The Three Musketeers

What's inside (9 sections)

1. A Gascon rides to Paris
2. Athos, Porthos, Aramis
3. The queen's diamonds
4. Milady
5. Siege at La Rochelle
6. Revenge and a night trial
7. What creaks and what holds
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I thought I knew this book before I opened it. Cloaks, swords, shouting one for all and one for all again in every film trailer. A friend left a thick paperback on my kitchen table and I told myself I would read fifty pages out of politeness. I read those fifty standing up. What pulled me was not the fencing. It was how quick and crowded and funny the early chapters are, full of rented rooms, debts, jealous husbands, and young men showing off. Published in 1844, set in the 1620s under Louis XIII, it still reads like it was written in a hurry for readers who wanted something to happen on every page. That is because it was.

The edition most readers find now runs about 700 pages in English. The first French publisher was Baudry. Dumas worked with Auguste Maquet on plot and research, and the serial habit shows. Short chapters, entrances through doors, letters stolen at the right second. Do not expect strict history. Expect appetite, pride, loyalty, and a Gascon boy who will not back down.

A Gascon rides to Paris

DArtagnan is eighteen, from Gascony in the south, poor and proud and trained to fight. His father sends him north with a yellow pony of odd color, a letter of introduction to Monsieur de Treville, captain of the king's musketeers, and advice that can be summed up as be brave and let no one insult you except the king and the cardinal. He means it as honor. DArtagnan hears it as permission.

At Meung he stops for food and loses his temper before he eats. A grave gentleman with a scar laughs at his pony while talking with a fair young woman in a carriage. DArtagnan demands satisfaction and gets knocked flat for his trouble. While he lies senseless, his letter of introduction is stolen. He remembers the scar and the laugh. The man is the Count de Rochefort, agent of Cardinal Richelieu. The woman is Milady, though Dumas holds her name back. In ten pages Dumas plants pride, theft, politics, and a face to hate.

Paris is colder than DArtagnan hoped. Treville receives him with kindness but without the letter he can promise little. DArtagnan waits on benches and learns how little a country name means in the capital. He rents a room above the haberdasher Bonacieux, hires Planchet, a servant from Picardy who is honest, timid, and comic, and walks the streets watching uniforms.

Then comes the famous morning of offenses. On Treville's stairs he bumps Athos, who is nursing a wound, and adds a careless remark. In a corridor he tangles with Porthos and exposes a baldric that is gold only in front. In the street he picks up a handkerchief that leads to words with Aramis. Each man demands a duel behind the Carmes convent at noon, at one, at two. DArtagnan agrees to all three. He has no second and no money for a surgeon, but he will show up.

The duels turn into an alliance. The cardinal's guards arrive to arrest the three musketeers for illegal dueling, and DArtagnan draws and stands with them. Four blades against five. They win. Treville scolds them in public and praises them in private. From that hour the four are bound.

I like this opening because it makes hunger plain. DArtagnan counts coins. He skips meals. He wants a uniform the way other boys want a trade. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis notice the nerve more than the manners.

Athos, Porthos, Aramis

The title names three men, and Dumas keeps them distinct.

Athos is near thirty, quiet, courteous, and sad. He drinks too much and speaks too little, and other men step aside for him without knowing why. His servant Grimaud has learned to obey a nod. Athos pays DArtagnan's debts, corrects his blunders, and asks for nothing. Later we learn he was once the Count de la Fere, married and ruined by love, and his silence gains weight. He is the moral center even when he is drunk.

Porthos is large in body and talk. He loves fine clothes, long meals, strong wine, and being admired. His baldric, half glitter and half leather, tells his whole economy. His servant Mousqueton learns to make a little food look like a feast. Porthos seems built for laughs, and often is, but he can fight for hours and gives freely when friends are short. Dumas lets him eat and boast, then puts him in the front line where it counts.

Aramis is young, handsome, and careful with his linen and his Latin. He says he will soon leave the sword for the church, and means it for about a day at a time until a lady or a quarrel delays him. His servant Bazin polishes swords while dreaming of altar cloths. Of the three, he watches most closely.

They are broke together, which is why the friendship holds. They share purses, lose at dice, pawn rings, argue about rent, then stand in a row when the guards whistle. DArtagnan fits because he lives the same thin life and learns the code fast.

One small moment stayed with me. After the first angry meetings, DArtagnan apologizes to Athos without excuses, and Athos accepts with a nod rather than a speech. That nod does more work than pages of talk about honor.

