The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), 1844
★ 4.10 from 357.5k ratings on Goodreads
Four swaggering swordsmen, a cardinal who wants them dead, and a queen's secret: a serial adventure written at a gallop, with jokes and a very cold villain. A galloping, joke-filled adventure of friendship and defiance, with dramatic duels and a cold villain keeping the stakes sharp.
Feels like passion, defiance and humor. About friendship, adventure and power.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy swaggering friendship, swordplay, and jokes mixed with political intrigue. The nineteenth-century prose and long serial structure can feel wordy and digressive, so it asks for patience.
Why read it
Pick it up for the pleasure of four friends trading jokes and blows, and for a plot that moves with the energy of its serial origins.
Pages from the book
The particular agony of walking into a room where everyone already knows each other.
It was, then, into the midst of this tumult and disorder that our young man advanced with a beating heart, ranging his long rapier up his lanky leg, and keeping one hand on the edge of his cap, with that half-smile of the embarrassed provincial who wishes to put on a good face. When he had passed one group he began to breathe more freely; but he could not help observing that they turned round to look at him, and for the first time in his life d’Artagnan, who had till that day entertained a very good opinion of himself, felt ridiculous. Ten strokes of a bell, and the whole night rearranges around them.
But for d’Artagnan all aspects were clothed happily, all ideas wore a smile, all shades were diaphanous. The appointed hour was about to strike. In fact, at the end of a few minutes the belfry of St. Cloud let fall slowly ten strokes from its sonorous jaws. There was something melancholy in this brazen voice pouring out its lamentations in the middle of the night; but each of those strokes, which made up the expected hour, vibrated harmoniously to the heart of the young man. The most selfish of the passions, and the one we dress up most carefully.
We are compelled to admit to our readers that d’Artagnan thought nothing about him in any way; or that if he did think of him, it was only to say to himself that he was very well where he was, wherever it might be. Love is the most selfish of all the passions. Alexandre Dumas.Dumas's father Thomas-Alexandre, born in Saint-Domingue to an enslaved woman, became a general in revolutionary France; the wronged heroes of the novels owe him something.
Books that feel like this
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy, 1869
Five families, one invasion, and the small domestic hours that turn out to matter more than the battles. Read it for the people, not the history.
More by Alexandre Dumas
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas, 1844
A young sailor is betrayed on his wedding day and spends fourteen years in prison. Then he returns, rich and unrecognisable, to dismantle the lives of the men who put him there.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Three Musketeers for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy swaggering friendship, swordplay, and jokes mixed with political intrigue. The nineteenth-century prose and long serial structure can feel wordy and digressive, so it asks for patience.
- What is The Three Musketeers like?
- A galloping, joke-filled adventure of friendship and defiance, with dramatic duels and a cold villain keeping the stakes sharp. Feels like passion, defiance and humor. About friendship, adventure and power.
- What should I read after The Three Musketeers?
- If you liked The Three Musketeers, try Les Misérables (Victor Hugo), Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson) and A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens).
A taste of the feed
The bravest lives are often the ones nobody applauds.
For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are instances of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves step by step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are requited with no renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the heroes who win renown.
Les Misérables · Victor Hugo
A man keeps one small proof that his old life happened.
Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of folded rag attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off upon his finger.
A Tale of Two Cities · Charles Dickens
The short list of what a life actually needs, packed in one sentence.
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog) · Jerome K. Jerome
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