The Three Musketeers

• 1. Introduction

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  The Three Musketeers began not as a novel but as a serial, running in the pages of the French newspaper Le Siecle from March to July 1844. Alexandre Dumas published it during the July Monarchy, a constitutional regime that sat uneasily between the old royal order and the republican future that was only four years away. A young Gascon named d'Artagnan arrives in Paris with nothing but ambition and a battered horse, picks fights with three of the most formidable swordsmen in France, and by the end of the afternoon is fighting beside them against the guards of Cardinal Richelieu. That pivot point, from rivals to companions, sits at the heart of a story that has never stopped being retold. Who actually wrote this book, and with what kind of collaboration? How did a real soldier from the 17th century become a fictional hero? And why, nearly two centuries after its publication, do film directors, playwrights, manga artists, and even intelligence agencies keep returning to it?

• 2. The Making of a Collaboration

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  Auguste Maquet's name does not appear on the cover of The Three Musketeers, but his labor runs through every chapter. Maquet would research the historical period, propose plot outlines, and hand them to Dumas, who then expanded the material, cut characters he did not want, invented new ones, and wrote the prose in his own voice. The same partnership produced the sequels, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, as well as The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas himself acknowledged the collaboration, though he presented it through an elaborate frame. In the preface to the novel, he claimed to have discovered a 1700 historical novel by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, Memoires de Monsieur d'Artagnan, printed by Pierre Rouge in Amsterdam, while researching a history of Louis XIV. He found in it a scene in which d'Artagnan first visits M. de Treville and encounters three young Bearnese named Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. That detail, Dumas wrote, compelled him to investigate further. The preface then describes finding a manuscript titled Memoire de M. le comte de la Fere, and quoting the document's mock-permission to reprint, Dumas writes: "we beg the reader to lay to our account and not to that of the Comte de la Fere, the pleasure or the ennui he may experience." The fiction of the recovered manuscript was a literary device, but the historical novel behind it was real, and so was the debt to Maquet.

• 3. History Underneath the Adventure

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  Charles de Batz-Castelmore d'Artagnan was a real soldier, and Dumas built his fictional hero on that foundation loosely. The novel places its action between 1625 and 1628, and the historical figures who appear alongside the invented characters are drawn with specific political intent. Cardinal Richelieu, identified in the source as Armand Jean du Plessis, is presented as the king's chief minister focused on strengthening the French national state, while also pursuing Queen Anne for personal reasons after she rebuffed his advances. King Louis XIII appears as a weak and self-indulgent monarch, frequently outmaneuvered by Richelieu. Queen Anne of Austria is portrayed as naive and neglected, endangered precisely because the Duke of Buckingham courts her and she gives him a diamond necklace as a keepsake. Buckingham himself, George Villiers, the 1st Duke of Buckingham, is drawn as a man so accustomed to having his way that he would risk war between England and France as a matter of personal convenience. Dumas also used the novel to comment on his own moment. The story first appeared four years before the French Revolution of 1848 established the Second Republic, and the source notes that Dumas frequently portrays injustices, abuses, and absurdities of the Ancien Regime, giving the novel political weight in a France still divided between republicans and monarchists. The Siege of La Rochelle, where the four friends hold the St. Gervais bastion against rebels for an hour and a half, killing a dozen Rochelaise in the process, was a real military engagement woven into the fictional plot.

• 4. Character and Consequence

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  Athos is described as the oldest of the four, a figure who has never recovered from discovering that his wife bore a fleur-de-lis brand on her shoulder, the mark of a felon. He left her to die in a forest with her hands tied, abandoned his family castle, and reinvented himself as a musketeer under another name. That backstory, which he tells d'Artagnan while drunk, is not decoration; it drives the plot, because Athos's branded ex-wife is Milady de Winter, the Cardinal's most dangerous spy. Porthos is a dandy who compensates for a lack of intellectual sharpness with what the source calls homeric strength of body and character; he ends the novel preparing to retire and marry his wealthy mistress. Aramis wavers throughout between his religious calling and his attraction to women and court intrigue, and his servant Bazin has always dreamed of the day his master would finally join the church. D'Artagnan himself is characterized as impetuous, brave, and clever. At the novel's close, when Richelieu is impressed enough by d'Artagnan's candor to write him a promotion to lieutenant in Treville's company, each of the three musketeers refuses the letter in turn: Athos because it is beneath him, Porthos because he is retiring, Aramis because he is entering the priesthood. The promotion d'Artagnan had coveted arrives at the moment his three friends disperse, which gives the ending a quality of bittersweet solitude. Cardinal Richelieu, who might have been a simple villain, is instead someone who destroys a signed order absolving a bearer of responsibility and writes a new one in its place, showing a pragmatic respect for the young man who outwitted him.

