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Illustrated portrait of Anne of Austria

A character in Twenty Years After

Anne of Austria

The queen regent, forty-six in the chapter that names her, who has forgotten the men who saved her once and needs them again.

The book

Cover of Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas
Twenty Years AfterAlexandre Dumas, 1845

The four musketeers at forty, split by a civil war in Paris and reunited under a scaffold in London.

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At a glance

In the book
Queen regent of France, mother of the boy king Louis XIV
Real person
Anne of Austria, 1601–1666

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Anne of Austria, widow of Louis XIII and regent for the boy Louis XIV, is the real queen the musketeers served in the first book, when they carried her diamond studs back from England. Dumas shows her twenty years older, ruled by Mazarin, and slow to remember the debt.

How Anne of Austria Is Portrayed

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • Forty-sixChapter IV is titled for her age, and shows Mazarin reaching her apartments in the Palais Royal by the private corridor that connects his rooms to hers.
  • Signing for BrousselIn Chapter XLVIII, with the barricades up and the crowd at the gates, she falls into a chair, takes a pen and signs the order setting Councillor Broussel at liberty.
  • The flight from ParisIn Chapters LI and LII she leaves the Palais Royal by night with the king, carried out of the city in the Coadjutor's carriage with d'Artagnan on the box.
  • The two signaturesIn Chapter LXXXVIII she signs d'Artagnan's commission as captain and Porthos's patent of nobility, saying as she does the second that here goes the barony.

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