All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dumas, Alexandre, 1802–1870.
[Trois mousquetaires. English]
The three musketeers/Alexandre Dumas; introduction by Alan Furst; translated by Jacques Le Clercq.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64140-7
1. France—History—Louis XIII, 1610–1643—Fiction. 2. Swordplay—Fiction. I. Title: 3 musketeers. II. Le Clercq, Jacques Georges Clemenceau, 1898–1972.
III. Title.
PQ2228.A34813 2001
843′.7—dc21 00-50096
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Alexandre Dumas, who lived a life as dramatic as any depicted in his more than three hundred volumes of plays, novels, travel books, and memoirs, was born on July 24, 1802, in the town of Villers-Cotterêts, some fifty miles from Paris. He was the third child of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (who took the name of Dumas), a nobleman who distinguished himself as one of Napoleon’s most brilliant generals, and Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Labouret. Following General Dumas’s death in 1806 the family faced precarious financial circumstances, yet Mme. Dumas scrimped to pay for her son’s private schooling. Unfortunately he proved an indifferent student who excelled in but one subject: penmanship. In 1816, at the age of fourteen, Dumas found employment as a clerk with a local notary to help support the family. A growing interest in theater brought him to Paris in 1822, where he met François-Joseph Talma, the great French tragedian, and resolved to become a playwright. Meanwhile the passionate Dumas fell in love with Catherine Labay, a seamstress by whom he had a son. (Though he had numerous mistresses in his lifetime Dumas married only once, but the union did not last.) While working as a scribe for the due d’Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe) Dumas collaborated on a one-act vaudeville, La Chasse et l’amour (The Chase and Love, 1825). But it was not until 1827, after attending a British performance of Hamlet, that Dumas discovered a direction for his dramas. “For the first time in the theater I was seeing true passions motivating men and women of flesh and blood,” he recalled. “From this time on, but only then, did I have an idea of what the theater could be.”
Dumas achieved instant fame on February 11, 1829, with the triumphant opening of Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court). An innovative and influential play generally regarded as the first French drama of the Romantic movement, it broke with the staid precepts of Neoclassicism that had been imposed on the Paris stage for more than a century. Briefly involved as a republican partisan in the July Revolution of 1830, Dumas soon resumed playwriting and over the next decade turned out a number of historical melodramas that electrified audiences. Two of these works—Antony (1831) and La Tour de Nesle (The Tower of Nesle, 1832)—stand out as milestones in the history of nineteenth-century French theater. In disfavor with the new monarch, Louis-Philippe, because of his republican sympathies, Dumas left France for a time. In 1832 he set out on a tour of Switzerland, chronicling his adventures in Impressions de voyage: En Suisse (Travels in Switzerland, 1834–1837); over the years he produced many travelogues about subsequent journeys through France, Italy, Russia, and other countries.
Around 1840 Dumas embarked upon a series of historical romances inspired by both his love of French history and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. In collaboration with Auguste Maquet, he serialized Le Chevalier d’Harmental in the newspaper Le Siècle in 1842. Part history, intrigue, adventure, and romance, it is widely regarded as the first of Dumas’s great novels. The two subsequently worked together on a steady stream of books, most of which were published serially in Parisian tabloids and eagerly read by the public. He is best known for the celebrated d’Artagnan trilogy—Les trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844), Vingt ans après (Twenty Years After, 1845) and Dix ans plus tarde ou le Vicomte de Bragelonne (Ten Years Later; or The Viscount of Bragelonne, 1848–1850)—and the so-called Valois romances—La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1845), La Dame de Monsoreau (The Lady of Monsoreau, 1846), and Les Quarante-cinc (The Forty-Five Guardsmen, 1848). Yet perhaps his greatest success was Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo), which appeared in installments in Le Journal des débats from 1844 to 1845. A final tetralogy marked the end of their partnership: Mémoires d’un médecin: Joseph Balsamo (Memoirs of a Physician, 1846–1848), Le Collier de la reine (The Queen’s Necklace, 1849–1850), Ange Pitou (Taking the Bastille, 1853), and La Comtesse de Charny (The Countess de Charny, 1852–1855).
