Signet Classics / The Three Musketeers

From Alexandre Dumas, a precise and candid description of his particular view of history:
I start by devising a story. I try to make it romantic, moving, dramatic, and when scope has been found for the emotions and the imagination, I search through the annals of the past to find a frame in which to set it; and it has never happened that history has failed to provide this frame, so exactly adjusted to the subject that it seemed it was not a case of the frame being made for the picture, but that the picture had been made to fit the frame.

This is the point of view of the historical novelist, who approaches the past as theater the unending melodrama of saints and sinners, and who knows that history, eternally surprising, inspiring, disheartening, sometimes described as one damn thing after another, will never fail him. It is all there. And it is all there to be used.


Dumas was in his early forties when he wrote The Three Musketeers, an age when novelists are believed to be entering their best creative years. He is traditionally described as a man of vast republican sympathies, which, in contemporary terms, made him a believer in democracy, equality, and the rights of man. He had fought in the streets of Paris during the July revolution of 1830; would man the barricades in 1848; would aid Garibaldi, with guns and journalism, in the struggle for Italian independence in 1860.

Such politics came to him by inclination, and by birth. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, had taken the name of his African slave mother, Marie Dumas, and spent the early years of his life on the island of Santo Domingo. When the French Revolution made it possible for men without wealth or social connections to rise to power, the soldier Alexandre Dumas became General Alexandre Dumas, commanding the Army of the Alps in 1794, serving under Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy, and later in Egypt. But his relationship with Bonaparte deteriorated; his health was destroyed by two

Alexandre Dumas (1802 1870) was the author of more than a hundred plays and novels including the famous Three Musketeers trilogy (1844 47), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844 45), and The Man in the Iron Mask (1848 50). His grandfather was a nobleman who lived in the French colony of Santo Domingo (now Haiti), and his grandmother an Afro-Caribbean slave. Dumas s father, a celebrated general in Napoleon s army, eventually fell out of favor and then died when Alexandre was four years old, leaving his family in poverty. At the age of twenty-one, Dumas moved to Paris, where he enjoyed success first as a playwright and then as a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction. He took part in the uprising of July 1830, which placed his patron, Louis-Philippe, on the throne, and built his own imposing Château de Monte Cristo outside of Paris. But by 1851, his lavish lifestyle had bankrupted him, and he left France, fleeing both creditors and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the new ruler who was no fan of Dumas. In the following decade, he made extended stays in Belgium, Russia, and Italy, where he joined the movement for its independence and unification. He died penniless but optimistic, saying of death, I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to me.

A scholar, critic, and novelist, Thomas Flanagan (1923 2002) was the author of The Irish Novelists, 1800 1850 (1959), The Year of the French (1979), which won the National Book Critics Award, The Tenants of Time (1988), and The End of the Hunt (1994).

Marcelle Clements is a novelist and journalist who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, and politics to many national publications. She is the author of two books of nonfiction, The Dog Is Us and The Improvised Woman, and the novels Rock Me and Midsummer.

The name Alexandre Dumas is more than French it is universal. Victor Hugo