The Three Musketeers

d’Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the King’s Musketeers and falls in with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, in a plot that runs through Richelieu’s court, an English duke and one of the most durable villains in popular fiction. Dumas wrote it as newspaper serial fiction, with the historian Auguste Maquet as collaborator, and the episodic rhythm of the instalments is still visible.

It is the founding text of the swashbuckler, and the motto attached to it has outlived almost everything else in the book.

Context: Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) serialised Les Trois Mousquetaires in 1844 and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo the same year. He published an enormous body of work with a team of collaborators, chief among them Auguste Maquet.

Connections

• Alexandre Dumas — the author.
• The Count of Monte Cristo — his other 1844 serial, already in the corpus.
• Literature