The Three Musketeers: Pathos 3 key examples

The king is caught between Monsieur de Tréville, who wants Athos released, and the cardinal, who does not. Monsieur de Tréville gives the king many reasons why it would be more just to release him, including the fact that Athos is not only innocent but has in fact put his life on the line for the king. When the king continues to resist his pleas, Monsieur de Tréville begins expressing regret that the king is an unprincipled military leader who lets politics steer him toward mistreatment of his soldiers. Dumas tells the reader that this is a "rash" thing to say. It is out of line for Monsieur de Tréville to level such a serious accusation against the king, who is his boss and who supposedly derives his power from God. But, as Dumas goes on to explain, Monsieur de Tréville wants to provoke the king. The metaphor he uses for the king's reaction is an "explosion." While "explosive" anger usually has negative and dangerous connotations, Monsieur de Tréville also knows that fire makes light. His hope is that by riling up the king's "explosive" anger, he will help him see the "light" of things: no matter what the cardinal says, Athos has been wrongfully imprisoned.

Porthos does not really mean to go anywhere with Milady. At this point, he doesn't even know her. He and the other musketeers have run out of money trying to foil the cardinal's plot against the queen and the Duke of Buckingham. Now, they are looking for creative ways to afford the equipment they need for the military campaign the king is starting. Porthos has come to the church specifically to get money out of Madame Coquenard. He knows that she is miserly, but he also knows that she is possessive of him. He lies to her, telling her that he is going to his family estate in Brittany for money. He doesn't say outright that he also plans to get money from Milady, but he implies that they would be a suitable match for marriage. Their family estates, he claims, border one another, so a marriage would allow both families to expand the borders of their land. He implies that they will spend a great deal of enjoyable time in one another's company on the journey there. Madame Coquenard is left worrying that Porthos is going to end up marrying Milady and leaving her without a lover besides her husband. Porthos thus pushes Madame Coquenard into a "struggle between love and avarice" (avarice meaning greed), forcing her to feel that she will lose Porthos to Milady if she does not make it worth his while to abandon his plan to go to Brittany.

This scene is comical because it highlights how important money is to both Madame Coquenard and Porthos. Madame Coquenard is willing (if begrudgingly) to pay to keep Porthos's amorous attention trained on her, and Porthos is willing to admit that his love is all about money. Characters in the novel are constantly making political and financial decisions based on love and personal feelings. Through these characters who are so blatantly allowing money to determine their decisions in love, Dumas satirizes the idea that love transcends worldly concerns. For Porthos and Madame Coquenard, as with everyone else, love, money, and politics are all part of the same game.

The experience Milady describes is deeply traumatic. She emphasizes the physical strain of struggling against the Duke and the physical pain of having a "red-hot iron" pressed into her skin. She also describes the deep shame she felt while enduring this treatment. The fleur-de-lis indicates that she is a sex worker. In 17th-century England, there were significant consequences for premarital and extramarital sex, especially for women. Milady knows that as a Puritan, Felton has highly restrictive beliefs about sex. To him, there are not only legal but also severe moral implications to being branded as a sex worker; it is unthinkable, then, that Milady, who has been kidnapped and sexually assaulted, should bear the stigma of a woman who has chosen to have sex outside of marriage.

By emphasizing the pain and shame of this experience, Milady successfully causes Felton to "roar with anger." By the time he finds out that the Duke of Buckingham is responsible for Milady's mistreatment, he is so angry that he is ready to murder him on her behalf. Dumas makes it clear to the reader that nothing Milady is telling Felton is true. Her fabrication of such a traumatic tale is highly manipulative, and it cements her status as a villain in the book. While it is troubling that she makes up this tale and equally troubling that Dumas represents sexual assault as something women lie about, it is also worth noting that Dumas is writing a comedic scene. Milady knows just how to wind Felton up. He looks like a fool for believing her story in part because she is so plainly manipulating him, and in part because her story bears a striking resemblance to the plot of a wildly popular 18th-century novel, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Clarissa tells the tale of a young woman who steadfastly refuses to marry a man named Lovelace, who kidnaps her, repeatedly assaults her, and makes her life miserable until she dies. The novel was popular not only in England, but in Paris as well.

If Felton had read or even heard of this novel or the many others like it (which Dumas's readers almost certainly had), he might have recognized that Milady was feeding him a melodrama designed to stir up his emotions. Dumas thus gives his readers the chance to feel clever because they see what Felton does not—though, to be fair, Clarissa was published over 100 years after the period in which The Three Musketeers is set, so it would have been impossible for Felton to be familiar with it.