The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires) (1844) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. It recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to become a musketeer. D'Artagnan is not one of the musketeers of the title; those are his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis - inseparable men who chant the motto "One for all, and all for one".

The story of d'Artagnan is continued in Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Those three novels by Dumas are together known as the d'Artagnan Romances.

The Three Musketeers was first published in serial form in the magazine Le Siècle between March and July 1844. Dumas claimed it was based on manuscripts he had discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It was later proven that Dumas had based his work on the book Mémoires de Monsieur d'Artagnan, capitaine lieutenant de la première compagnie des Mousquetaires du Roi (Memoirs of Mister d'Artagnan, Lieutenant Captain of the first company of the King's Musketeers) by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (Cologne, 1700). The book was borrowed from the Marseille public library, and the card-index remains to this day; Dumas kept the book when he went back to Paris.

Dumas' version of the story covers the adventures of d'Artagnan and his friends from 1625 to 1628, as they are involved in intrigues involving the weak King Louis XIII of France, his powerful and cunning advisor Cardinal Richelieu, the beautiful Queen Anne of Austria, her English lover, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, and the Siege of La Rochelle. Adding to the intrigue are the mysterious Milady de Winter, and Richelieu's right-hand man, the Comte de Rochefort. (From wikipedia.org)

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First published in 1844, The Three Musketeers is the most famous of Alexandre Dumas’s historical novels and one of the most popular adventure novels ever written. Dumas’s swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of d’Artagnan, a brash young man from the countryside who journeys to Paris in 1625 hoping to become a musketeer and guard to King Louis XIII. Before long, he finds treachery and court intrigue—and also three boon companions, the daring swordsmen Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Together the four strive heroically to defend the honor of their queen against the powerful Cardinal Richelieu and the seductive spy Milady.

About the Author:

Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) lived as stormy and romantic a life as that of any of his fictional characters. His father-Napoleon's famous mulatto general, Dumas--died when he was four years old, and Alexandre grew up in poverty. At twenty, he left his small village for Paris, where he launched a writing career that was eventually to produce over two hundred and fifty volumes. It is for his adventure-filled novels-including The Count of Monte Cristo; Queen Margot, and The Three Musketeers and its sequels, Twenty Years After and The Man in the Iron Mask-that Dumas is chiefly remembered.

Usefull Links:

• Works by Alexandre Dumas, père at Project Gutenberg
• The Alexandre Dumas père Web Site, with a complete bibliography and notes about many of the works.
• Herald Sun: Lost Dumas play discovered
• Lost Dumas novel hits bookshelves
• Dumas' Works: text, concordances and frequency lists
• Rafferty, Terrence. "All for One", The New York Times, August 20, 2006 (a review of the new translation of The Three Musketeers, ISBN 0670037796)
• 1866 Caricature of Alexandre Dumas by André Gill
• Freely downloadable works of Alexandre Dumas in PDF format (text mode)
• Dumas in Larino Molise

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