{"id":1207,"date":"2013-05-23T10:15:30","date_gmt":"2013-05-23T04:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/?p=1207"},"modified":"2013-05-23T10:15:30","modified_gmt":"2013-05-23T04:45:30","slug":"the-three-musketeers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2013\/05\/23\/the-three-musketeers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Three Musketeers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I finished reading\u00a0<em>The Three Musketeers<\/em> yesterday. (These days, as a result of being broke and unable to afford books, all my reading is either review copies that newspapers send me, or out-of-copyright classics.)<\/p>\n<p>The book approves of, among other things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>extra-marital affairs<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 13px;\">monarchical government<\/span><\/li>\n<li>summary executions<\/li>\n<li>persecuting religious minorities<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>and throws in a bonus <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/WomenInRefrigerators\">girlfriend-in-refrigerator<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s impossible for this book to be anything but a\u00a0<strong>guilty<\/strong> pleasure. But pleasure it is.<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, one of the chapters begins this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It was a stormy and dark night; vast clouds covered the heavens, concealing the stars; the moon would not rise till midnight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Hmmm.\u00a0<em>The Three Musketeers<\/em> was published in 1844 in French, and I\u00a0<em>think<\/em> the translation I read dates to 1846.<\/p>\n<p>The more widely known &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night\">It was a dark and stormy night<\/a>&#8221; dates back to Lord Bulwer-Lytton&#8217;s 1830\u00a0<em>Paul Clifford<\/em>, so now I wonder just what is going on here. Does the original French version also contain &#8220;It was a stormy and dark night,&#8221; and did the translator reproduce it faithfully, or was the translator trying to sneak in a pop culture reference on his own accord? (Actually, back in the 1840s,\u00a0<em>was<\/em> &#8220;It was a dark and stormy night&#8221; a meme at all, or did it explode into consciousness thanks to Snoopy?) \u00a0And if Dumas had written this in the original French, was\u00a0<em>he<\/em> making fun of Bulwer-Lytton, or was he just doing it unselfconsciously, and being as melodramatic a writer? This is a mystery, on the order of, dare I say it, the identity of the man in the iron mask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I finished reading\u00a0The Three Musketeers yesterday. (These days, as a result of being broke and unable to afford books, all my reading is either review copies that newspapers send me, or out-of-copyright classics.) The book approves of, among other things: extra-marital affairs monarchical government summary executions persecuting religious minorities and throws in a bonus girlfriend-in-refrigerator. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-movies-and-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-jt","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1208,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions\/1208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}