The queen's diamonds

The plot turns from street brawls to court danger with Queen Anne of Austria. She is young, Spanish in a French court, watched by a jealous king and a patient cardinal. She has given her affection to the English Duke of Buckingham, a bold favorite of Charles I. Richelieu, who wants war with England and wants Anne disgraced, learns through spies that Anne gave Buckingham twelve diamond studs cut from a set the king had given her.

Richelieu sets a clean trap. He persuades Louis XIII to ask Anne to wear the diamonds to a coming ball. If she comes without them, the gift is proved. If she confesses, the affair is proved. Anne panics and turns to Constance Bonacieux, her linen maid and go between, who happens to live below DArtagnan and who has caught his eye for her kindness and plain sense.

Constance begs DArtagnan to help. He agrees because he loves her and because danger with the musketeers sounds better than waiting in an attic. The plan is simple to say and hard to do. Someone must reach London, warn Buckingham that the studs are marked for a trap, and bring them back to Paris before the ball.

The road eats the party one by one. Porthos is wounded in a tavern fight and must stay. Aramis takes a bullet graze and fever and holds at an inn, half reading prayers and half writing to a lady. Athos is drugged over dice in a cellar and stays behind with a pistol and a bottle, telling the others to ride on. Only DArtagnan and Planchet push through ambushes, bad horses, and forged orders.

In London, Buckingham opens the casket and finds two studs missing. Milady, sent by Richelieu, cut them during a ball to make the theft clear. Buckingham does not waste an hour. He locks the palace doors, calls his jeweler to the house, and has two copies cut in two days while DArtagnan waits and watches the Thames fog. Then DArtagnan rides for Paris with the full twelve.

He arrives late, muddy, and nearly spent, and gets the casket to Constance just as the musicians tune. Anne enters wearing the diamonds. Louis counts, satisfied, and Richelieu smiles through a loss. For DArtagnan and Constance it is the start of love under watch. For the book it fixes the method. Richelieu plans from above, Milady cuts from inside, the friends bleed on roads, and DArtagnan runs through the middle.

Milady

Milady de Winter is the engine of fear in the second half. Blond, pale, graceful, fluent in roles as well as tongues, she serves Richelieu for pay and herself for keeps. Dumas shows her first at Meung, then at work in London, then close up in Paris, and each view is colder.

DArtagnan meets her through her maid Kitty, who loves him and lets him into the house by the back way. Heedless and twenty, he answers Milady's letters meant for another man and visits in the dark. For a night he believes he has won a countess. Then, by lamplight, he sees the brand on her shoulder. A fleur de lis. The mark burned by the law on thieves and others condemned.

That mark ties straight to Athos. Years before, as the young Count de la Fere, he married a lovely girl found alone, raised her to his rank, then found after a fall from a horse that her shoulder bore the brand. In shock and pride he had her hanged from a tree and rode away. She lived, hardened, and rose again as Milady. Athos tells the story late, drunk and level, and DArtagnan understands that his friend's dead wife is alive and plotting against them all.

Milady never stops moving. Locked up, she charms her guard. Accused, she produces tears and prayers on cue. In England she plays the Puritan widow to Lord de Winter, her brother in law, and bends his young officer Felton, a serious Puritan soldier, toward murder by telling him Buckingham is a villain and she is a saint in chains. She poisons, stabs, forges, and smiles while cornered.

She frightens me more than Richelieu on the page. The cardinal is power that waits. He signs, funds, listens, and lets others hang. Milady is wit under pressure. When the men are slow, she is already writing the next letter.

Dumas gives her long acting scenes, and they work because we see the seams. Loud prayer. Timed faint. Eyes on the door while the voice shakes. You admire the craft and dread what it will buy.

Siege at La Rochelle

After the diamonds, the war widens. France under Richelieu moves to crush La Rochelle, the Huguenot port backed by England. The musketeers march to the siege, and DArtagnan at last earns notice and the promise of a commission through Treville's favor and hard service. The camp is mud, fever, short bread, dice, letters from home, and priests in armor. Richelieu rides the lines in a corselet over his red robes. Louis hunts and sulks. Buckingham fits out ships that sail too late.

Dumas mixes real siege facts with tavern tales. La Rochelle did starve in 1627 and 1628, and the English relief did fail, but Dumas keeps hunger offstage while his four eat and joke in the foreground.

