The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas, 1844 ★★★½

A Potboiler for the Ages

The test of a great storyteller lies not in the story, but the telling. Few storytellers stand the test of time like Alexandre Dumas in his breakout novel The Three Musketeers.

Is it a great story? I don’t think so. The narrative ambles about, plays up many tropes of the historical-adventure genre, takes several protracted detours, and doesn’t quite climax after 600 pages as much as run out of steam. But what a ride!

Many know that the title itself is misleading. Formally, it refers to three members of the King of France’s elite guard circa 1625, namely Porthos, Aramis, and Athos. But a fourth man and a friend of the trio, d’Artagnan, is at its center. Seeking employment as a musketeer, D’Artagnan spends most of the book earning his spurs under an ancillary command. Still, a bold attitude brings the other three into his orbit. The parting words of his father become his mantra:

“Have no fear of many imbroglios, and look about for adventures. You have been taught to handle the sword; you have muscles of iron, a wrist like steel; fight whenever you can, the more so because duels are forbidden, and consequently it requires twice as much courage to fight.”

The opening chapter is one of most delightful I ever read. In it, we meet young tyro d’Artagnan riding a gawky yellow horse into the French town of Meung, hotbed of festering unrest. Mindful of his father’s words, he picks a fight with a lordish gent who cuts a jape about d’Artagnan’s awkward mount. Instead of dueling, which is after all a crime, the antagonist escapes in the company of a beautiful minx and leaves d’Artagnan to wage his fight with locals who beat him down with cooking implements. He wakes to find stolen his valued letter of introduction to the Musketeer leader, M. de Treville. What to do?

"He sold him for three crowns." d'Artagnan offloads his mocked yellow steed once arriving in Paris. I was disappointed when the yellow horse returned later in the narrative, only to be suddenly dropped. A dangling plot thread, or lost in translation? Illustration by Maurice Leloir from http://www.cadytech.com/dumas/images/all/000180.jpg.

Being from Gascony, which as Dumas often reminds us makes him fearlessly hardheaded, d’Artagnan plugs on, eventually making his way to Paris and Treville’s headquarters. Treville turns him down gently, but in the process, d’Artagnan spots that man from Meung, whom he (rightly) suspects stole his letter. Rushing fruitlessly after him, d’Artagnan manages to successively annoy Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, arranging in turn to duel each man the next day. This obviously bodes ill for the young upstart, but he maintains a sunny outlook (“Positively, I cannot escape! but at all events, if I am killed, it will be by a musketeer”) and winds up not only alive but impressing his three adversaries. Their fellowship is cemented when the four find themselves fighting together against the guard of Cardinal Richelieu.

This is a spoiler of sorts, since the way Dumas tells it is much better, but it gives you a flavor for what the next 550 pages are about: A lot of action, enriched by period detail and generous dollops of comedy. Dumas likens d’Artagnan to that famous figure of medieval mirth, Don Quixote, but unlike Cervantes’ much-esteemed, impenetrable classic, I found the narrative here engaging and immersive.

Though as I stated at the outset, it’s not a streamlined narrative. While the Musketeers’ conflict with Richelieu remains active throughout, the story moves around quite a bit. Action centers on a historic event, the siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle from 1627-28, but most of the novel concerns the romantic affairs of the Musketeers and others. When an early adventure centers on recovering a set of pearls given by France’s queen, Anne of Austria, to her English lover, the Duke of Buckingham, you may find the attention to social niceties and trivialities tiring. Yet the way Dumas breathes life into this episode keeps your attention, and pays out with a charming resolution.

I love Buckingham’s profession of love to his royal mistress, after she reminds him their liaison is not only dangerous but could lead to war:

“It is but too true that my enjoyment will have been bought by the blood of thousands of human beings, but what will their lives be to me, provided that my eyes are blessed once more with seeing you! This may be folly, madame – perhaps madness; but tell me, pray, has ever woman a more impassioned lover, has ever a queen a more enthusiastic servant?”

The translation I used in reading this, from a 1998 Oxford World Classics paperback, is an old one, and according to Wikipedia, somewhat bowdlerized from Dumas’s original. A lot of sex was taken out, apparently, which does reduce the drama. When d’Artagnan earns the enmity of the novel’s main villain, the beautiful but coldly brutal aristocrat known as Milady, a reader only senses d’Artagnan’s sexual gamesmanship that Dumas spelled out more clearly in the original.

