Alexandre Dumas - The Three Musketeers

CONTENTS

The young Gascon dArtagnan and the legendary musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis are ready to sacrifice everything for love, glory and the common good. The wicked machinations of Cardinal Richelieu and his accomplice, the magnetic Milady de Winter, propel the devoted friends across seas and battlefields from masked balls to a remote convent, in order to defend the honour of the Queen and the life of Constance Bonacieux, dArtagnans true love.

Dashing, knockabout, romantic, violent, chilling and tragic, this buoyant new translation of The Three Musketeers brings Dumas masterpiece to joyful life.

Alexandre Dumas was a mixed-race French playwright, historian and prolific novelist, who penned a string of successful and celebrated books including The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845). His novels have been translated into a hundred different languages and have inspired over two hundred films. In his day Dumas was as famous for his financial insouciance and flamboyant lifestyle as for his writing. His contemporary, Watts Phillips, remarked, He was the most generous, large-hearted being in the world. He was also the most delightfully amusing and egotistical creature on the face of the earth. His tongue was like a windmill once set in motion you never knew when he might stop. Dumas died in 1870, remarking of Death, I shall tell her a story, and she shall be kind to me.

Will Hobson is a writer and translator of French and German. His translations include Marilyns Last Sessions by Michel Schneider, about Marilyn Monroe and her last analyst, Goncourt Prize-winning The Battle by Patrick Rambaud, and Being Arab by Samir Kassir, which won the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award 2007.

AN IMMEDIATE, AND colossal, success, The Three Musketeers was serialised in the Parisian newspaper Le Sicle from March to July 1844 (and promptly followed in August of the same year, in a rival publication, by The Count of Monte Cristo). Its sequel, Twenty Years After, came out the following year, and the third, and longest, of the dArtagnan romances, The Viscount of Bragelonne (a novel Robert Louis Stevenson loved so much, he read it six times) two years later not to mention, in the same period, seven plays and fifteen other novels. No wonder Dumas, who had always worked on several things at once but, even by his standards, was now in a golden period, was called the inextinguishable volcano by a contemporary critic. Already renowned, he became wildly famous, earned and gleefully spent huge sums of money, had countless affairs, travelled, built a theatre and a mansion, the Chteau de Monte Cristo, which he was forced by bankruptcy to sell six years later and never stopped writing. The incredible momentum of The Three Musketeers its repeated cry of En avant!, Forward! is therefore no coincidence. One of the reasons The Three Musketeers is so memorable, in fact, is the degree to which it bears the stamp of Dumass personality. Its relish for life, humour, warmth, flaws, comic bravado, and overriding sense of being undaunted, no matter what storm clouds are brewing, are all distinctly autobiographical.

Alexandre Dumas pre (18021870) was born at Villers-Cotterts, fifty miles north-east of Paris. His mother, Marie-Louise Labouret, was a local innkeepers daughter. His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the son of a white, dissolute French aristocrat, Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, and a black slave, Marie Cessette Dumas, born in what is now Haiti.

When Dumas was three and a half, his father died of cancer, an event stirringly described in his memoirs. He had been sent with his two sisters to a neighbours house on the day of the Generals death. At midnight, there was a loud knock on the door. He got out of bed, convinced it was his father coming to say goodbye. The next morning, when he was told his father had died at midnight or rather, that God had taken him back he went home, took one of his fathers pistols and set off upstairs. When his distraught mother found him on the landing, she asked him what he was doing:

I am going to heaven!

And what are you going to do in heaven, my poor child?

I am going to kill God who has killed Papa.

It is a quintessential Dumas story, winning both for its exaggeration and for the kernel of truth it contains, for in a sense he repeated that scene for the rest of his life left alone with his mother, whom he idealised, trying to emulate his father, whom he idolised, and permanently going into battle. The Goncourt brothers spoke for their contemporaries when they called him, An enormous, overflowing ego, but sparkling with wit and agreeably wrapped up in childish vanity. Essential qualities for a storyteller, but even Alexandre Dumas fils, who did not find it easy being his son, is affectionate when he says, My father is a great big child whom I had when I was a boy. [He] was the kind of man who would get up on the back of his own carriage and ride through the fashionable streets of Paris so people would exclaim: Oh, look, Alexandre Dumas has his own Negro!

Fathers are obviously a central theme of The Three Musketeers, but The Black Count (Harvill Secker, 2012), Tom Reisss biography of Dumass actual father, is still electrifying. Thomas-Alexandre had a dizzying rise joining the army just before the French Revolution as a private under his mothers name (some scholars have suggested Dumas is in fact not a family name but a slave designation: du mas [property] of the farm), he had become General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps within seven years. And then an equally dizzying fall a committed Republican, he quarrelled with Napoleon over the latters imperial ambitions; sent back to France, he was shipwrecked in Naples and imprisoned for almost two years; returning partly paralysed and deaf in one ear, he was unable to draw a pension and died leaving his wife and three children penniless.

In its derring-do, therefore, The Three Musketeers seems to be a homage to Thomas-Alexandre Dumas at the height of his powers, and Porthos Dumass way of keeping him alive. The bluff soldier dreaming of home comforts, the giant of a man under whose cloak dArtagnan gets lost like a little boy, the only musketeer to find love and financial security, Porthos was Dumass favourite character. When the newspaper courier came to pick up one of the last instalments of the trilogy, so the story goes, he emerged from his office in tears, saying, I have had to kill Porthos.

But, of course, The Three Musketeers is a myriad other things, not least a supreme piece of storytelling. Besides his gifts for plotting, dialogue, and humour, Dumass genius as a storyteller lay in his ability to make his autobiographical preoccupations universal. For the first time, a mass audience existed literacy increased exponentially in the nineteenth century and technological innovations, notably cheaper paper and the introduction of inked roller press, meant that the first modern newspapers such as Le Sicle, funded solely by advertisements, could achieve mass circulation. Dumas knew not only how to entertain with his tales of romance and adventure, but also how to appeal directly to the imaginations of his huge audience then, and ever since; to conjure up the spirit of youth, the challenge of setting out into the world, the need for friendship and loyalty, the openhearted embrace of life, the quest for self-respect.