Two set pieces carry this middle. In one, the four take a wager to breakfast inside the Bastion Saint Gervais, a ruined fort between the lines, and hold it for an hour under fire. They spread a napkin, open wine, carve fowl, and talk while shot knocks plaster. Grimaud signals, Mousqueton hides badly, Bazin prays, Planchet holds horses. It is absurd and brave, and it shows the friendship better than any speech. They finish, gather muskets as proof, and walk back unhurried.

In the other, letters are seized that prove Milady has Richelieu's written protection to kill Buckingham in England and then return to kill Constance, who is hidden in a convent. Athos meets the cardinal face to face in an inn and, with a pistol steady on the table, forces him to surrender the pass. Richelieu, amused and wary, yields. Athos speaks little and wins. He knows power respects nerve.

The siege pages sag in spots. Supplies, guard duty, sorties that change nothing. The thread that holds is Milady moving toward England while the armies sit still.

Revenge and a night trial

The last movement is darker and faster.

Milady reaches England and works on Felton day by day. She tells him Buckingham persecutes the faithful, that Lord de Winter holds her for virtue, that heaven wants the duke punished. Felton, lonely and earnest, believes and stabs Buckingham at Portsmouth. Buckingham dies. Felton is seized. Milady sails for France with a pass that she thinks will shield her.

Constance waits in the Carmelite convent at Bethune, gentle and afraid, loyal to Anne and to DArtagnan. Milady finds the house first, poses as a victim of the cardinal, and shares supper. She talks sweetly and watches the cup. The wine is poisoned. When DArtagnan and the three ride in minutes later, Constance dies in his arms. Dumas writes it plain, without jokes. After so much swagger, the cruelty lands hard.

What follows is not law. Athos gathers the friends, Lord de Winter who has crossed from England, and a masked man in red who proves to be the executioner of Lille, the same officer who branded Milady long ago and whose brother she helped ruin. They track her to a lonely house by the Lys, hold a night hearing, read her crimes aloud, and condemn her. She begs, offers gold, confesses in part, threatens in part. The sword falls. DArtagnan takes a ring from her hand. The river takes the sound.

Richelieu hears the account and surprises DArtagnan. Instead of prison for murder, he offers a lieutenant's commission in the musketeers with the name left blank. DArtagnan offers it in turn to Athos, to Porthos, to Aramis, and each refuses for his own reason. Porthos will marry a rich widow. Aramis will at last take orders. Athos will retire to his small estate. DArtagnan keeps the paper. The friends part on the road with tears and pledges to meet again.

What creaks and what holds

No fair retelling should skip the faults. The book is long and repeats its tricks. Another inn, another intercepted letter, another duel stopped by a shout. Dumas wrote week by week and fed readers what they liked, so the middle bulges, especially around the siege and Porthos courting his supposed duchess, who proves to be a lawyer's wife. A shorter book would move cleaner.

The history is scenery. The real Richelieu was more able and more complex than the smiling spider here. La Rochelle fell after terrible hunger, which Dumas notes and steps past to keep his heroes fed and witty. If you want the 1620s straight, read a history next.

The view of women dates the book most. Constance is brave and kind and thin beside the men. She loves, helps, hides, and dies to move DArtagnan forward. Serving women are used for keys and notes. Court ladies scheme but seldom act. Milady is the exception, sharp and active from first to last, and the book kills her by a private court of men with no appeal and no priest she trusts. She did murder, and the book lists true crimes, yet the scene still reads as fear of a woman who will not be owned. Readers now will notice, and should.

What holds is the friendship and the pace of talk and steel. Athos keeps his word. Porthos pays when it matters. DArtagnan grows from a boy who quarrels over a pony to a man who can give away a commission and mean it. Give it a hundred pages, past Meung and the first duels into the diamonds. Keep a light grip on names. I closed my copy sorry to leave Paris.

FAQ

Is The Three Musketeers part of a series?

Yes, it is the first book in The dArtagnan Romances. Dumas continued the friends in Twenty Years After and the long Bragelonne story, so this Paris ending is a beginning.

Who is Milady and why does she bear a brand?

Milady is a skilled agent for Richelieu and, as Athos learns too late, his wife from his youth as the Count de la Fere. She bears a fleur de lis brand from an early crime, survived hanging, and rose again as a spy, poisoner, and forger.

How long is the book and is it hard to start?

The standard English text runs about 700 pages and first appeared in 1844 as a fast serial. Give it a hundred pages past Meung and the first duels, and keep a light list of names until the diamonds plot locks in.