The Three Musketeers
The d'Artagnan Romances, Book 1
by Alexandre Dumas 1802–1870
The book, and the century it came out of.
A young Gascon arrives in Paris with a letter of introduction, a borrowed horse and a talent for being challenged to duels, and by nightfall he has three of them arranged. Dumas — grandson of an enslaved woman, son of one of Napoleon’s generals — ran a fiction factory with collaborators and outsold everyone in France; the swagger of this book has never dated. Behind the swordplay sits a queen’s necklace and a cardinal’s patience. Illustrated with 60 full-page plates — paintings by de Boulogne, de La Tour and Duyster among them.
In which it is proved that, notwithstanding their names’ ending in os and is, the heroes of the story which we are about to have the honor to relate to our readers have nothing mythological about them.
The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, complete and unabridged. Spelling and punctuation follow present-day American usage; the sentences, the paragraphs and the voice are the author’s, word for word.
It was written in another era and may carry attitudes a reader today will find dated. They are kept for the sake of the work and do not reflect the views of this house.
- Series
- Adventure & the Sea
- Format
- Ebook
- Extent
- about 704 pages
- Reading time
- about 14 hours
- Illustrations
- Full-page plates, credited
- Text
- Complete, unabridged
- Language
- en
- This edition
- 2026
- ISBN
- 9785501140479
60 paintings are bound into this edition
Six of them are shown here, taken from the volume itself. Each is reproduced full page and named with its painter and year.
Paris, 1844 — written for a newspaper, paid by the line
The French press had just discovered the serial. Newspapers printed a chapter a day at the foot of the front page, circulation doubled on a good story, and writers were paid by the line — which is why so much of Dumas is dialogue, and why his characters answer each other in short bursts.
He worked with a collaborator, Auguste Maquet, who drafted from the historical sources; Dumas rewrote everything and put his name on it. The arrangement was known, the two men later went to law over it, and the books are nonetheless entirely his in voice.
The setting — the 1620s, Richelieu, the siege of La Rochelle — was two centuries past for his readers, and safely so: France in the 1840s had a king again after a revolution and an empire, and a story about a monarchy worth serving read differently for that.
A page from this edition
Not a mock-up: this page is taken from the finished volume. The ornament above the chapter belongs to its shelf and to no other, the opening letter is set as a drop capital, and the plate below carries the name of the painter and the year.
Both photographed from the finished volume.
The Three Musketeers, issued in this edition by Aeneas Press in 2026 on the Adventure & the Sea shelf. Newly set, with the ornament of its series above each chapter and a drop capital on the opening page. Illustrated with full-page plates, each named with its painter.
Published as an ebook and not issued in print by this house; it carries one ISBN, 9785501140479, and is supplied worldwide. This edition — its setting, its ornament, its cover art, and the selection and attribution of its plates — © 2026 Aeneas Press.
Questions readers ask
- Is this the whole of The Three Musketeers?
- Yes — complete and unabridged. Nothing is cut, condensed or paraphrased. This is the book, not a summary of it.
- What exactly did you change?
- The spelling and the punctuation follow present-day American usage. Alexandre Dumas's sentences are untouched — same words, same order, same rhythm.
- Are the pictures really in the book?
- Yes. The edition carries full-page plates bound into the text, each one named with its painter and the year it was made. Six of them are shown on this page.
- How long is it?
- About 704 pages, which is roughly about 14 hours of reading.
- What do I actually get?
- An illustrated ebook with its own ISBN, sold worldwide. One file, yours to keep, readable on any device.
