Alexandre Dumas - Three Musketeers (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)  

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Table of Contents

From the Pages of

The Three Musketeers

Imagine to yourself a Don Quixote of eighteen; a Don Quixote without his corselet, without his coat of mail, without his cuisses; a Don Quixote clothed in a woolen doublet, the blue collar of which had faded into a nameless shade between lees of wine and a heavenly azure; face long and brown; high cheek bones, a sign of sagacity; the maxillary muscles enormously developed, an infallible sign by which a Gascon may always be detected, even without his capand our young man wore a cap set off with a sort of feather; the eye open and intelligent; the nose hooked, but finely chiseled. (page 11-12)

All for one, one for allthat is our motto, is it not? (page 115)

Oh, nothing but a scratch. (page 233)

Immediately eight swords glittered in the rays of the setting sun, and the combat began with an animosity very natural between men twice enemies. (page 361)

During the evening she despaired of fate and of herself. She did not invoke God, we very well know, but she had faith in the genius of evilthat immense sovereignty which reigns in all the details of human life, and by which, as in the Arabian fable, a single pomegranate seed is sufficient to reconstruct a ruined world. (page 590)

Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was born on July 24, 1802, in Villers-Cotterets, a town northeast of Paris. He was the grandson of a French nobleman, the Marquis Davy de la Pailleterie, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean slave. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, took the name Dumas when he enlisted in the French army. After a period of illustrious service, he rose to the rank of general; but by the end of the eighteenth century, he had fallen into disfavor with Napoleon and was subsequently imprisoned. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas died penniless and broken at age forty-five, leaving his family impoverished. Young Alexandre received only a limited education; however, he was an avid reader, and his elegant penmanship got him a position as clerk to a solicitor. In 1823 he moved to Paris, where, through his fathers connections, he became a copyist for the Duke of Orlans, the future King Louis-Philippe.

Dumas soon turned his attention to literary pursuits. His first major success was the historical drama Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court) in 1829, followed in 1831 by Antony. By his thirtieth birthday, Dumas was regarded as one of the major figures of the nascent French Romantic theater. His La Tour de Nesle ( The Tower of Nesle, 1832) is a classic example of French romantic drama replete with love, treachery, and death. Despite his success as a playwright, Dumas found his true mtier with the birth of the roman feuilleton, or serial novel, in the 1840s. His gripping adventures, with their rambling subplots and moments of suspense, were ideally suited to serialization in newspapers. Les Trois mousquetaires ( The Three Musketeers), published in the press from 1843 to 1844, was an overwhelming success that instantly established Dumas as a master of the genre. It was followed by Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) in 1844, and, by 1850, two sequels to The Three Musketeers: Vingt Ans apres (Twenty Years After) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (The Viscount of Bragelonne) .

Enormously prolific, Dumas was known for collaborating with others, notably Auguste Maquet, with whom he wrote The Three Musketeers. His practice of using other literary works as sources and working with collaborators, while hardly unique among his contemporaries, was often criticized, making him a controversial figure in French literary circles. Dumass life was filled with adventures. He participated in the July Revolution of 1830 in France as well as in Garibaldis quest for Italian independence in the 1860s; he amassed a fortune through his writing, only to let his lavish lifestyle plunge him into perpetual debt; and he built (and then lost in bankruptcy) an opulent chateau on the outskirts of Paris that he called Monte Cristo. He was also an incorrigible lover whose numerous liaisons produced three children, including a son, Alexandre Dumas (known as Dumas fils to distinguish him from his father), who became an important author in his own right. Alexandre Dumas pre died on December 5, 1870.

The World Of Alexandre Dumas andThe Three Musketeers

	King Louis XIII of France forms the Musketeers. His personal bodyguards, they number approximately 200 and are armed with the newly developed flintlock, muzzle-loading rifle, or musket.
	M. de Trville, the Musketeers capitaine lieutenant, is involved in an attempt to assassinate the kings adviser Cardinal Richelieu. The plot fails, and de Trville is dismissed from the court and the Musketeers.
	Born in 1632, the real-life DArtagnan becomes the capitaine lieutenant of one of the two companies of King Louis XIVs musketeers. He is later appointed governor of Lille.
	The real-life DArtagnan dies in the battle of Maestricht, Holland.
89-	The years surrounding the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte produce upheavals in French society. In literature, classicism, featuring universal themes and pure genres such as tragedy and comedy (the former represented by Corneille and Racine, and the latter by Molire), remains the dominant force. However, a new modernism, fueled by the works of Shakespeare, the German Sturm und Drang movement, and such Romantics as Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, arises as a competing trend in which genres are often mixed.
1802	Alexandre Dumas is born on July 24 in Villers-Cotterts, a village in the department of Aisne to the northeast of Paris. Dumass mother is Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Labouret, the
daughter of a local innkeeper; his father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, is the Haitian-born son of the Marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean slave from the French colony of Santo Domingo.
1806	Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a leading general in Napolons army who has fallen into disfavor, dies, leaving his family impoverished. Young Dumas receives a limited education and becomes attracted to the popular literature of the time.
1817-1820	Dumas takes a job as a solicitors clerk in Villers-Cotterts. At eighteen he meets Adolphe de Leuven, a young exiled Swedish aristocrat through whom Dumas is introduced to the Parisian theater scene.

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