In 1847, at the height of his fame, Dumas assumed the role of impresario. Hoping to reap huge profits, he inaugurated the new Théâtre Historique as a vehicle for staging dramatizations of his historical novels. The same year he completed construction of a lavish residence in the quiet hamlet of Marly-le-Roi. Called Le Château de Monte Cristo, it was home to a menagerie of exotic pets and a parade of freeloaders until 1850, when Dumas’s theater failed and he faced bankruptcy. Fleeing temporarily to Belgium in order to avoid creditors, Dumas returned to Paris in 1853, shortly after the appearance of the initial volumes of Mes Mémoires (My Memoirs, 1852). Over the next years he founded the newspaper Le Mousquetaire, for which he wrote much of the copy, as well as the literary weekly Le Monte Cristo, but his finances never recovered. In 1858 he traveled to Russia, eventually publishing two new episodes of Impressions de voyage: Le Caucase (Adventures in the Caucasus, 1859) and En Russie (Travels in Russia, 1865).
The final decade of Dumas’s life began with customary high adventure. In 1860 he met Garibaldi and was swept up into the cause of Italian independence. After four years in Naples publishing the bilingual paper L’Indépendant/L’Indipendente, Dumas returned to Paris in 1864. In 1867 he began a flamboyant liaison with Ada Menken, a young American actress who dubbed him “the king of romance.” The same year marked the appearance of a last novel, La Terreur Prussiene (The Prussian Terror). Dumas’s final play, Les Blancs et les Bleus (The Whites and the Blues), opened in Paris in 1869.
Alexandre Dumas died penniless but cheerful on December 5, 1870, saying of death: “I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to me.” One hundred years later his biographer André Maurois paid him this tribute: “Dumas was a hero out of Dumas. As strong as Porthos, as adroit as d’Artagnan, as generous as Edmond Dantès, this superb giant strode across the nineteenth century breaking down doors with his shoulder, sweeping women away in his arms, and earning fortunes only to squander them promptly in dissipation. For forty years he filled the newspapers with his prose, the stage with his dramas, the world with his clamor. Never did he know a moment of doubt or an instant of despair. He turned his own existence into the finest of his novels.”
CONTENTS
Master - Table of Contents
The Three Musketeers
Title Page
Copyright
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INTRODUCTION by Alan Furst
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Wherein It Is Proved That Despite Their Names Ending in -os and -is, the Heroes of the History We Are About to Have the Honor to Relate Have Nothing Mythological About Them
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
I. The Three Gifts of Monsieur d’Artagnan the Elder
II. The Antechamber of Monsieur de Tréville
III. The Audience
IV. Of Athos and His Shoulder, of Porthos and His Baldric, and of Aramis and His Handkerchief
V. His Majesty’s Musketeers and the Cardinal’s Guards
VI. His Majesty King Louis XIII
VII. Home Life of the Musketeers
VIII. Concerning a Court Intrigue
IX. D’Artagnan to the Fore
<
br /> X. Concerning a Mousetrap in the Seventeenth Century
XI. In Which the Plot Thickens
XII. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham
XIII. Of Monsieur Bonacieux
XIV. The Man of Meung
XV. Men of Law and Men of the Sword
XVI. Wherein Monsieur Pierre Séguier, Chancellor of France and Keeper of the Seals, Looks More Than Once for a Bell to Ring as Lustily as He Was Wont to Do of Yore
XVII. Of Monsieur Bonacieux and His Lady
XVIII. Lover and Husband
XIX. Plan of Campaign
XX. The Journey
XXI. Lady Clark
XXII. In Which Their Majesties Dance La Merlaison, a Favorite Ballet of the Kings
XXIII. The Rendezvous
XXIV. The Lodge
XXV. Of What Happened to Porthos
XXVI. Of Aramis and His Thesis
XXVII. Of Athos and His Wife
XXVIII. The Return
XXIX. Of the Hunt for Campaign Outfits
XXX. Milady
XXXI. Englishmen and Frenchmen
XXXII. A Dinner at the House of an Attorney-at-Law
XXXIII. The Soubrette and Her Mistress
XXXIV. Concerning the Respective Outfits of Aramis and Porthos
XXXV. At Night All Cats Are Gray
XXXVI. Dreams of Vengeance
XXXVII. Of Milady’s Secret
XXXVIII. How Athos Without Lifting a Finger Procured His Equipment for the Campaign
