The musketeers are middle-aged, the young king is in love with Louise de La Vallière, and Fouquet is spending the treasury on a house that will destroy him. This is the volume of the cycle where power replaces swordplay and the four friends find themselves on different sides of it. Paintings of Versailles gardens, fortress dungeons and royal courts; the Gilded Library ornament is baldric, fleur-de-lis and a sealed letter.