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Zusatztext "I do not say there is no character as well-drawn in Shakespeare [as D'Artagnan]. I do say there is none that I love so wholly." —Robert Louis Stevenson Informationen zum Autor Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802 in France and died in 1870. Allan Massie is the author of more than twenty historical novels, including Charlemagne and Roland, and has written about Colette, Lord Byron, and Muriel Spark. Klappentext Alexandre Dumas's most famous tale- and possibly the most famous historical novel of all time- in a handsome hardcover volume. This swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines, kings, queens, cavaliers, and criminals in a whirl of adventure, espionage, conspiracy, murder, vengeance, love, scandal, and suspense. Dumas transforms minor historical figures into larger- than-life characters: the Comte d'Artagnan, an impetuous young man in pursuit of glory; the beguilingly evil seductress "Milady"; the powerful and devious Cardinal Richelieu; the weak King Louis XIII and his unhappy queen-and, of course, the three musketeers themselves, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, whose motto "all for one, one for all" has come to epitomize devoted friendship. With a plot that delivers stolen diamonds, masked balls, purloined letters, and, of course, great bouts of swordplay, The Three Musketeers is eternally entertaining. From the Introduction by Allan Massie My granddaughter, aged three, was enthralled by a cartoon series, 'Dogtanian', and watched this version of The Three Musketeers , in which men are dogs and women cats, over and over again. Her mother, some twenty years previously at a slightly older age, had been equally smitten. There is a photograph of her, dressed at a musketeer and mounted on her grey pony, not much smaller or more impressive than the yellow Béarnais sheltie, which provoked such mockery of its rider when the young D'Artagnan set out adventuring in search of fame and fortune. If I begin this introduction to Dumas' novel with what may seems an irrelevant family memory, it is because it is not irrelevant at all. For, while happily the book is there to be read, and is still read with enjoyment so long after it was written, the first essential thing to grasp is that D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis have escaped its confines. Like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver and Sherlock Holmes, they have become figures of modern mythology. The novel has been dramatized, filmed and made into TV series — with human actors as well as cartoon figures. The characters have become the stuff of children's games, for many young people of spirit have been musketeers at some point in their life. Dumas' novels are intoxicating. They make life more vivid, and they are addictive. They are also comforting; whatever the drama we know things will come out right in the end, as in a classic Western like Stagecoach or High Noon . For this reason when I wrote a crime novel set in Bordeaux, the capital of D'Artagnan's old province of Gascony, it seemed right that I should allow my policeman hero to turn to Dumas in moments of stress or depression (as indeed Simenon has Maigret also turn) and that when his young rugby-playing son swerves round his marker to score a try under the posts, and leaves the field flushed with happiness and triumph, the father should think, 'like a musketeer, like D'Artagnan himself'. Of course, for some stern critics, such things merely go to prove that Dumas is not a serious writer. Even the New Oxford Companion to French literature treats him with what is almost disdain. The entry on him runs to a single column, whereas two are allotted to George Sand and four to Jean-Paul Sartre. Dumas, though 'on a world scale perhaps the best known of all French novelists', is dismissed as a mer...