• 5. The Translation Problem

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  Les Trois Mousquetaires had three English translations by 1846, within two years of its first French publication. One of them, by William Barrow (1817-1877), remains in print and was issued in an Oxford World's Classics edition in 1999. That translation came with a cost: to meet 19th-century English standards, all explicit sexual references and many implicit ones were stripped out, which the source notes adversely affected the readability of several scenes, particularly those between d'Artagnan and Milady de Winter. The problem persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries. Richard Pevear, who published a new translation in 2006, applauded Barrow's effort but argued that most modern translations available by then were textbook examples of bad translation practices that gave readers an extremely distorted notion of Dumas' writing. The most recent translation, by Lawrence Ellsworth (whose legal name is Lawrence Schick), was published by Pegasus Books in February 2018. Ellsworth drew from the 1956 French edition and set himself a larger task: translating the full trilogy of the d'Artagnan Romances as well as two novels of The Count of Moret, making it the first complete translation in over a century and a half, spread across nine volumes. As of 2025 all nine volumes have been published.

• 6. A Century of Adaptations

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  Douglas Fairbanks played d'Artagnan in a 1921 silent film, and the story has not left screens since. The 1948 film version assembled a cast that included Van Heflin, Lana Turner, June Allyson, Angela Lansbury, Vincent Price, and Gene Kelly. Richard Lester split the material across two films released in 1973 and 1974, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, with Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, and Michael York. A 2004 Ukrainian musical cast Volodymyr Zelenskyy as d'Artagnan and gender-flipped the three musketeers to women. The 2023 French two-part film saga starred Francois Civil, Vincent Cassel, Pio Marmai, Romain Duris, and Eva Green. For the stage, the musical with lyrics co-written by P. G. Wodehouse and music by Rudolf Friml ran for 318 performances in its original 1928 Broadway production. A 1984 revival ran for only 9 performances. The Stratford Festival has staged Peter Raby's adaptation four times, in 1968, 1988, 2000, and 2013, with a different cast each time; the 1988 production featured Colm Feore as Athos and Geraint Wyn Davies as d'Artagnan. On the animated side, Walt Disney Productions made Three Blind Mouseketeers as a Silly Symphony cartoon in 1936, and the 1981 Spanish-Japanese anime Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds presented the characters as anthropomorphic dogs. A sequel, The Return of Dogtanian, arrived in 1989. In that version, the character traits of Athos and Porthos were deliberately swapped from the novel, making Athos the extrovert and Porthos the secretive one. Classic Comics used the novel as the debut issue for publisher Albert Lewis Kanter in 1941, and in September 2019 Amazon released an Audible audio drama that retells the story from Milady's perspective.

• 7. The Story Beyond the Story

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  Eli Cohen, the Israeli spy who infiltrated the Syrian government for several years before being discovered by Syrian intelligence and executed, used a French-language copy of The Three Musketeers as the basis for a book cypher in his communications with Israel. A matching copy at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv was used to decode his messages; that copy is now preserved in the Mossad's museum. The phrases all for one and one for all entered Japanese manga: in My Hero Academia they name two of the most powerful superpowers in the series, called Quirks. In the film Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal Malik's final question asked him to name the third musketeer; he identified Aramis and won twenty million rupees. Fantasy novelist Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances series uses the d'Artagnan Romances as a chief inspiration, recasting the plots within his world of Dragaera; his 2020 novel The Baron of Magister Valley draws on The Count of Monte Cristo by the same method. The Smiths quoted a passage describing Athos directly in the song "You've Got Everything Now": the novel's line that his companions could remember having often seen him smile, but had never heard him laugh became source material for a lyric. The Royal Shakespeare Company and Told by an Idiot have announced a new adaptation scheduled to run at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon from the 28th of November 2026 to the 8th of January 2027.