The Three Musketeers

A young Gascon arrives in Paris with a letter of introduction, a comic yellow nag 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 ...