The Three Musketeers
by Alexandre Dumas
Summary
D'Artagnan leaves Gascony for Paris with nothing but a horse, a letter of introduction and a hot temper, and manages to challenge three of the King's Musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, to duels on the same afternoon before joining forces with all three against a squad of the Cardinal's guards. The four become inseparable, and the novel's real plot arrives with the Queen's diamond studs, a gift from her lover the Duke of Buckingham that Cardinal Richelieu, hunting for leverage over her, schemes to expose as missing. D'Artagnan and his friends race to England and back to recover the jewels in time for a court ball, outrunning the Cardinal's agents, chief among them the beautiful, ruthless spy Milady de Winter, who turns out to be Athos's presumed dead wife and carries a scarred past that explains his bitterness toward women. Milady's later revenge poisons D'Artagnan's love, the young seamstress Constance Bonacieux, and the four friends respond by hunting Milady down and having her executed, a scene the book stages with grim ceremony rather than triumph.
Dumas writes swordplay, disguise and cross channel intrigue at a gallop, and the friendship among the four men, their loyalty tested by money, women and the Cardinal's schemes but never broken, is the engine that has kept the book in print for nearly two centuries. It is not subtle, and it does not want to be; it wants a reader turning pages past midnight, and it still delivers that.
The novel was written with the historical researcher and collaborator Auguste Maquet, who supplied period detail and plot outlines that Dumas then expanded and voiced.
Historical Context & Significance
Serialised in the newspaper Le Siecle from March to July 1844 and published in book form the same year, The Three Musketeers set off two sequels, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne, following the same four men into middle age and old age, and the trilogy has been translated and reprinted around the world ever since. Three English translations had appeared by 1846.
Its cultural reach is unusual even for a classic: the Israeli spy Eli Cohen used a French copy of the novel as a book cipher to communicate with Mossad handlers in the 1960s, and the story has been filmed repeatedly, from Douglas Fairbanks's 1921 silent version through a 1993 Disney adaptation to multiple French, British and American productions since, alongside stage musicals and television series stretching from the 1950s to the 2010s.