XXXIX. A Vision
XL. Wherein D’Artagnan Meets His Eminence and Milady Speeds Him Off to War
XLI. The Siege of La Rochelle
XLII. Of Anjou Wine and Its Salubrious Virtues
XLIII. At the Sign of the Red Dovecote
XLIV. Of the Utility of Stovepipes
XLV. Husband and Wife
XLVI. The Bastion Saint-Gervais
XLVII. The Council of the Musketeers
XLVIII. A Family Affair
XLIX. Fatality
L. Of an Intimate Conversation Between Brother and Sister
LI. Of an Officer Out on a Stroll
LII. Captivity: The First Day
LIII. Captivity: The Second Day
LIV. Captivity: The Third Day
LV. Captivity: The Fourth Day
LVI. Captivity: The Fifth Day
LVII. How Milady Employed the Technique of Classical Tragedy to Prepare a Modern One
LVIII. Escape
LIX. Of What Occurred at Portsmouth on August 23, 1628
LX. Of What Was Happening in France
LXI. Of What Occurred at the Convent of the Carmelite Nuns in Bethune
LXII. Of Two Varieties of Demons
LXIII. Of Wine and Water
LXIV. The Man in the Red Cloak
LXV. Day of Judgment
LXVI. Of How Judgment Was Accomplished
LXVII. Of the Cardinal, His Agent and a Lieutenant’s Commission
LXVIII. Epilogue
COMMENTARY
INTRODUCTION
Alan Furst
From Alexandre Dumas, a precise and candid description of his particular view of history:
I start by devising a story. I try to make it romantic, moving, dramatic, and when scope has been found for the emotions and the imagination, I search through the annals of the past to find a frame in which to set it; and it has never happened that history has failed to provide this frame, so exactly adjusted to the subject that it seemed it was not a case of the frame being made for the picture, but that the picture had been made to fit the frame.
This is the point of view of the historical novelist, who approaches the past as theater—the unending melodrama of saints and sinners, and who knows that history, eternally surprising, inspiring, disheartening, sometimes described as “one damn thing after another,” will never fail him. It is all there. And it is all there to be used.
Dumas was in his early forties when he wrote The Three Musketeers, an age when novelists are believed to be entering their best creative years. He is traditionally described as “a man of vast republican sympathies,” which, in contemporary terms, made him a believer in democracy, equality, and the rights of man. He had fought in the streets of Paris during the July revolution of 1830; would man the barricades in 1848; would aid Garibaldi, with guns and journalism, in the struggle for Italian independence in 1860.
Such politics came to him by inclination, and by birth. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, had taken the name of his African slave mother, Marie Dumas, and spent the early years of his life on the island of Santo Domingo. When the French Revolution made it possible for men without wealth or social connections to rise to power, the soldier Alexandre Dumas became General Alexandre Dumas, commanding the Army of the Alps in 1794, serving under Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy, and later in Egypt. But his relationship with Bonaparte deteriorated; his health was destroyed by two years in an Italian prison; and he died, a broken man, in 1806. His son, in time the novelist Dumas, was then four years old, but he would be told of his father’s life, and he knew what it meant.
By 1844, France was ruled by Louis-Philippe, due d’Orleans, a constitutional monarch known as “the bourgeois king,” who presided over the golden age of the French bourgeoisie, a propertied class animated by the slogan “Enrichissez-vous!” (Enrich yourselves!) This was a period of transition, when corrupt capitalism was opposed by passionate idealism—the age of monarchy was dying, the age of democracy was just being born. The best insight into the period is to be found in the novels of Honoré de Balzac—Dumas’s fierce literary rival. Balzac was virtually the same age as Dumas, and, like Dumas, rose from social obscurity and penury by producing a huge volume of work at an extraordinary pace. But Balzac wrote about contemporary life—the vanity, corruption and sexual politics of Paris in the 1840s—and was, throughout his fiction, essentially a novelist of vice. Dumas, on the other hand, was a novelist of virtue, though he had to go back two hundred years to find it.
