The Three Musketeers: Premium Edition - Paperback

by Alexandre Dumas Pere (Author)

The Three Musketeers (In French: Les Trois Mousquetaires) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, p re. Set in the seventeenth century, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to become a guard of the musketeers. D'Artagnan is not one of the musketeers of the title; those are his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis; inseparable friends who live by the motto "all for one, one for all" ("tous pour un, un pour tous"). The story of d'Artagnan is continued in Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Those three novels by Dumas are together known as the d'Artagnan Romances.

Author Biography

Alexandre Dumas was born in the village of Villers-Cotter?ts in the department of Aisne, northeast of Paris, France, Europe. Dumas' paternal grandparents were Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and G?n?ral commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint Domingue - now Haiti - and Marie-Cesette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean Creole of mixed French/African ancestry. Their son, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, married Marie-Louise ?lisabeth Labouret, the daughter of an innkeeper. Thomas-Alexandre, when a general in Napoleon's army, fell out of favor, thus rendering his family impoverished. By the time young Dumas was born, his family had lost all pretensions to wealth, and his widowed mother struggled to give him a decent education. General Dumas died in 1806, when Alexandre was three and a half years old. Although Marie-Louise was unable to provide her son with much in the way of education, this did not hinder young Alexandre's love of books, and he read everything he could get his hands on. While Dumas was growing up, his mother's stories of his father's brave military acts during the glory years of Napoleon I of France spawned Alexandre's vivid imagination for adventure and heroes. Although poor, the family still had the father's distinguished reputation and aristocratic connections; and in 1822, after the restoration of the monarchy, twenty-year-old Alexandre Dumas moved to Paris, where he obtained employment at the Palais Royal in the office of the powerful duc d'Orl?ans (Louis Philippe).