In the Library
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas, 1844
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 17 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by William Robson
- Chapters
- Chapters 69
- Length
- Length 229k words
£1.99
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If you like this, try
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Dumas does the same thing on a grander scale, trading four friends' camaraderie for one man's decades-long revenge, but the same relish for disguise, intrigue, and reversal drives every page.
£1.99
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Dumas himself compares d'Artagnan on his absurd yellow nag to Don Quixote, and Cervantes's knight is where that comic, touchy heroism with a sword first rode out.
£1.99
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott
Scott does the same thing a generation earlier, arming a wandering knight with a code of loyalty amid a court thick with intrigue, in Saxon England rather than Richelieu's Paris.
£1.99
About the book
Three swordsmen and a Gascon boy duel one another by accident in a Paris courtyard at noon, and before the swords cross they are interrupted by the cardinal's guards and become brothers for life. Alexandre Dumas serialised this novel in Le Siecle across 1844, working from a half-forgotten memoir and the relentless pen of his collaborator Auguste Maquet. Athos drinks to forget a marriage, Porthos preens for a procureur's wife, Aramis dreams of taking orders, and D'Artagnan rides north to England on a horse that will not last the journey, carrying a queen's secret and twelve diamond studs. Behind them moves Richelieu, and behind Richelieu the indelible Milady, a viper in a nun's collar. The motto is panache made into a creed.