"I pardon you ... let the justice of God be done!"

Reading about the execution of Saddam Hussein reminded me of a scene I read in Dumas' The Three Musketeers last summer. I commented about that scene in an e-mail at the time and I brought it up again with a friend this morning. I still marvel at that scene as a brilliant depiction of earthly justice and deference to the Divine. Even upon rereading, the scene is profound in ways I can't fully articulate. It reflects a clearly Christian understanding of justice and pity for the condemned.

I read in WORLD this morning that just before Saddam Hussein’s execution, one of the masked guards told the prisoner, “God d-mn you,” and Hussein responded, “God d-mn you.” It's a striking contrast to the execution of Milady de Winter who, like Hussein, was treacherous and defiant to the end. The executioners in Baghdad, however, did not concern themselves with the soul of the condemned, nor even their own.

The following are my comments from last June:

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This is a major spoiler if you ever want to read the book, but it doesn't ruin anything for the movies - the scene was left out of them, and at least one movie version let the villainess live on for two sequels.

Here's the setup: The woman being executed is known through most of the story as "Milady de Winter," but she was previously known as Charlotte Backson and Comtesse de la Fere. She is a woman of intense beauty, beguiling charm, snakelike deception, and deadly revenge. I have never seen (or read) a female character so brilliantly devious, and the author builds up her treachery well. Her first crime, while she was a novice in a convent, was seducing a priest, convincing him to steal liturgical objects from church, and running away with her. She somehow took the money and disposed of him. She went on to seduce a government official, poisoned him, was caught, branded (literally) to mark her as a criminal, but she somehow escaped execution, presumably by charming a guard. She deceived and married a wealthy baron, who later becomes the musketeer Athos. Athos, upon finding she was a condemned murderer, hanged her, but she somehow survived. (The author didn't reveal how.) She married Lord de Winter and secretly poisoned him, thus finally acquiring through inheritance the wealth to carry out her schemes for power. This all happened before the timeline of the novel begins.

When you first see her in the book, she is an accomplice of a corrupt cardinal, surreptitiously carrying out his edicts, but clearly for her own gain. What I found most amazing is how cleverly she deceives her victims. When captured in England, her warden is the most trusted and loyal guard to Lord de Winter (brother of the Lord she murdered). When she learns the guard is a Puritan (serving a Catholic lord), she contrives the persona of a persecuted martyr, exploiting the guard's faith while ultimately mocking it. She even convinces him to murder a duke to avenge a fabricated crime.

D'Artagnan is the only person in the story who successfully outsmarts and humiliates her, and for that she tries numerous schemes to assassinate him, eventually exacting her revenge by winning the confidence of the woman he loves, then poisoning her. Nearly every person who encounters Milady de Winter dies or is in some way ruined. She is an evil, evil woman, but so diabolically persuasive that even during her execution, the men guarding her have to be relieved of duty after she talks to them.

Her accusers, including the three musketeers and D'Artagnan, finally track her to an abandoned house, where they try and sentence her. The executioner in this scene is the judge who initially branded her, and coincidentally is the brother of one of her early victims. The scene gets very grim (as in reaper), but I'll describe afterwards what I found interesting about it.

[The chapter cannot be adequately summarized by excerpts. You can read chapter 66 of The Three Musketeers here, or you can download the entire book in a single 1.3 MB text file here.]

I'm not the type to be intrigued by execution scenes. What I found interesting in this was how the accusers pardoned her before God. They forgave her sins against them, thus not holding her bound in in heaven (as in the scripture, "Whatever you bind on earth I will bind in Heaven.") and leaving her soul to the mercy and judgment of God. They then carried out the earthly sentence for her crimes. I can't say I thoroughly understand the theology, but Dumas clearly thought it through. It's an intriguing scene to consider in discussing the moral and political implications of capital punishment.