The Three Musketeers: Introduction by Allan Massie

The Three Musketeers: Introduction by Allan Massie

The Three Musketeers: Introduction by Allan Massie

The Three Musketeers: Introduction by Allan Massie

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Overview

Alexandre Dumas’s most famous tale— and possibly the most famous historical novel of all time— in a handsome hardcover volume.

This swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines, kings, queens, cavaliers, and criminals in a whirl of adventure, espionage, conspiracy, murder, vengeance, love, scandal, and suspense. Dumas transforms minor historical figures into larger- than-life characters: the Comte d’Artagnan, an impetuous young man in pursuit of glory; the beguilingly evil seductress “Milady”; the powerful and devious Cardinal Richelieu; the weak King Louis XIII and his unhappy queen—and, of course, the three musketeers themselves, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, whose motto “all for one, one for all” has come to epitomize devoted friendship. With a plot that delivers stolen diamonds, masked balls, purloined letters, and, of course, great bouts of swordplay, The Three Musketeers is eternally entertaining.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307594990
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 02/15/2011
Series: Everyman's Library Classics Series
Pages: 680
Sales rank: 113,958
Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802 in France and died in 1870.

Allan Massie is the author of more than twenty historical novels, including Charlemagne and Roland, and has written about Colette, Lord Byron, and Muriel Spark.

Read an Excerpt

From the Introduction by Allan Massie

My granddaughter, aged three, was enthralled by a cartoon series, 'Dogtanian', and watched this version of The Three Musketeers, in which men are dogs and women cats, over and over again. Her mother, some twenty years previously at a slightly older age, had been equally smitten. There is a photograph of her, dressed at a musketeer and mounted on her grey pony, not much smaller or more impressive than the yellow Béarnais sheltie, which provoked such mockery of its rider when the young D'Artagnan set out adventuring in search of fame and fortune.

If I begin this introduction to Dumas' novel with what may seems an irrelevant family memory, it is because it is not irrelevant at all. For, while happily the book is there to be read, and is still read with enjoyment so long after it was written, the first essential thing to grasp is that D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis have escaped its confines. Like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver and Sherlock Holmes, they have become figures of modern mythology. The novel has been dramatized, filmed and made into TV series — with human actors as well as cartoon figures. The characters have become the stuff of children's games, for many young people of spirit have been musketeers at some point in their life.

Dumas' novels are intoxicating. They make life more vivid, and they are addictive. They are also comforting; whatever the drama we know things will come out right in the end, as in a classic Western like Stagecoach or High Noon. For this reason when I wrote a crime novel set in Bordeaux, the capital of D'Artagnan's old province of Gascony, it seemed right that I should allow my policeman hero to turn to Dumas in moments of stress or depression (as indeed Simenon has Maigret also turn) and that when his young rugby-playing son swerves round his marker to score a try under the posts, and leaves the field flushed with happiness and triumph, the father should think, 'like a musketeer, like D'Artagnan himself'.

Of course, for some stern critics, such things merely go to prove that Dumas is not a serious writer. Even the New Oxford Companion to French literature treats him with what is almost disdain. The entry on him runs to a single column, whereas two are allotted to George Sand and four to Jean-Paul Sartre. Dumas, though 'on a world scale perhaps the best known of all French novelists', is dismissed as a mere entertainer, an excellent entertainer admittedly, but no more than that. You can't, it is implied, take him seriously, and indeed D'Artagnan and the musketeers belong to the same category of fancy as Dick Hannay, Sandy Arbuthnot, John S. Blenkiron and Peter Pienaar; they may even be held to have, in this first book of their adventures, little more substance than James Bond. Dumas does not explore character as Stendhal does. He has none of Balzac's penetrating understanding of society. He lacks Hugo's feeling for the poor and wretched, and his awareness of historical process. He is not a scrupulous artist like Flaubert, reworking sentences till they satisfy him.

