In brief
In April 1625 a penniless eighteen-year-old from Gascony rides into Paris on a yellow horse, with fifteen crowns, a letter that gets stolen on the way, and his father’s advice to fight everybody. Within a day he has booked duels with three of the king’s Musketeers, and soon afterwards he is fighting beside them against the cardinal’s guards. Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan then save the queen’s honour by riding to London for her diamond studs, feud with Cardinal Richelieu through the siege of La Rochelle, and are drawn into a private war with his agent, the branded adventuress known as Milady.
Everyone knows the swords, the plumes and the motto. Fewer people remember that the book’s last third belongs to the villain, that its climax is the beheading of a woman at midnight by men who are not a court, and that it ends with its hero in tears. It is the best-paced adventure in French, and it is much stranger and colder than its reputation.
The argument
The novel’s proposition is that loyalty to your friends outranks every other claim, and it means this with its whole heart and knows what it costs. The founding moment is ch. 5, behind the Carmes Déchaussés, when the boy who owes these men three duels steps across to their side against the law: “You said you were but three, but it appears to me we are four.” The famous oath comes four chapters later, and it is less grand than memory makes it. It is D’Artagnan’s idea, not theirs, and he offers it as a thing they already say: “All for one, one for all—that is our motto, is it not?” (ch. 9). Porthos has to be pushed: “Overcome by example, grumbling to himself, nevertheless, Porthos stretched out his hand.” In this text the phrase appears in that scene and nowhere else in the novel.
Against this friendship stands the state, and Dumas plays fair with it. Richelieu is the one adult in the book, the only character thinking about France rather than about honour, love or lunch. The king is a sulky gambler, the queen is compromising herself with the enemy’s chief minister, and our heroes spend the novel helping her to do it. The Musketeers are on the wrong side of the argument, as the book half admits, and it does not care, because they are young and funny and there are four of them.
Dumas’s final joke is that the state wins by recruiting them. Milady’s safe-conduct has passed from the cardinal through her hands into Athos’s: “It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this has done what he has done.” At the end D’Artagnan presents it to Richelieu in place of a defence, and Richelieu answers with a commission: “I have taken from you one carte blanche to give you another” (ch. 67). The rebel becomes a lieutenant. His three friends refuse the blank commission in turn, and the band dissolves. “I shall then have no more friends,” he says, and Athos, of all people, offers the novel’s only consolation: “your bitter recollections have time to change themselves into sweet remembrances.”
The shape of the book
Written for serial publication, the book is really four books, each with a different engine. The first, up to the ballet in ch. 22, is the adventure that almost every film adapts. The cardinal plots to expose the queen’s gift to Buckingham, instructing Milady that “He will wear on his doublet twelve diamond studs; get as near to him as you can, and cut off two” (ch. 14). Four friends ride for the coast and three are picked off one by one (ch. 20).
The second is a comedy of money and bedrooms. D’Artagnan collects his scattered friends, each comically disabled (chs 25–27); they scramble for equipment for the campaign; and D’Artagnan, whose Constance has been kidnapped, chases Milady. The third is war: the siege, a breakfast held under fire for a bet (ch. 47), and the overheard conference through the stovepipe (ch. 44) in which Richelieu trades Buckingham’s death for D’Artagnan’s.
The fourth is a different kind of novel altogether. For a run of chapters (chs 52–56, one to a day), the heroes vanish and we are shut in an English castle with Milady and her jailer, the young officer Felton. Using nothing but talk, posing as a persecuted Puritan, she turns him in five days into the assassin of Buckingham (ch. 59). It is the most brilliant sustained passage in the book, and the reader’s sympathy goes to the wrong person. After that the plot rushes to the convent at Béthune, Constance’s death, and the night by the river.
