Baisemeaux de Montlezun
Governor of the Bastille, in Aramis's debt and Aramis's power, who twice hands over the wrong prisoner.
To keep his post, his supper and his books in order, and to be told by someone in authority that he has done nothing wrong.
The book
At a glance
- Governor of the Bastille
- The Bertaudière tower and the governor's supper table
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBaisemeaux runs the Bastille as a business, worries about his accounts, and owes Aramis money and gratitude. Once he learns that the bishop is a confessor of the Jesuits he stops being a friend and becomes a subordinate. He is the instrument of the plot and the last person to understand it.
How Baisemeaux de Montlezun Is Portrayed
- At your orders, monseigneurIn Chapter I he lights the lantern himself, summons a turnkey, and tells Aramis he is at his orders. The text says he now feels himself an inferior.
- Seldon, MarchialiIn Chapter VIII he reads a release order for Seldon and is talked into believing it says Marchiali. He asks to keep the order, because if it is found it will prove he is lost and Aramis will have to save him.
- Less like the king than you saidIn Chapter XVII, locking the true king into Philippe's cell, he tells Aramis that the resemblance is striking but less than promised, and says he would never have been deceived by a substitution.
- His few remaining hairsIn Chapter XXIII he watches Marchiali walk out a second time on Fouquet's authority, with the king's own signature under the order, tears out most of the hair he has left, and strikes himself on the forehead.
If you like The Man in the Iron Mask
If you like Alexandre Dumas
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Mark Twain
The Missouri newspaperman who became America's most famous writer, and whose first book made its reputation partly out of Paris: in 1867 he arrived with a shipload of American tourists, renamed his guide Ferguson, watched the high-kicking can-can through his fingers and wrote it all down. He kept coming back — and was living in Paris in the mid-1890s, broke, while finishing the novel he considered his best, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.
View author
Mary Shelley
The author of Frankenstein, who first saw Paris at sixteen as a runaway. In the summer of 1814 she crossed from England to Calais with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, spent a week trapped in an expensive Paris hotel with no money, then bought a donkey and walked south-east across a France still wrecked by the Napoleonic wars. That journey became her first published book. Two years later, on a lake in Switzerland, she began her second.
View author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View author