The Three Musketeers

All for one; and one for all!

Inspired by real characters and events, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d’Artagnan’s fictionalised escapades, fighting for justice against the devious Cardinal Richelieu and the beguiling ‘Milady’, are now part of literary history. Amidst the clash of swords, chivalrous deeds, romantic trysts and imbibing of fine wine, Dumas weaves the injustices of the Ancien Régime into his narrative, giving the novel contemporary relevance when it was first serialised in Le Siècle in 1844, against the roiling backdrop of pre-February revolution France. Such is the influence of the novel, that the stirring unofficial motto of Switzerland, ‘All for one; and one for all’, remains better known as the collective refrain of the Musketeers.

[Dumas] creates the thirst for reading and raises the human genius

1. Victor Hugo

Born in Picardy in 1802, Alexandre Dumas had a life as fascinating as his novels. The grandson of an enslaved Haitian woman and the son of France’s first mixed-race general, Dumas began his career as a scribe to the Duke of Orleans, the future King Louis Philippe. Magazine articles and theatre plays made way for novels, and such was their success that Dumas employed ghost-writers to keep pace with demand; most notably Auguste Maquet, who outlined the plot for The Three Musketeers.

An extravagant lifestyle and dozens of mistresses took their toll on Dumas’s fortune and, with his debtors in pursuit and the King ousted for the less favourably disposed President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Dumas went into exile in Belgium and Russia, finally returning to Paris in 1864. By the time of his death in 1870, Dumas had claimed authorship of some 1,200 books and remains one of the best-loved French authors.

His Musketeers burst on the literary scene like a bomb; nothing like it had ever come from a Frenchman’s pen.

1. George MacDonald Fraser

The first English translation of Les Trois Mousquetaires, by William Barrow in 1846, cemented its worldwide appeal and is widely considered to be the best, making it a natural choice for the Folio edition.

In his fascinating introduction, the late George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, delights in the lavish narrative that so endeared Dumas to his readers and which continues to enthral more than 170 years later. As screenwriter for the 1973 film, Fraser was acutely aware of the magnetism of the gallant Musketeers, who veer between the vainglorious and the unashamedly romantic, and the rare storytelling talent of their creator.