The Three Musketeers (Annotated): A Raven's Gate Classics Edition

A young Gascon rides into Paris on a yellow horse, with three letters of introduction, a family sword, and a recipe for healing balm. Within twenty-four hours he has challenged three of the King's Musketeers to duels, fought the Cardinal's Guards alongside them, and made friends with the three most dangerous men in France.

That is the opening, and the pace never drops.

Alexandre Dumas published The Three Musketeers in 1844 as a serial in Le Siecle, and it was an instant phenomenon. It is the adventure novel that all adventure novels since have been trying to equal. D'Artagnan is broke, brave, and smarter than everyone in the room. Athos drinks because he has been destroyed by a woman and will not say how. Porthos lies about everything, especially money. Aramis is going to join the priesthood any day now, as soon as he finishes his current love affair. Together they serve King Louis XIII against Cardinal Richelieu, recover diamond studs from the Duke of Buckingham before the Queen's indiscretion is discovered, and cross swords with Milady de Winter, one of the greatest villains in fiction.

Milady is worth the price of admission alone. She is beautiful, lethal, branded as a criminal, and operating with the Cardinal's authority. She kills without hesitation and manipulates without remorse. She is also the most interesting person in the novel, and Dumas knows it.

This Raven's Gate Classics edition includes the complete, unaltered text of all sixty-seven chapters plus the epilogue. A biography of Alexandre Dumas covers his father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the Haitian-born son of a French marquis and an enslaved woman who became one of Napoleon's finest generals; Alexandre's racial identity in nineteenth-century France; his theatrical career; the July Revolution; the feuilleton era that made serialized fiction a cultural force; his collaboration with Auguste Maquet and the question of joint authorship; the construction of the Chateau de Monte-Cristo; the financial recklessness; the Italian exile with Garibaldi; and the death during the Franco-Prussian War.

Commentary covers D'Artagnan and the historical Charles de Batz, the real Richelieu and Dumas's version, Milady as villain and victim, the friendship as the novel's moral centre, the feuilleton structure and how serial publication shaped every cliffhanger, the actual Queen's diamonds affair and what Dumas invented, and why this novel has never been out of print for 180 years. Curated further reading is included.

No summaries. No study questions. No academic gatekeeping. Just the greatest adventure novel ever written, with the context to understand the biracial son of a revolutionary general who turned seventeenth-century France into the most entertaining fiction of the nineteenth century.