What remains intact is an engagingly odd and keenly-felt code of chivalry that makes Three Musketeers unique. Example: The four heroes’ first battle leaves one of Richelieu’s guards dead and others gravely injured. Having made their point, the Musketeers and d’Artagnan escort their former foes to get proper medical attention, exchanging complements with each other all the while. “Bravery is always respected, even in an enemy,” Dumas notes.

"One for all – all for one!" The most famous quote from "The Three Musketeers" is misquoted as often as "Play it, Sam" from Casablanca. A Maurice Leloir illustration with what I'm guessing is left-to-right d'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos from http://www.vintagenovels.com/2015/07/the-three-musketeers-by-alexandre-dumas.html

Even Richelieu, with his machinations against the Queen whom the Musketeers protect, is an ambiguous foe. He may seethe at the way d’Artagnan frustrates his plans, but he still admires the guy and even, late in the novel, is the one who finally makes d’Artagnan a Musketeer.

While combat is central to the narrative, battle scenes are relatively few and, for the most part, briskly handled. The Siege of La Rochelle is the scene of the best-remembered action sequence, in which the musketeers make a bet to hold a picnic in enemy territory. This is prompted not only by bravado, but an opportunity to discuss the matter of Milady without being overheard. As they eat, drink, and confer, enemy soldiers make sorties the musketeers repel without interrupting their meal.

Mostly, Dumas gives us a series of portraits of heroes thriving under stress. Porthos, the Oliver Hardy of the group, has an affair with a rich woman whose husband suspects but can do nothing but thwart Porthos’ more materialist yearnings while leaving him his wife. Aramis pines for life as a priest, and engages in a long dialogue with a pair of annoying clerics which Dumas plays up for comic effect.

With the (possible) exception of the shadowy Richelieu, Athos is the novel’s most interesting character, for his mysterious backstory, his lonely alcoholism, and choice nuggets of wisdom he often bestows:

“I say that love is a lottery, in which he who wins gains death! You are very fortunate to have lost, believe me, my dear d’Artagnan; and if I have any advice to give you, it is to lose always.”

D’Artagnan’s willingness to risk all for love is what passes for a story through much of the novel. It makes him an amusing if frustrating protagonist, as he knowingly throws himself into danger in order to rescue someone else’s wife, declaring “I in my turn am going to be caught in the mousetrap; but woe betide the cats who shall deal with such a mouse!”

The Three Musketeers is a story of caricatures rather than characters, but what caricatures! Like his English contemporary Dickens, Dumas painted with a broad brush of many colors.

Author Alexandre Dumas, late in life. After his death in 1870, his fiction fell out of favor in the face of social realism, but he came back with a vengeance over time, especially once Hollywood discovered him. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas.

The most vivid caricature is none of the four principals but rather Milady, who brags she is her own God and brings death and ruin for her private pleasure. Modern readers may see a feminist hero demanding more of life than women of her era were allowed, but within the confines of the book, she’s too nasty for sympathy:

“You are not a woman,” replied Athos coldly; “you do not belong to the human race: you are a demon, escaped from hell, and to hell we shall send you back.”

Dumas’ willingness to ride Milady’s villainy for long stretches becomes labored, especially late in the novel. For about half of the last 100 pages, we zoom in on her locked in an English cell. The editor of my Oxford World Classics edition, David Coward, notes how, typically in Romantic fiction, prison idylls represented “a symbolic passage from transgression to spiritual purification.” Here, as Coward notes, Milady’s nasty streak only grows stronger.

I do find The Three Musketeers gets a bit ponderous in this and other ways. Many critics see in Milady a compelling successor to Lady MacBeth, but she is too dark to draw that kind of investment from me. By the time we get to her comeuppance, the payoff seems rather forced given the build-up.

Still, Dumas’s abilities as a writer are at full boil throughout, and make the story, despite many chronological flubs, blind alleys, and personality changes, hard to put down. So often he sets up a scene in such a way a reader can’t help but be immersed, whatever the critical distance:

Beyond this hedge, and garden, and cottage, a heavy mist enveloped in its shade that vast immensity where Paris slept – an immensity, void and open in which some luminous points glittered like the funereal stars of that vast pandemonium of suffering and sin.

The amazing thing about Dumas is not just the quality, but the quantity. He wrote two more Musketeer novels, a plethora of other fictions, plays, histories, and travelogues. Able to dash off best-selling prose in 14-hour bursts, he was a genre onto himself, whose myriad works (The Count Of Monte Cristo, The Man In The Iron Mask, The Corsican Brothers) remain popular and beloved to this day.

There’s no better place to begin investigating Dumas than here. You may get confused, even annoyed, by a plot with hints of ropiness, but Dumas reminds you of how transporting great literature can be while not seeming to break a sweat.