Alexandre Dumas published The Three Musketeers in 1844, serialized in a Paris newspaper. D'Artagnan, a young Gascon of minor noble family, arrives in Paris with a broken-down horse and a letter of introduction to the captain of the King's Musketeers. In the first two days he manages to schedule duels with all three of the musketeers he eventually befriends, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, before those duels become a collective fight against the Cardinal's guards. The main plot concerns the effort by Cardinal Richelieu and his agent Milady de Winter to expose Queen Anne's secret correspondence with the Duke of Buckingham, which the musketeers are recruited to prevent.
The novel's underlying preoccupation is the relationship between loyalty and hierarchy. The musketeers serve the king but conspire against the cardinal, who technically operates in the king's name; they protect a queen who is conducting what would be considered treason; and they do all of this in the name of personal honor rather than institutional obligation. "All for one and one for all" is a code of private solidarity, not civic duty, and the novel celebrates it as sufficient moral grounding for the characters' choices. Milady, the novel's most capable and dangerous figure, is treated with a mixture of fascination and contempt that reflects Dumas's own complicated construction of female villainy.
Dumas wrote with a speed and abundance that his critics used against him, he produced copy at a rate that made quality control difficult across his full output. In The Three Musketeers that speed is an asset rather than a liability. The novel moves without sentimentality or unnecessary elaboration, the action sequences are spatially clear, and the characters are differentiated with enough precision to remain distinct across three hundred pages of plot. That the story is essentially a thriller constructed from seventeenth-century costumes has not stopped it from being continuously in print for nearly two centuries, which is its own form of argument about what makes adventure fiction last.
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