All this is true. It would be folly to deny it. And yet, one well-read Frenchman, my translator indeed, once surprised me by remarking that Vingt ans aprés — Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers — is the greatest French novel. Bizarre judgement? Perhaps. Then I recall that Robert Louis Stevenson, the most fastidious of artists who yet never lost his youthful love of Romance and high adventure, declared that he had read the last of the series, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, at least half-a-dozen times, and even called it his favourite book. Such was the charm it held for him that he suspected that, like George IV who came to believe that he had fought at Waterloo, he might 'fancy it one of the first, and Heaven knows best, of my own works'. I am not at all surprised, but whence comes the charm that Dumas exerts?

*

Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802. His childhood and adolescence were passed in the years of Napoleanic adventure, but, only just twelve when the emperor was defeated and forced to abdicate for the first time in 1814, he was too young to partake of it. He belonged to a generation that felt it lived in duller times, and, if his energy was too abundant to allow him to experience the disillusioned melancholy which Alfred de Musset called 'le mal de siécle', nevertheless he could not but be aware that the paths of martial glory were closed. In the new bourgeois age they could be explored only in the imagination.

He was the son of a general in the armies of the Revolution, who had distinguished himself in an Alpine campaign against the Piedmontese, but had fallen foul of the emperor and been sidelined. General Dumas was himself the son of a minor aristocrat who had settled in the French colony of San Domingo, and his mother was a black slave girl. Alexandre Dumas was therefore a quadroon (interestingly, his great Russian contemporary Pushkin was an octaroon).

He enjoyed his first successes in teh the theatre, collaborating with others to write melodramas and vaudeville sketches. His spectacular historical drama, Henri III et sa cour, a triumph when performed at the Comédie-Française in 1829, established him as one of the leaders of the new school of Romantic drama which scornfully swept aside the rules and restrictions of classical French tragedy. Other successes followed, notably Kean, ou Désordre et génie (1836). He would continue to write plays and adapt works for the theatre, but it was in the novel that he fully expressed his own remarkable and fecund genius.

In the 1830s newspaper editors became aware of the public appetite for fiction. They fed it by means of serial novels — the romans-feuilletons. Within a few years all the main Paris papers were clamouring for such material. By modern standards, their circulation was small — Le Siécle, for which Dumas would write, had only some 33,000 subscribers. Its readership, however, was much greater, for it was available in clubs and cafés. Moreover, when republished in volume form, the romans-feuilleton was also available in cabinets de lectures, reading-rooms and lending libraries. The cheapest of them charged only one sou for reading a volume on the premises, two sous to take it home.

Newspaper serialization had peculiar requirements. Each episode had to be satisfying, even complete, in itself, while at the same usually advancing the general narrative, if not always directly. Description had to be brief, at least by the standards of the nineteenth-century novel first published in volume form. Characters had to be established quickly and memorably. Memorability was indeed important, for the exigencies of the narrative — or the author's whim — might have characters disappear for several episodes, being recalled perhaps a week or ten days later. There was neither space nor time for lengthy analysis of motives or states of mind. Plot was secondary to incident, for readers could not be expected to hold the details of a complicated plot in mind over a serialization lasting for several months. The author was required to be rapid, inventive, and alert to the responses of the readers. This last was important. Any evidence of a fall-off of interest might lead to the abrupt cancellation of a serial. This happened even to Balzac: in 1844 publication of his roman-feuilleton, Les Paysons, was prematurely cut short and replaced by Dumas' La Reine Margot, which begins with a brilliant account of the Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve.

Dumas had all the qualities required. His prose is always rapid and lucid. You never have to pause to think what a sentence means. He was wonderfully inventive and witty; the dialogue crackles. He had the gift for bringing characters to life with a few bold strokes. There is admittedly little subtlety in his characterization, though D'Artagnan himself develops over the course of the years and the sequence of novels in which he appears, so that the impetuous and fiery, though also canny, young Gascon of the Musketeers has, as Stevenson put it, by the time we reach the last volume of his adventures, 'mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind and upright, that he takes the heart by storm' and 'the whole man rings true like a good sovereign' — the coin, that is, not a king. But all the other characters are types, though types accorded a necessary dash of individuality; and this is as it should be, for this is all that is required.

