![]() ![]() ![]() Played by Lana Turner in the 1948 film, Dumas's villainess personifies the blokeish 19th-century terror of strong women: Milady is a psychopathic blonde who uses her seductive powers to manipulate and serially kill a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Myra Hindley, with a dash of Thatcher. No wonder the newspaper in which the novel was first serialised in 1844 saw its circulation shoot up. Later, discovering the ruse, she ends up repeatedly burying her dagger so deeply in the door through which d'Artagnan has escaped by a whisker, that the blade pokes right through - to the consternation of Kitty and our stark-naked hero. The tricked woman is, of course, the wicked spy called Milady. At 15, one can be forgiven for admiring a hero who kills at the slightest provocation makes it with other men's wives or pretends to be his love-rival in order to sleep with a beautiful woman - with the added thrill, in d'Artagnan's case, of having Kitty, the pretty soubrette he's already humped, weeping next door, her ear clamped to the paper-thin walls. ![]() ![]() The Three Musketeers is a steamy, disturbing book that would have delighted me, not at nine, but at 15. This revivifying, unbowdlerised translation into (American) English by Richard Pevear makes me realise what I was, in fact, missing. ![]()
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