Fan Fiction · Set in The Forty-Five Guardsmen

The Gascon Who Stayed Home

A story about a Gascon who declined the king's summons · Read the novel this is based on

This is fan fiction. An original, unofficial story written by a contributor to this site, not by Alexandre Dumas. It is not part of the actual novel and should not be mistaken for Dumas's own writing.

"Come with me," his cousin said, the letter from Paris still open on the table between them. "You've the sword arm for it, better than half the men already chosen. We could ride together."

Bertrand didn't answer immediately. He spent nearly a week turning the offer over, weighing a summons that would carry him toward exactly the kind of glory his younger self had once imagined for himself.

"You're not going," his cousin said finally, reading the answer in his face before Bertrand had fully spoken it aloud.

"I'm not going."

"Why? You've got the skill. Everyone who's crossed swords with you knows it."

Bertrand glanced toward the next room, where his mother slept more hours now than she used to, her health failing by degrees no physician had offered much hope of reversing. "Because someone has to manage this land properly, and I don't trust it to anyone else's hands the way I'd need to if I rode off to Paris chasing the king's favor."

"That's not a small thing to give up."

"No. It isn't." Bertrand said this plainly, without self-pity. "I know exactly what I'm choosing against — the ballads will be about you and the others, not about a man who stayed home to look after his mother's last years. I've made my peace with that."

His cousin left for Paris within the month, and Bertrand built, across the years that followed, a life considerably quieter than the one his cousin found: a well-managed holding, a mother whose final years passed in more comfort than any distant remittance could have guaranteed her, a local reputation for exactly the dependable competence that no history book would ever trouble itself to record.

"Do you regret it?" a neighbor asked him once, years later, after news arrived of his cousin's latest true adventure in royal service.

"Some days. I won't pretend otherwise." Bertrand considered the question honestly before finishing it. "But my mother had a peaceful decline instead of a lonely one, and this land is in better condition than when my father left it to me, and I don't think either of those things would exist if I'd chosen differently. My cousin answered a king's call. I answered my mother's need. I've never managed to convince myself, weighing the two honestly, that his answer took more courage than mine did — only that his made for a considerably better story afterward."