The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.
Illustrated portrait of Athos, the Comte de La Fère

A character in Twenty Years After

Athos, the Comte de La Fère

The gravest of the four, now a country gentleman at Bragelonne raising a boy he does not call his son.

What they want

To make Raoul an accomplished gentleman, and to serve a cause he can call honourable.

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.

View the book

At a glance

In the book
The Comte de La Fère, of the château de Bragelonne near Blois
Household
Raoul, his ward, and Grimaud, his servant who barely speaks
Serves
The Fronde, with Aramis; then Charles I in England

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Athos has left the musketeers and lives on his estate near Blois as the Comte de La Fère. When d'Artagnan finds him in Chapters XIII and XIV he is sober, calm and barely aged, and he explains the change in one word: Raoul, the boy of fifteen he has brought up. He receives d'Artagnan as a friend, listens to the cardinal's offer, and turns it down without saying so.

He has chosen the other side. With Aramis he helps the duc de Beaufort escape from Vincennes, and in England he serves Charles I because a king in trouble is a cause he can respect. The execution at Whitehall, which he hears from beneath the scaffold, is the centre of the book, and his fight with Mordaunt in the sea is its end.

How Athos, the Comte de La Fère Is Portrayed

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

  • What Raoul changedIn Chapter XIV he tells d'Artagnan that he was dried up like a withered tree, attached to nothing, and that Raoul worked the change his friend can see in him.
  • Marie MichonIn Chapter XX he brings Raoul to Madame de Chevreuse, who once travelled as a needlewoman from Tours called Marie Michon. She and Athos recognise each other as the boy's parents without saying it aloud.
  • The cathedral at Saint-DenisIn Chapter XXII he furbishes a sword for Raoul, gives him his counsel on how a gentleman should live, and after the boy rides off goes into the cathedral to kneel and pray in its darkest corner.
  • Up, sire!In Chapter LVI Charles I has just learned that the Scots have betrayed him. Athos tells the king that this is no time for recrimination but a time to show himself a king and a gentleman, and that three men at least will not betray him.
  • Under the scaffoldIn Chapter LXVI he stands beneath the boards at Whitehall while the king kneels and speaks to him in French through a gap. The axe falls on the word "Remember!" and the king's blood runs down onto his brow.
  • The dagger in the seaIn Chapter LXXIII Mordaunt drags him under the water. Athos comes up alone and Mordaunt floats past with a gold-hilted dagger in his chest. Asked why, Athos says only that he has a son and wished to live.

Athos, the Comte de La Fère quotes

Lines spoken by or about Athos, the Comte de La Fère, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book.

our presence here is the best proof of former friendship; not one of us has failed the others at this rendezvous; not one has, therefore, to reproach himself.
— Athos (dialogue) · Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After (1845), the anonymous nineteenth-century translation, Chapter XXVIII
this is not a moment for recrimination, but a time to show yourself a king and a gentleman. Up, sire! up! for you have here at least three men who will not betray you.
— Athos (dialogue) · Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After (1845), the anonymous nineteenth-century translation, Chapter LVI
I have a son. I wished to live
— Athos (dialogue) · Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After (1845), the anonymous nineteenth-century translation, Chapter LXXIII
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

Athos survives the book and returns to Bragelonne with Raoul in Chapter XC, telling d'Artagnan that he is nothing more than a plain country gentleman now. The million in gold Charles I described to him under the scaffold, buried at Newcastle for the king's eldest son, is a thread the next novel picks up.

If you like Twenty Years After

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Alexandre Dumas

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

  • Illustrated portrait of Mark Twain

    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
  • Illustrated portrait of Mary Shelley

    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
  • Illustrated portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline

    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
Back to Twenty Years After