This autumn I have visited the Lavardens Castle which had an exhibition on D'Artagnan. Stole the English version of the explanations (QR codes, hosted incognito on their website)
So, I immediately looked it up. There was a real d'Artagnan, he was kind of a big deal, so Dumas wrote some stories based on a fictionalized version of the real d'Artagnan.
Wow, that's really cool. I knew that Cardinal Richelieu was a real person (and that he is credited with inventing the butter knife!), but I didn't realize there were others.
All highly fictionalized and I have had trouble finding information on the real counterparts (aside from the Cardinal). I started learning about that period of history after listening to the D'Artagnan Romances in audiobook form.
The other interesting thing is Gatien de Courtilz de Sanras wrote semi-fictional accounts of D'Artagnan, published 27 years after D'artagnan's death and 144 years before Dumas' The Three Musketeers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatien_de_Courtilz_de_Sandras ).
I had a similar experience with the characters in Sienkiewicz's Trilogy. A number of the fictional characters were amalgamations of actual historical figures, with added or modified histories. For example, the character of Sir Wołodyjowski is actually drawn from two figures with the same surname.
(For those interested, Jerzy Hoffman has produced excellent film adaptations of these books, two while navigating communist censorship, which is why they were filmed in reverse order. In reading order:
- "With Fire and Sword" (1999) [1]
- "The Deluge" (1974) [0] (trailer for the significantly shortened 2014 director's cut [3])
- "The Colonel Wołodyjowski" [2]
In my opinion, and this is widely regarded to be the case, the original 5+ hour "The Deluge" is the best of the three and frankly one of the best movies I've ever watched.)
Some Swedes will be delighted to learn that not only was there a historical d'Artagnan, but also a real life cardinal named Mazarin. But I have yet to find a historical person named Loranga.
There were in fact two Mazarin cardinals. The one people know about, who happened to be one of the major statesmen in Europe at the time, and his brother who was notoriously useless.
> So, he became a priest? (Father Ted [a literary classic] reference)
Galileo had (illegitimate) daughters but was unable to find husbands for them, so their remaining options were to become nuns. One seems to have quite brilliant, but the other a drunk:
Back in the day the Church was the social safety net of society, so many folks ended up in monasteries as a form of charity for folks that would perhaps otherwise would have no other way to support themselves.
Monasteries were not orphanages. You could sometimes dump a baby off there (they had deposit bins specifically for that), but they wouldn't raise it. They would usually find somebody else to take care of it.
Monasteries did not have accept older children or adults, either. Children given to the church would often come with money for their care and feeding. The poor would often get turned away.
A monastery could be a safe place to house offspring who didn't have a family who could (publicly) support them. They were also good places for second sons and other spare children, and with enough money donated they could work their way up in the church hierarchy to do the family some good.
Genearlly nuns would enter to convent before puberty while boys would enter the monastary after. You are right that they were not orphanages and did not take young children, thou what orphanages there were, were run by the Church.
Abandoing newborns to a orphanage was not possible. Babies can't survive on cow's milk, especially the unpastuzed kind.
AFAIK, babies can survive on goat milk (barely). I think I read that this was used in the past when the mother died and there was no wet nurse available.
Is there some part of it that was based on real people?