Setting The Three Musketeers in the year 1625—at that distance, a contemporary American novelist might use the revolution of 1776—Dumas was summoning up a remote and heroic era. Yes, it was all different back then. Better. Still, it may be worth remembering that Dumas’s musketeers are proud, courageous men, men without inherited money or the support of prominent family, who must fight their way through a world of political intrigue dominated by predatory, immoral people who scheme and connive, who will do virtually anything, to keep their wealth and position. So, if it is about anything, The Three Musketeers is about betrayal, fidelity, and, like almost all genre fiction, it is about honor. Honor lost, honor gained, honor maintained at the cost of life itself. By 1894, the sale of Dumas’s works totaled three million books and eight million serials.
The Three Musketeers, the first book of the d’Artagnan trilogy, with Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne to follow, appeared in installments in the journal Le Siècle from March to July in 1844. It was written with help of a collaborator, Auguste Maquet, who also participated in the writing of The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would later claim significant authorship, and haul Dumas into court.
Dumas was accused, as well, of plagiarism, having used The Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan, by one Courtilz de Sandras, published in Cologne in 1701, as source material. There he found not only d’Artagnan but Athos, Porthos, and Aramis; Tréville and his musketeers; Milady and her maid; and the Cardinalist Guards. From the annals of French history, he took the machinations, real or reputed, involving Louis XIII, Anne of Austria, Cardinal Richelieu, and the duke of Buckingham. Then he threw out whatever reality he found inconvenient and wrote what he liked.
In the real world of Europe in 1625, the continent was being torn apart by the Thirty Years War—a rather pallid name that obscures the cruel and brutal nature of its reality. Fighting on behalf of royal houses in conflict over religious issues and rights of succession, mercenary armies were paid by the right of
pillage and ravaged the countryside, a strategy described as “war supports the war.” In France, French Catholics suppressed a French Protestant minority, the Huguenots, who were supported by English Protestant money and arms. Serving as virtual regent for a weak king Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu was perhaps the greatest political figure of his time. Famously eloquent, determined and brilliant, Richelieu was a deeply ambitious man, but a devoted and faithful servant of king and country.
A popular novelist, however, must produce an archvillain, and Dumas gave the job to Richelieu. As the servant of Dumas’s fictional requirements, Richelieu is merely political on the surface, as he undertakes a series of intrigues in a struggle for power with the king or with his English Protestant enemy, Buckingham. In The Three Musketeers, Richelieu is discovered to have deeper motives, a lust for revenge inspired by a romantic slight—a spurned advance—and, in general, by sexual jealousy. The cardinal, according to Dumas, was in love with the queen, Anne of Austria. The reader of 1844, hurrying off to buy this week’s chapter in Le Siècle, likely suspected as much.
Serialized fiction read as a novel can, at times, be a slightly bumpy ride. The twists and turns of the story are intended not only to keep the reader reading, but to keep the reader buying. Thus the plot tends toward precipitous dives and breathtaking ascents, as peril and escape follow each other at narrow intervals, characters disappear and are brought back to life, and what seemed like the central crisis of the narrative is suddenly resolved, to be replaced by a second crisis.
The perfidious Cardinal Richelieu is a good example of this principle at work. He’s a useful éminence grise at the beginning of the novel, as Cardinalist guards fight the king’s faithful musketeers. But, when it’s time for the story to end, he’s too historical a figure to be vanquished with all the force that the conclusion of a romantic adventure demands. Thus the role of villain is shifted to Milady; the story can then take its chilling and violent turn; and justice, when it is at last achieved, can be, to say the least, severe.
The Modern Library Children's Classics Page 58
