This edition also includes notes on the text. Richard Pevear's introduction investigates the controversy of Dumas' literary collaborators, and how important serialisation was to the book's success.

A stirring nineteenth-century tale of friendship and adventure, The Three Musketeers continues to be one of the most influential and popular pieces of French literature.

And when the young hero falls in love with the beautiful but inaccessible Constance, he finds himself in a world of murder, conspiracy and lies, with only the Musketeers to depend on. Soon part of their close band, D'Artagnan's loyalty to his new allies puts him in the deadly path of Cardinal Richlieu's machinations. Dumas rampaged through the history of France, inventing, changing, distorting-doing whatever was needed to produce a tale to hold the reader breathless.Young D'Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the King's elite guards, but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men he has come to swear allegiance to - Porthos, Athos and Aramis, inseparable friends: the Three Musketeers. The pleasure he must have felt inĬreating D'Artagnan's troubles and triumphs flashes out of these pages. To one who made D'Artagnan all shall be forgiven.' Clifton Fadiman agreed: 'Dumas enjoyed writing his stories. Few, if any, characters in fiction inspire one with such belief in their individual existences. 'His greatest creation is undoubtedly D'Artagnan, type at once of the fighting adventurer and of the trusty servant, whose wily blade is ever at the back of those whose hearts have neither his magnanimity nor his courage. 'Dumas will be read a hundred, nay, three hundred years on,' wrote John Galsworthy. He soon finds himself fighting alongside three heroic comrades-Athos, Porthos, and Aramis-who seek to uphold the honor of the king by foiling the wicked plots of Cardinal Richelieu and the beautiful spy 'Milady.' It is all impossible and it is all magnificent.'įirst published in 1844, Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of D'Artagnan, a gallant young nobleman who journeys to Paris in 1625 hoping to join the ranks of musketeers guarding Louis XIII.

'In these violent pages all is action, intrigue, suspense, surprise-an almost endless chain of duels, murders, love affairs, unmaskings, ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, wild rides. Buy the eBook The Three Musketeers, Penguin Classics by Alexandre Dumas online from Australias leading online eBook store. Synopsis: 'We read The Three Musketeers to experience a sense of romance and for the sheer excitement of the story,' reflected Clifton Fadiman.

The three musketeers penguin classics