Table of Contents

Introdction xi

Author's Preface xxi

I The Three Presents of Monsieur d'Artagnam the Elder 3

II The Antechamber of Monsieur de Tréville 20

III The Audience 31

IV The Shoulder of Athos, the Baldric of Porthos, and the Handkerchief of Aramis 43

V The King's Musketeers and the Cardinal's Guards 52

VI His Majesty King Louis XIII 64

VII The Domestic Life of the Musketeers 85

VIII A Court Intrigue 95

IX D'Artagnan Begins to Show Himself 104

X A Seventeenth-Century Mousetrap 114

XI The Plot Thickens 126

XII George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham 145

XIII Monsieur Bonacieux 154

XIV The Man of Meung 164

XV Men of the Robe and Men of the Sword 176

XVI In Which Séguier, the Keeper of the Seals, Looks More Than Once for the Bell He Used to Ring 186

XVII In the Bonacieux Household 199

XVIII The Lover and the Husband 214

XIX Plan of Campaign 222

XX The Journey 232

XXI The Comtesse de Winter 245

XXII The Ballet of La Merlaison 257

XXIII The Rendezvous 265

XXIV The Pavilion 277

XXV The Mistress of Porthos 288

XXVI The Thesis of Aramis 308

XXVII The Wife of Athos 327

XXVIII The Return 348

XXIX The Hunt for Equipment 364

XXX Milady 374

XXXI English and French 384

XXXII Dinner at the Prosecutor's 392

XXXIII Mistress and Maid 402

XXXIV Concernig the Equipment of Aramis and Porthos 413

XXXV At Night All Cats Are Gray 422

XXXVI Dreams of Vengeance 430

XXXVII Milady's Secret 439

XXXVIII How Athos, Without Inconveniencing Himself, Acquired His Equipment 446

XXXIX An Apparition 456

XL The Cardinal 466

XLI The Siege of La Rochelle 476

XLII The Anjou Wine 490

XLIII The Inn at Colombire-Rouge 499

XLIV On the Utility of Stovepipes 509

XLV A Conjugal Scene 518

XLVI The Bastion of Saint-Gervais 525

XLVII The Council of the Musketeers 534

XLVIII A Family Affair 554

XLIX The Hand of Fate 571

L A Conversation Between Brother and Sister 580

LI "Officer!" 588

LII The First Day of Captivity 600

LIII The Second Day of Captivity 608

LIV The Third Day of Captivity 616

LV The Fourth Day of Captivity 626

LVI The Fifth Day of Captivity 635

LVII A Scene from Classical Tragedy 652

LVIII Escape 660

LIX What Happened at Portsmouth on 23 August 1628 670

LX In France 683

LXI The Carmelite Convent at Béthune 689

LXII Two Varieties of Demon 703

LXIII A Drop of Water 711

LXIV The Man in the Red Cloak 727

LXL Judgment 733

LXVI Execution 743

LXVII Conclusion 749

Epilogue 759

Dramatis Personae: Historical Characters 761

Notes on the Text of The Three Musketeers 772

Acknowledgments 791

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Rollicking."
— Independent

"Dumas is a master of ripping yarns full of fearless heroes, poisonous ladies and swashbuckling adventurers."
— Guardian

"The Napoleon of storytellers."
— Washington Post

Reading Group Guide

1. Discuss Dumas's use of historical events in the novel. Do you think a knowledge of history is necessary or unnecessary in order to enjoy the novel? Discuss the ways in which Dumas alters or takes liberties with real events in order to suit the story. Is his view of history sanitized in any way?

2. Dumas is thought of as the chief popularizer of French Romantic drama. In considering The Three Musketeers, do you think this reputation is an accurate one? How does Dumas use dramatic effect in the novel?

3. Contemporary critics were offended by the scenes depicting vice and violence in the novel. Do you find these scenes arbitrary or not?

4. Many critics have described the musketeers as well-developed stereotypes, but are there ways in which the musketeers transcend these stereotypes? Are there other, perhaps more complex ways of interpreting the four protagonists?

5. Discuss Dumas's female characters, in particular Milady. What is her role in the novel, and what does this reveal about Dumas's views of women, if anything? Does Dumas depict a war between the sexes?

6. How do the chapter endings contribute to Dumas's masterly maintenance of pace? How does this kind of device recall a play, and how does this speak to Dumas's strengths stylistically?

7. In what ways is The Three Musketeers a bildungsroman? Would you characterize the work as a youthful novel?

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