The voice
Dumas writes in dialogue, fast, and his narrator stands just far enough back to enjoy himself. The first portrait is a joke with a literary pedigree: “Imagine to yourself a Don Quixote of eighteen” (ch. 1). The chapter titles wink too, from “The Utility of Stovepipes” to “In Which M. Séguier, Keeper of the Seals, Looks More than Once for the Bell”. The prose has none of the great stylists’ density. It has timing. From the bastion Athos calls down to the soldiers coming to retake it: “Gentlemen, a few friends and myself are about to breakfast in this bastion. Now, you know nothing is more disagreeable than being disturbed when one is at breakfast.” Athos’s dialogue is an art of its own, and Grimaud, trained to obey by signs, is the running gag that goes with it.
The comedy can be chilling, and the epilogue gives the best example. Bonacieux, the informer husband, reminds the cardinal of his existence and is told that he will never want for anything; he leaves for the Louvre and is “fed and lodged in some royal castle, at the expense of his generous Eminence”. That sentence ends the book.
The history
Dumas opens with a mock-scholarly preface: he says he found the Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan, then a manuscript by the Comte de la Fère, and that his heroes “have nothing mythological about them” (preface). The memoirs exist, but they are a novel by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, published in 1700. The manuscript is Dumas’s invention.
The real Charles de Batz de Castelmore d’Artagnan was born around 1611, joined the army in the 1630s, served Louis XIV and was killed at Maastricht in 1673. In 1625 he was a boy at home. Real musketeers did give the three their names: Armand d’Athos, Isaac de Porthau and Henri d’Aramitz. Their lives have nothing to do with the plot.
The large events are sound. The siege ran from 1627 to October 1628, as the epilogue says, and John Felton did stab Buckingham at Portsmouth on 23 August 1628, though for his own grievances and without any Frenchwoman’s help. The stud story comes from the Memoirs of La Rochefoucauld, whose thief, Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, is the nearest thing Milady has to a source. The notion that Richelieu fought the siege as Buckingham’s rival for the queen is romance, and on how real that passion was Dumas himself shrugs: “That we are not able to say” (ch. 41).
The people
D’Artagnan
Quick, poor, vain and brave, the only one of the four who changes, and not always upward. His father’s rule is “Fight on all occasions.” He loves Constance Bonacieux, his landlord’s wife, and while she is missing he pursues Milady. To reach Milady he seduces her maid Kitty, intercepts her letters and then, in the dark, takes her lover’s place: “It is I,” he says, “I, the Comte de Wardes” (ch. 35). The narrator treats this as a scrape. A modern reader will call it something else, and is right to. Nothing the hero does afterwards quite cancels it.
Athos
The heart of the book, a nobleman who drinks with terrifying steadiness and who, his friends say, has never been heard to laugh. In ch. 27 he tells the story of “One of my friends—one of my friends, please to observe, not myself”, who found a fleur-de-lis on his young wife’s shoulder and “hanged her on a tree.” She survived. He is the Comte de la Fère, she is Milady, and the gentlest man in the book has already done the worst thing in it. He also thrashes his servant without passion, which Dumas reports as a character note.
Porthos and Aramis
Porthos is appetite and vanity, a giant whose splendid baldric is gold only in front (ch. 4) and whose “duchess” is a lawyer’s wife with a strongbox. Aramis is a would-be priest who writes theses and receives letters from a real duchess, and he is the cleverest and least trustworthy of the four. Dumas barely begins with him here; the sequels finish the job.
Milady
She has more names than anyone: Anne de Breuil, Lady de Winter, Charlotte Backson. She is the ablest person in the novel, and the only one who works for a living. She is also a murderer several times over, and Dumas loads the scales heavily against her: “Great criminals bear about them a kind of predestination” (ch. 61). Nonetheless he gives her the best scenes. “Because I am too young to die!” she screams on the riverbank, and for a moment the novel’s whole moral arrangement shakes.
Richelieu, and the household
Richelieu is as Dumas needs him, patient, witty and without illusions, and the only opponent the heroes come to respect. Below him the lackeys Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton and Bazin form a comic mirror of their masters. Constance herself, brave, briefly glimpsed and poisoned in ch. 63, exists chiefly to be lost.
