The Three MusketeersStudy Guide

At the Jolly Miller in Meung, an eighteen-year-old Gascon hears laughter at a yellow pony and draws. The pale man in violet is already on other business. While the boy is still down, a boxed charge goes to an Englishwoman called Milady, and the letter that was supposed to introduce him to Monsieur de Tréville vanishes from a kitchen doublet. He sells the horse at the gate of Saint-Antoine and walks into Paris on a stolen name. Alexandre Dumas began the serial as Les Trois Mousquetaires in Le Siècle in 1844. Later rooms remember a toast. The book opens on a theft and a face he will not forget.

D'Artagnan wants a musketeer's cassock, so he treats every smile as a step toward it. The three men who can give him that life are already paying for it: Athos with a branded wife he will only name drunk, Porthos with a baldric that is not gold, Aramis with a second cassock and a letter written as if by a cousin. Tréville, once as poor as his visitor, scolds those men in public so he can defend them in private. Opposite them, Richelieu fights through other people's bodies, and the queen has already given diamond studs to Buckingham. Constance Bonacieux carries the messages that follow, and will pay for that work. Milady wears a fleur-de-lis on her shoulder and does not forgive a witness. The pressure among them is not one duel. It is whom you stand with when the king, the cardinal, and your own ambition each want a different answer.

The three Musketeers book him for noon over a wounded shoulder, a false baldric, and a dropped handkerchief. Cardinal's guards arrive before the first pass, so the men who meant to kill him keep him instead. Once they are a company, the queen's diamonds become their problem: the stones must be on her dress before a ball the cardinal designed as a count. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis fall on the road to Calais so one of them can still reach London. Buckingham cuts two new studs overnight, and the dance holds. At La Rochelle the same four take the Bastion Saint-Gervais because they cannot talk in camp. From that breakfast they write a family letter to Lord de Winter and give Planchet sixteen days. He is late enough that Felton, not the letter, reaches Buckingham. The friends then ride for Constance and arrive after a drop of water at Béthune. What they can still do, they do at night on the Lys, without a public court.

Dumas built the book from Gatien de Courtilz's Mémoires and from Richelieu's France, then refused to leave friendship as a toast. The four share a purse and a bastion. They also share a riverbank where a woman they have used and hunted is condemned in the dark. He lets the boy refuse the cardinal's commission at La Rochelle, then take a lieutenancy on a blank his Eminence once signed. He lets the friends scatter. The king gets a siege. The cardinal gets England delayed. The reader gets the bill for serving two masters and still calling the work loyalty. Entertainment is the method. The cost is the argument.

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