Comment on A Cabal of Paris

  1. Deiseach (Guest) on Chapter 2 Tue 01 Jan 2019 03:34AM UTC

    Porthos seems to be pretty simple to explain, which I imagine would make it all the more hilarious if he was the only one of them to really have a genuine Not His Fault Tragic Backstory ("so anyway that is how, at the age of five, my parents were murdered and I was falsely declared illegitimate and cheated out of my rightful fortune and title and ended up taken in by a passing band of Gypsies who smuggled me out of town before my scheming cousin could dispose of me and then the Gypsies left me with a poor but honest childless couple on the coast and I was brought up as a fisherman's child, but never mind all that, what do you think of my new suit?")

    Porthos does seem to be of solid yeoman stock, not a lot of money, with rather grand tastes and pretensions which he funds by finding sugar mommas, but he can't aim very high in that regard (despite telling Mousqueton that it's all duchesses and fine ladies); he's good-looking enough to attract women, rather vain, dressy, tall and strong, and not very smart (at least not when it comes to book-learning). He's not a complicated character, he's fairly honest and average, he's not stupid but he doesn't bother getting involved in all the intriguing that Aramis loves and he just wants to get rich, acquire a title of some sort, and retire to a country estate where he can indulge his love of good living.

    He's loyal as well, not just to his two idiots but also to his mistress, the rich (eventual) widow: that may be a marriage more or less of convenience but he did marry her and seems to have lived without much domestic drama, so while she presumably still held the purse strings she must have been happy ending up as a baroness and Porthos treated her well enough that she wanted to marry him when she did become a rich widow - she could just as easily have thrown him over for a better catch.

    He likes wine, women, song, food, good clothes and lodgings, admiration, and a good fight. He sticks with Athos, Aramis and d'Artagnan as best he can through all the intrigues and changes of alliances, which eventually leads to his death. Probably the most normal out of the Three of Them and the best of the lot if you wanted a guy not likely to kill you after marriage, refuse to ever marry you while stringing you along as a mistress, or exile you off to Normandy once it became inconvenient :-)

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