The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers

"D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis and Porthos"
Image by Maurice Leloir, 1894
Author Alexandre Dumas
in collaboration with Auguste Maquet
Original title Les Trois Mousquetaires
Country France
Language French
Genre Historical novel
Publication date
March–July 1844 (serialised)
Followed by Twenty Years After, The Vicomte of Bragelonne

The Three Musketeers (French: Les Trois Mousquetaires [le tʁwa muskətɛʁ]) is a historical novel by Alexandre Dumas.

Set in 1625–1628, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan (based on Charles de Batz-Castelmore d'Artagnan) after he leaves home to travel to Paris, to join the Musketeers of the Guard. Although D'Artagnan is not able to join this elite corps immediately, he befriends the three most formidable musketeers of the age: Athos, Porthos and Aramis and gets involved in affairs of the state and court.

In genre, The Three Musketeers is primarily an historical and adventure novel. However, Dumas also frequently works into the plot various injustices, abuses and absurdities of the old regime, giving the novel an additional political aspect at a time when the debate in France between republicans and monarchists was still fierce. The story was first serialised from March to July 1844, during the July Monarchy, four years before the French Revolution of 1848 violently established the Second Republic. The author's father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, had been a well-known General in France's Republican army during the French Revolutionary Wars.






This being understood, let us proceed with our story.[2]



The Three Musketeers was written in collaboration with Auguste Maquet, who also worked with Dumas on its sequels (Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later), as well as The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would suggest plot outlines after doing historical research; Dumas then expanded the plot, removing some characters, including new ones, and imbuing the story with his unmistakable style.


Plot summary


In Paris, d'Artagnan visits De Tréville at the headquarters of the Musketeers, but without the letter, De Tréville politely refuses his application. He does, however, write a letter of introduction to an academy for young gentlemen which may prepare him for recruitment at a later time. From De Tréville's window, d'Artagnan sees Rochefort passing in the street below and rushes out of the building to confront him, but in doing so he offends three Musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, who each demand satisfaction; D'Artagnan must fight a duel with all of them that afternoon. As d'Artagnan prepares himself for the first duel, he realizes that Athos' seconds are Porthos and Aramis, who are astonished that the young Gascon intends to duel them all. As d'Artagnan and Athos begin, Cardinal Richelieu's guards appear and try to arrest d'Artagnan and the three Musketeers for illegal dueling. Although outnumbered, the four men win the battle. D'Artagnan seriously wounds Jussac, one of the Cardinal's officers and a renowned fighter. After learning of this, King Louis XIII appoints d'Artagnan to Des Essart's company of the King's Guards and gives him forty pistoles.

Depiction of the Cardinal's musketeers, the great rivals of the King's musketeers.



He is informed that the Queen has rescued Constance from prison. In an inn, the musketeers overhear the Cardinal asking Milady to murder the Duke of Buckingham, a supporter of the Protestant rebels at La Rochelle who has sent troops to assist them. Richelieu gives her a letter that excuses her actions as under orders from the Cardinal himself, but Athos takes it. The next morning, Athos bets that he, d'Artagnan, Porthos, and Aramis, and their servants can hold the recaptured St. Gervais bastion against the rebels for an hour, for the purpose of discussing their next course of action. They resist for an hour and a half before retreating, killing 22 Rochellese in total. They warn Lord de Winter and the Duke of Buckingham. Milady is imprisoned on arrival in England but seduces her guard, Felton (a fictionalization of the real John Felton), and persuades him to allow her escape and to kill Buckingham himself. On her return to France, Milady hides in a convent where Constance is also staying. The naive Constance clings to Milady, who sees a chance for revenge on d'Artagnan, and fatally poisons Constance before d'Artagnan can rescue her. The Musketeers arrest Milady before she reaches Cardinal Richelieu. They bring an official executioner, put her on trial and sentence her to death. After her execution, the four friends return to the siege of La Rochelle. The Comte de Rochefort arrests d'Artagnan and takes him to the Cardinal. When questioned about Milady's execution, d'Artagnan presents her letter of pardon as his own. Impressed with d'Artagnan's willfulness and secretly glad to be rid of Milady, the Cardinal destroys the letter and writes a new order, giving the bearer a promotion to lieutenant in the Tréville company of musketeers, leaving the name blank. D'Artagnan offers the letter to Athos, Porthos and Aramis in turn but each refuses it, Athos because it is below him, Porthos because he is retiring to marry his wealthy mistress and Aramis because he is joining the priesthood. D'Artagnan, though heartbroken and full of regrets, gets the promotion he coveted.


Musketeers' servants
Historical characters



The most recent and now standard English translation is by Richard Pevear (2006), who, though applauding Barrow's work, states that most of the modern translations available today are "textbook examples of bad translation practices" which "give their readers an extremely distorted notion of Dumas' writing".[4]





Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds is a Spanish–Japanese anime adaptation, where most of the characters are anthropomorphizations of dogs. Another anime adaption was later made in Japan called The Three Musketeers Anime, only this time the characters were human.



The first stage production was in Dumas' own lifetime as the opera Les Trois Mousquetaires with a libretto by Dumas himself and music by Albert Visetti.


Video games and board games

1995 saw the release by publisher U.S. Gold of Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer by video game developers Clipper Software, a classic point-and-click adventure game.[6] In 2005, Swedish developer Legendo Entertainment published the side-scrolling platform game The Three Musketeers for Windows XP and Windows Vista. In July 2009, a version of the game was released for WiiWare in North America and Europe under the title The Three Musketeers: One for All!.[7] In 2009, Canadian developer Dingo Games self-published The Three Musketeers: The Game for Windows and Mac OS X. It is the first game to be truly based on the novel (in that it closely follows the novel's story).[8] 2009 also saw the publication of the asymmetric team board game The Three Musketeers "The Queen's Pendants" (Настольная игра "Три мушкетера") from French designer Pascal Bernard[9] by the Russian publisher Zvezda.[10]

In 2010, Anuman Interactive launched The Three Musketeers, a hidden object game on PC and MAC. Players follow d'Artagnan in his quest to become a king's musketeer.[11]


Three Musketeers, Issue No. 1, Classic Comics, published 1941


In 1939, American author Tiffany Thayer published a book titled Three Musketeers (Thayer, 1939). This is a re-telling of the story in Thayer's words, true to the original plot but told in a different order and with different points of view and emphasis from the original. The Khaavren Romances by Steven Brust are fantasy (or science-fiction) novels heavily influenced by The Three Musketeers and its sequels; the characters and social background are closer to Dumas's than the plots.

Sarah Hoyt wrote a series of Historical Murder mysteries with the Musketeers as the protagonists. (Hoyt wrote the novels under the name Sarah D'Almeida.)


  1. "Les Trois Mousquetaires by Alexandre Dumas – Free Ebook : Author's Preface". 4 November 2004. Retrieved 2014-02-26.
  2. Dumas, Alexandre. The Three Musketeers, Author's Preface.
  3. Editions de La Table Ronde, Paris, 1993 ISBN 2-7103-0559-3
  5. Strecker, Erin (1 August 2012). "One for all: BBC announces new show 'The Musketeers'". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
  6. Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer, Moby Games
  8. The Three Musketeers: The Game, Moby Games
  9. "Pascal Bernard – Board Game Designer". BoardGameGeek. Retrieved 18 January 2010.
  11. "HdO Adventure series | GamesIndustry International". 18 March 2010. Retrieved 2014-06-29.

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