Are the Three Musketeers allergic to muskets?(2014)

Summary

The BBC's new drama series The Musketeers – adapted from Alexandre Dumas' novel Les Trois Mousquetaires – made its debut on Sunday evening. Ahead of the screening, Dr Simon Kemp, Oxford University Fellow and Tutor in French, tackled the curious question of why the musketeers appear to have an aversion to muskets..."So here it comes. Peter Capaldi – Malcolm Tucker as was, Doctor Who as shortly will be – is twirling his moustache as Cardinal Richelieu in trailers for the much-heralded BBC adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844). It's always good to see British TV take on French literary classics. Let's hope The Musketeers has a little more in common with its source material than the BBC's other recent effort, The Paradise, for which I'd be surprised if the producers were able to put up the subtitle 'based on the novel by Émile Zola' without blushing."At any rate, the Dumas adaptation looks exciting, with plenty of cape-swishing, sword-fighting, smouldering looks and death-defying leaps. Plus one element that is markedly more prevalent than in the book itself: gunfire. One of the odder things about Dumas' novel for the modern reader is its singular lack of muskets."In the mid-1620s, when the story is set, the Mousquetaires are the household guard of the French king, Louis XIII, an elite force trained for the battlefield as well as for the protection of the monarch and his family in peacetime. They are named for their specialist training in the use of the musket (mousquet), an early firearm originally developed in Spain at the end of the previous century under the name moschetto or 'sparrow-hawk'. Muskets were long-barrelled guns, quite unlike the pistols shown in the trailer, and fired by a 'matchlock' mechanism of holding a match or burning cord to a small hole leading to the powder chamber. By the 1620s they were not quite as cumbersome as the Spanish originals, which needed to have their barrels supported on a forked stick, but they were still ...