The three musketeers
Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet
The three musketeers
Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet
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D'Artagnan rides into Paris in 1625 with a letter of introduction and manages to challenge three of the King's Musketeers to duels before the day is out. Athos, Porthos and Aramis become his friends instead, and the four of them are shortly carrying a queen's secret across the Channel against Cardinal Richelieu and a woman called Milady.
About the book
Serialised in 1844, The Three Musketeers opens with an eighteen-year-old Gascon riding into Paris on a yellow horse with a letter of introduction, which is stolen before he arrives. Within a day d’Artagnan has arranged duels with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, and the four of them are fighting the Cardinal’s guards side by side instead. The plot proper turns on twelve diamond studs the Queen of France has given to the Duke of Buckingham, and a ball at which Richelieu has arranged for her to wear them. Dumas and Auguste Maquet wrote it from memoirs of the period, and the history is more or less there under the invention. Its real subject is the friendship, and the character who has outlasted the plot is Milady de Winter — beautiful, branded, and the most capable person in the book.
Characters
D’Artagnan — Protagonist
A Gascon of eighteen with a sword, a letter and no money, in Paris to join the King’s Musketeers.
Athos — Musketeer
Noble, silent and drinking, with a history he will not discuss until it walks back into the story.
Porthos — Musketeer
Vain, enormous and loud, living handsomely on money he is careful nobody asks about.
Aramis — Musketeer
Always about to take holy orders, and always detained by a letter in a woman’s handwriting.
Milady de Winter — Antagonist
The Cardinal’s agent, marked with a fleur-de-lis, and more than a match for all four of them.
Cardinal Richelieu — First Minister
Running France and his own guard, opposed to the Musketeers and rather admiring of d’Artagnan.
Constance Bonacieux — The Queen’s seamstress
Who brings d’Artagnan into the affair of the diamonds, and whom he loves.
Queen Anne — Queen of France
Whose gift to Buckingham puts her at the Cardinal’s mercy and starts the ride to London.
About the author
Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet
Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) and Auguste Maquet (1813–1888) wrote together for a decade, and the books everyone knows as Dumas's came out of that partnership: Maquet worked up the history and drafted the plots, Dumas wrote the version that was published. Dumas was the grandson of an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue and the son of one of Napoleon's generals, and he produced serial fiction at industrial speed for the newspapers of his day. Maquet sued for credit and a share of the proceeds in 1858 and largely lost. The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers are both theirs.