The trial by the river
Everything in the novel that seemed a game is called in during chapters 65 and 66. Five men and a stranger in a red cloak hold a trial by night. Each accuses her in turn, and the stranger reveals himself as the executioner of Lille, who branded her and whose brother she ruined. She has a real answer: “You are not judges! You cannot condemn me!” De Winter replies that he offered her Tyburn. D’Artagnan, the youngest, breaks at the last: “Oh, I cannot behold this frightful spectacle!” It makes no difference. They row her over the river, the stranger strikes off her head, and he drops the body in midstream: “Let the justice of God be done!”
Dumas has it both ways. She is guilty beyond doubt of poisoning Constance and procuring Buckingham’s murder, and the scene has every Gothic thrill. But it has no warrant, and the book lets you see that. “The executioner may kill, without being on that account an assassin,” says the man in red, and the sentence is a sophism. Athos hanged her once on his own authority, and here he does it again with witnesses. This is the novel’s true ending, and it is why those last tears of D’Artagnan’s are not sentiment.
How it was made
Dumas was born in 1802, the son of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a Republican general born in Saint-Domingue to a French nobleman and an enslaved woman, who died when his son was three. By the 1840s he was a famous playwright turning to the newspaper serial, then the new mass medium. The novel ran in Le Siècle from March to July 1844, and The Count of Monte Cristo began that same summer.
He did not write alone. Auguste Maquet, a teacher trained as a historian, drafted plots and found sources; Dumas rewrote, added and supplied the dialogue and the style. Maquet’s name stayed off the title page, he later sued for co-authorship and royalties, and the court found for Dumas. Where the division fell in any given scene cannot now be settled by anyone, and scholars still argue about it.
Readers and critics
The public never hesitated. The critics took longer. In 1845 the pamphleteer Eugène de Mirecourt attacked Dumas and Company as a novel factory, and for a century and more the French literary establishment treated him as a brilliant manufacturer. His reburial in the Panthéon in 2002 was the state’s late reply. Tom Reiss’s The Black Count (2012) has since made readers think again about his family and what his heroes’ contempt for rank meant to him.
The English record is its own story. The Victorian translations cut or veiled the sexual material, and the text linked here does the same: Gutenberg’s file names no translator. Richard Pevear, whose version appeared in 2006, called most modern English texts examples of bad translation while praising the Barrow version of 1846. Lawrence Ellsworth’s of 2018 is the newest.
Afterlives
Dumas went on to Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte of Bragelonne (1847–50), and the whole trilogy is richer and sadder than this first book. The screen has returned to it with little pause: Douglas Fairbanks in 1921, Gene Kelly in 1948, Richard Lester’s bruised, funny two-parter of 1973–74, the much-loved Soviet musical of 1979, and Martin Bourboulon’s French pair of 2023, D’Artagnan and Milady. Nearly all stop or soften where the novel darkens, and Lester’s comes closest to its grain.
How to read it
- Do not stop at the ballet. Many readers think they know the book from its first third. The best of it comes after ch. 40.
- Read the captivity chapters at a sitting. They are a five-act play about persuasion.
- Keep score of who pays. Follow the money, the mistresses and the servants, and the swagger reads differently.
- Know your text. Read Pevear or Ellsworth if you want the bedroom scenes as Dumas wrote them.
- Go on to the sequels. The final pages of the whole cycle repay the 1844 ones.
Read next
- Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After (1845). The same four, older, on opposite sides of the Fronde.
- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (1846). His other great serial, on revenge with far more patience.
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605–15). Dumas names it on his first page, and knows what he owes it.
- Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Gascon cadets and the same century, turned to verse.
- Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921). The best heir to the form, with a mind on its politics.
- Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas (1993). A thriller built around Dumas’s manuscripts and readers.