The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [1]
XVI. In Which the Keeper of the Seals Séguier Searches More Than Once for the Bell in Order to Ring It the Way He Used To
XVII. The Bonacieux Household
XVIII. The Lover and the Husband
XIX. The Campaign Plan
XX. The Journey
XXI. The Countess de Winter
XXII. The Ballet of the Merlaison
XXIII. The Rendezvous
XXIV. The Pavilion
XXV. Porthos
XXVI. The Thesis of Aramis
XXVII. The Wife of Athos
XXVIII. The Return
XXIX. The Chase After Outfits
XXX. Milady
XXXI. Englishmen and Frenchmen
XXXII. A Procureur’s Dinner
XXXIII. Soubrette and Mistress
XXXIV. Which Treats of the Outfitting of Aramis and Porthos
XXXV. At Night All Cats Are Gray
XXXVI. The Dream of Vengeance
XXXVII. Milady’s Secret
XXXVIII. How, Without Stirring, Athos Found His Outfit
XXXIX. A Vision
XL. The Cardinal
XLI. The Siege of La Rochelle
XLII. The Wine of Anjou
XLIII. The Inn of the Red Dovecote
XLIV. Of the Usefulness of Stovepipes
XLV. A Conjugal Scene
XLVI. The Saint-Gervais Bastion
XLVII. The Council of the Musketeers
XLVIII. A Family Matter
XLIX. Fatality
L. A Brother Chats with His Sister
LI. Officer
LII. First Day of Captivity
LIII. Second Day of Captivity
LIV. Third Day of Captivity
LV. Fourth Day of Captivity
LVI. Fifth Day of Captivity
LVII. A Means from Classical Tragedy
LVIII. Escape
LIX. What Happened in Portsmouth on the Twenty-third of August 1628
LX. In France
LXI. The Convent of the Carmelites in Béthune
LXII. Two Sorts of Demons
LXIII. A Drop of Water
LXIV. The Man in the Red Cloak
LXV. The Judgment
LXVI. The Execution
LXVII. Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Introduction
Gustave Doré designed the monument to Alexandre Dumas that stands on the place Malesherbes in Paris. It was his last work, donated in the writer’s honor, and he did not live to see it completed. The smiling bronze Dumas is perched atop a huge stone pedestal. Below him on the front face of the pedestal is a group of three figures—a student, a worker, and a young girl—all bending over the same book. On the back face a rather stern d’Artagnan keeps watch, seated casually with one leg drawn up, his left hand on his hip, his right hand holding a bared sword across his knees. At the unveiling of the monument on the third of November 1883, thirteen years after Dumas’s death, the novelist Edmond About paid tribute to the father of the musketeers in a speech that formed a verbal pendant to Doré’s sculpture. It is worth quoting at length:
This statue, which would be of solid gold if each of Dumas’s readers had contributed one centime for it, this statue, gentlemen, is that of a great fool who, in his fine humor and his astounding gaiety, housed more good sense and true wisdom than all of us have together. It is the image of an irregular who gave the lie to regularity; of a man of pleasure who could serve as a model for all hardworking men; of a chaser after gallant, political, and military adventures who studied more by himself than three convents of Benedictines. It is the portrait of a prodigal who, after having squandered millions on all sorts of liberalities, left, without knowing it, a king’s inheritance. This beaming face is that of an egoist who was devoted all his life to his mother, his children, his friends, and his country…Goodness made up at least three-quarters of the rich, strange, and nebulous composition of his genius…This impetuous, powerful writer, as irresistible as a torrent in flood, never produced a work of hatred or vengeance; he was mild and generous to his worst enemies; thus he left none but friends behind…
The original of these bronze and verbal portraits was born in the town of Villers-Cotterêts, some fifty miles northeast of Paris, in 1802. His father, who might have been one of his own characters, and undoubtedly inspired several of them, including the giant musketeer Porthos, was a military man by the name of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de La Pailleterie, the son of a marquis of the Norman nobility, who had been a colonel in the artillery and in 1760 had gone to try his fortune