Three Musketeers (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

Dumas soon turned his attention to literary pursuits. His first major success was the historical drama
Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court)
in 1829, followed in 1831 by
Antony.
By his thirtieth birthday, Dumas was regarded as one of the major figures of the nascent French Romantic theater. His
La Tour de Nesle ( The
Tower
of Nesle,
1832) is a classic example of French romantic drama replete with love, treachery, and death. Despite his success as a playwright, Dumas found his true métier with the birth of the
roman feuilleton,
or serial novel, in the 1840s. His gripping adventures, with their rambling subplots and moments of suspense, were ideally suited to serialization in newspapers.
Les Trois mousquetaires ( The Three Musketeers),
published in the press from 1843 to 1844, was an overwhelming success that instantly established Dumas as a master of the genre. It was followed by
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo)
in 1844, and, by 1850, two sequels
to The Three Musketeers: Vingt Ans apres (Twenty Years After)
and
Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (The Viscount of Bragelonne) .

Enormously prolific, Dumas was known for collaborating with others, notably Auguste Maquet, with whom he wrote The
Three Musketeers.
His practice of using other literary works as sources and working with collaborators, while hardly unique among his contemporaries, was often criticized, making him a controversial figure in French literary circles. Dumas’s life was filled with adventures. He participated in the July Revolution of 1830 in France as well as in Garibaldi’s quest for Italian independence in the 1860s; he amassed a fortune through his writing, only to let his lavish lifestyle plunge him into perpetual debt; and he built (and then lost in bankruptcy) an opulent chateau on the outskirts of Paris that he called Monte Cristo. He was also an incorrigible lover whose numerous liaisons produced three children, including a son, Alexandre Dumas (known as Dumas
fils
to distinguish him from his father), who became an important author in his own right. Alexandre Dumas
père
died on December 5, 1870.

Alexandre Dumas’s
The Three Musketeers
is one of the most perennially popular works of French literature. It has been continuously in print since its original publication in serial form in the Parisian newspaper
Le Siècle
(March 14-July 1, 1844) and has also been the subject of numerous cinematographic adaptations. Dumas himself wrote two sequels to the novel. The first,
Twenty Years After,
also appeared in Le
Siècle
(January 21-August 2, 1845); the second, The
Vicomte de Bragelonne
(sometimes translated as
The Man in the Iron Mask),
was likewise published in
Le Siècle,
with significant interruptions, between October 20, 1847, and January 10, 1850. Dumas also adapted The Three Musketeers for the stage. Under the title
La Jeunesse des
Mousquetaires
(The Musketeers‘Early Years
)
,
the play was first performed at Dumas’s own Theatre Historique in 1849, with Mélingue starring as the book’s hero, D’Artagnan.
¹
Other authors, too, have taken advantage of the popularity of
The Three Musketeers,
by penning numerous imitations and continuations of Dumas’s masterpiece.
²

Many readers, public libraries, and book publishers today classify
The Three Musketeers
as “youth fiction” and see the work as a swashbuckling adventure novel appealing primarily to adolescent boys. Dumas, however, wrote for a broader, adult public. During the nineteenth century, and especially after 1836, when new printing techniques and commercial advertising made it possible to produce newspapers more cheaply, short stories, travelogues, chronicles, and even entire novels began to appear in daily or weekly installments in the French press. Newspaper publishers hoped that these serialized texts would boost readership and revenues, and they did. Authors likewise gained from this. Eugène Sue
(The
Mysteries of
Paris
)
,
Honoré de Balzac
(The Human Comedy),
and Dumas, among others, saw the mass production and distribution of their narratives as a way to increase their income and establish a solid relationship with a growing, if diversely sophisticated, reading public. What is more, following its serialization in the press,
^a
successful work might profit from its journalistic notoriety and be reprinted in book form.
³

Serial publication was not without its constraints, however. There were deadlines to be met and a certain volume of words, lines, or pages to be produced. This frequently led to an emphasis on dialogue, since each speaker’s comments would trigger a new paragraph break and thus a new line, making pages accumulate more quickly and the action seem more fast-paced. Dumas, who was known primarily as a dramatist prior to the publication of
The Three Musketeers,
was ideally suited to take advantage of such a technique. He knew how to portray characters, reveal conflicts, and describe elements of the decor in dynamic, dramatic exchanges of speech. He understood how to vary pacing, when to present or postpone information, and how to conclude an act or scene so as to promote suspense or heighten emotion. There are numerous examples of the dramatic—if not to say theatrical—nature of serial fiction writing in
The Three Musketeers.
Take chapters 52—58, which describe the incarceration and eventual escape of the book’s villainess, Milady (de Winter), from a cell in her English brother-in-law’s castle. Replete with references to performance (for example, postures and expressions, lighting, costuming, and setting),
⁴
this series of chapters advances by increments that seem to be more like acts in a play than sections of a novel.
⁵
What is more, each individual chapter in this sequence begins and ends in a way that leaves the reader eager to discover what follows.
⁶
Such a compositional strategy all but insured future newspaper sales and created an avid audience for each episode of the story.