As a child I loved the swashbuckling adventure of The Three Musketeers. I felt a kind of kindred spirit in D’Artagnan. Re-reading it years later, after experiencing a little more of what life can throw at you and hearing many other literary voices, was something of a shock. It didn’t help that I also discovered my handsome 1950s hardback was abridged.
In The Three Musketeers we are told who the heroes are. They are brave. Loyal, at least to each other. Honourable enough to duel for pride and friendship. They play politics with swords drawn and heads held high.
Then Milady de Winter arrives and spoils the tidy “all the boys together” narrative.
Milady is intelligent, measured, and strategic. She spots weakness instantly and weaponises charm. She survives by thinking three moves ahead. In another story these qualities would make her formidable. Here, in the court of Louis XIII, they make her unforgivable.
The musketeers lie. They manipulate. They kill when necessary. Their violence is framed as loyalty to the crown and brotherhood. Milady does the same, but without the protection of old-boys-club camaraderie. Her ambition is not reframed as honour. It is branded as corruption.
Quite literally.
The fleur-de-lis burned into her shoulder marks her as a criminal, a woman permanently defined by past judgement. A woman once left hanging from a tree and expected to die.
By the end, the musketeers hold their own tribunal. No king presiding. No court of law. Just men deciding that this woman has crossed a line, one they themselves have been fencing back and forth for six hundred pages.
They judge her. Then they execute her.
It is one of the most disquieting scenes in the novel, because it forces a question the book never quite answers:
Why is ruthlessness strategy when men do it, but monstrosity when a woman does?
Milady is not innocent. She is dangerous, and undeniably ruthless. But the speed with which she becomes disposable reveals something darker than straightforward villainy.
The novel treats male loyalty with reverence. Brotherhood is almost sacred.
Female power, when it refuses submission, must be extinguished.
From the start, Milady stands alone. No one is ever truly on her side. And it is that tension which keeps The Three Musketeers alive.
Not the duels.
Not the cloaks.
Not even the cry of “all for one, and one for all.”
The Three Musketeers was our Classic of the Month Club title for April. You can pick up our edition of the book here.
