Vanel: (1644–1703) Anne-Marguerite Vanel was the daughter of Claude Vanel (a magistrate in the Paris Parliament) and became the wife of Jean Coiffer (a member of the Royal Audit Office) in 1654. Contemporaries described her as a “dainty and extremely pretty young woman with a lively and very witty turn of mind.” She was Fouquet’s mistress during the 1650s, and later transferred her affections to Colbert. Her high spirits annoyed Colbert, and he passed her off to his brother.
Wardes: (1620–88) Francois-Rene Crespin du Bec was the Marquis de Vardes, and a noted schemer and bold liar. Some women, though, including Madame de Motteville, found him charming. Dumas creates two characters out of the historical De Vardes. The father plays a prominent part in The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After, and the son in The Vicomte de Bragelonne, though they were, in reality, the same man. He was named Governor of Aigues-Mortes in 1660 and was banished there a few years later following a court scandal. Although a favorite of Louis XIV, he got entangled in a plot by Olympe Mancini (then the Comtesse de Soissons) to avenge her sister, Marie, whom the king had abandoned in favor of his political marriage to Maria-Theresa of Spain. He remained in Aigues- Mortes for 17 years.
Much of the information for these biographies was taken from the David Coward’s editions of the D’Artagnan Romances, published by Oxford World’s Classics. Additional material came from the Fireblade Coffeehouse’s web page on Alexandre Dumas at www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Dumas/. The quote from Robert Louis Stevenson comes from his A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s from Memories and Portraits.