassination? The man was on the verge of waging war to France, their own country, and for a really petty matter at that. As a French spy, this must have been the most powerful move she (and Richelieu) could have made, even if her motivations weren't at all selfless.
** This is one of the themes of the book and, to a much larger extent, the entire trilogy. All four protagonists (especially Athos and young d'Artagnan) are presented by the novel(s) as adhering to a rapidly-disappearing set of values. They value honour and loyalty and other knightly virtues - even in ways that seem contradictory to modern sensibilities. This tension between being, in some ways, awful people and having very strong principles (or not having them, which is the reason for much of the conflict between Aramis and the rest of the friends in later books), is a large part of the characters. Whether it's ValuesDissonance or DeliberateValuesDissonance on the author's part is unclear (the narration describes the Musketeers as among the last few great people, but also points out each character's hypocrisy on many occasion in all three novels). And a nobleman does not approve of low tactics like assassination for reasons both moral and pragmatic. On the one hand, if high nobility are killed left and right in such a crass way, it's more than a little worrying for any nobleman, who relies on the notion that nobility are on top of the heap by virtue of the divine-ordained order of things. Assassination may give people the wrong ideas. On the other, more idealistic side, Buckingham is a fellow noble. Killing him in a duel is fine. Killing him on battlefield is great. Assassination is underhanded and therefore disgusting. Especially assassination by a woman, which is especially bad because the Musketeers - again, not following modern (or even contemporary to Dumas) sensibilities - don't see women as equals and judge actions by men vs women with some pretty jarring double standards. The book(s) make much more sense if you view them from a rather schizophrenic, skewed sense of honor and justice (often used to justify awful actions that were just convenient for the protagonists) rather than from any consistent ethical or political perspective. Again - this is possibly part of the actual point of the book(s).
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