RAKE INCARNATE
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers can be reduced to Spice Girl-style thumbnail archetypes. Athos, in this line-up, is Moody Musk, the nobleman with dark secrets who’s morose, sarcastic and prone to moues of sullen silence. Porthos is Party Musk, a vain blowhard who boasts of his prodigious conquests; a codpiecegrabbing cousin of Blackadder’s Lord Flashheart. And Aramis? He’s Enigmatic Musk, a still-waters Sphinx who conceals his prowess — as a lover, fighter, and much else besides — behind a serenely spruce façade.
Dumas makes much of the latter. When Aramis first appears, he’s a young buck of 22 or 23, with “an open, ingenuous countenance, a black, mild eye, and cheeks rosy and downy as an autumn peach”. Furthermore, “his delicate moustache marked…
