Count of Rochefort (The man from Meung): The man with the scar who was just like the musketeers, except for his master

The Three Musketeers begins with an insult. At an inn in Meung, in 1625, the young d’Artagnan, newly arrived from Gascony with a letter of introduction for the captain of the musketeers, sees a dark gentleman with a scar on his temple laughing at his yellow horse. He challenges him, is beaten by the man’s servants and wakes up without his letter. The man is the Count of Rochefort, Cardinal Richelieu’s confidential agent. For the rest of the novel he appears at the worst moments: he meets Milady at Meung, takes part in the intrigue around the queen, and helps the cardinal’s men abduct Constance Bonacieux, the queen’s seamstress whom d’Artagnan loves. D’Artagnan spends the whole book hunting “the man from Meung”. At the end, after the cardinal has given d’Artagnan his commission, the two finally settle their quarrel. The epilogue tells that they fought three times and that d’Artagnan wounded him three times; then they embraced and became friends. In the sequel, Twenty Years After, Rochefort, who has been imprisoned by Mazarin, takes the side of the Fronde and dies in a street fight by d’Artagnan’s sword.

// The theoryThe values that hide underneath

In 1961, four years after their famous article on neutralization, David Matza and Gresham Sykes published “Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values”. Their question was what delinquents actually want, if they share society’s norms. Their answer: they want things everybody wants. They pursue excitement, adventure, kicks; they show disdain for work and routine; they value toughness and masculine aggression; and they like spending money conspicuously. None of these values is foreign to respectable society. They are subterranean: present, admired, celebrated in films and novels, but kept for leisure, sport and war. The delinquent’s fault, Matza and Sykes argued, is not that he holds strange values, but that he lives them at the wrong time and in the wrong place. The difference between a hero and a delinquent often depends less on what they value than on who authorizes them to act on it.

// The subjectThe professional of the shadows

Rochefort is a secondary villain, but a memorable one. He is a nobleman, brave, loyal and discreet, the kind of man the cardinal trusts with delicate missions. He never shows the cruelty of Milady or the fanaticism of Felton. He does his job, and his job happens to place him against the heroes. His most recognizable features are physical: the scar, the cold smile at Meung. In the later novels, Dumas fills in the portrait of a man who has served one master all his life and is thrown away by the next, Mazarin, who keeps him in the Bastille. His decision to join the Fronde is not a moral conversion. It is the choice of another side for the same appetite for action.

// The crackShared values, different victims

The theory of subterranean values was written about working-class adolescents in American cities, not about seventeenth-century nobles. Applied to Rochefort, it explains the similarity between villain and heroes very well, and his particular crimes less well: those come from his loyalty to the cardinal, which belongs to theories of obedience and of state crime. The abduction of Constance is not a thrill-seeking adventure; it is a political operation against a woman whose only fault is to serve the queen.

The theory also points to an uncomfortable fact about the novel’s readers. We celebrate the musketeers’ duels, drinking and contempt for rules because we like their side, and we condemn the same acts in Rochefort because we do not. Rochefort chose to steal, to deceive and to help abduct a woman. What Matza and Sykes add is that the line between hero and villain, in Dumas as in life, is often drawn by the side one serves rather than by the values one holds.