The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.

A character in Twenty Years After

Porthos, Monsieur du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds

Rich, widowed, enormously strong, and unhappy for want of a barony.

What they want

A barony, so that the neighbours who look down on a rich commoner will have to bow.

The book

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
Monsieur du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds, a widower
Home
The château de Pierrefonds, with Mousqueton
Serves
Cardinal Mazarin, with d'Artagnan

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Porthos married money in the first book and has been left with it. He owns three estates, signs himself with all three names, and lives at Pierrefonds with his servant Mousqueton, who has grown fat. D'Artagnan expects to fail with him as he failed with Aramis, and instead finds him bored, snubbed by the local nobility, and ready to follow anyone who will make him a baron.

He is the book's strength and much of its comedy. He is the man who wants to pull out a window bar at Rueil, who throws his servants into the sea to save them, and who stands guard over Mazarin while d'Artagnan dictates. He gets the barony, and the last chapter shows him trying to remember where he has seen the cardinal's face before.

How Porthos, Monsieur du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds Is Portrayed

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

  • Three estates and no titleIn Chapters X and XI he explains that Bracieux was once a barony and that nothing but the title stands between him and the respect of the country gentlemen who snub him. He says he would give anything to be a baron.
  • The promise on paperIn Chapter XXIV, at the Palais Royal, d'Artagnan asks Mazarin to erect one of Porthos's three estates into a barony. Porthos steps forward crying that he will be a baron, and the cardinal tells him his barony is on the back of the Duc de Beaufort's horse: he has only to overtake it.
  • Servants overboardIn Chapter LXXII, escaping the gunpowder felucca, he seizes Blaisois by neck and heels and pushes him out of the window into the sea, then supports the terrified Mousqueton with one hand until he reaches the boat.
  • A bar and a doorIn Chapter LXXXIII, locked up at Rueil, his own plan for escape is to pull out a window bar and push down a door. D'Artagnan talks him into something quieter.
  • The shoulder on the panelIn Chapter LXXXV a door that will not open for d'Artagnan gives way when Porthos puts his shoulder to one panel, which lets them into the corridor where Mazarin keeps his treasury.
  • The patent of nobilityIn Chapter LXXXVIII the queen says that here goes the barony and signs his patent. In Chapter XC he rides home to a triumphal arch his tenants have built, promising his neighbours will die of envy.

Porthos, Monsieur du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds quotes

Lines spoken by or about Porthos, Monsieur du Vallon de Bracieux de Pierrefonds, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book.

’tis not civil war that disunites us. It is that we are each of us twenty years older; it is that the honest emotions of youth have given place to suggestions of interest, whispers of ambition, counsels of selfishness.
— D'Artagnan (dialogue) · Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After (1845), the anonymous nineteenth-century translation, Chapter XXVII
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

He becomes a baron and goes home to Pierrefonds. In the last pages of Chapter XC he turns back to ask d'Artagnan where he has seen Mazarin's face before, and cannot place it. The joke, and the man, return in the next novel.

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 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
  • Illustrated portrait of Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens

    The most popular English novelist of the nineteenth century, who was never a Paris resident in the ordinary sense but kept coming back for twenty-five years: one winter in a rented mansion on the rue de Courcelles, a second winter on the Champs-Élysées writing Little Dorrit, repeated compulsive visits to the Paris Morgue — the riverside building where the city displayed its unidentified dead to the public — and a novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, that has shaped how English readers picture Paris ever since.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Henry Miller

    Henry Miller

    The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.

    View author
Back to Twenty Years After