The Three Musketeers: a historical adventure novel written in 1844 by French author Alexandre Dumas. It is in the swashbuckler genre which has heroic chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice.

The Three Musketeers By Alexandre DumasThe Three Musketeers (French: Les Trois Mousquetaires) is a historical adventure novel written in 1844 by French author Alexandre Dumas. It is in the swashbuckler genre which has heroic chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice.Set between 1625 and 1628 it recounts the adventures of a young man named dArtagnan (a character based on Charles de Batz-Castelmore dArtagnan) after he leaves home to travel to Paris hoping to join the Musketeers of the Guard. Although dArtagnan is not able to join this elite corps immediately he is befriended by the three most formidable musketeers of the age - Athos Porthos and Aramis the three inseparables- and becomes involved in affairs of state and at court.Dumas presents his novel as one of a series of recovered manuscripts turning the origins of his romance into a little drama of its own. In the Preface he tells of being inspired by a scene in Mémoires de Monsieur dArtagnan (1700) a historical novel by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras printed by Pierre Rouge in Amsterdam which Dumas discovered during his research for his history of Louis XIV. According to Dumas the incident where dArtagnan tells of his first visit to M. de Tréville captain of the Musketeers and how in the antechamber he encountered three young Béarnese with the names Athos Porthos and Aramis made such an impression on him that he continued to investigate. That much is true-the rest is fiction: He finally found the names of the three musketeers in a manuscript titled Mémoire de M. le comte de la Fère etc. Dumas requested permission to reprint the manuscript permission was granted: Now this is the first part of this precious manuscript which we offer to our readers restoring it to the title which belongs to it and entering into an engagement that if (of which we have no doubt) this first part should obtain the success it merits we will publish the second immediately.In the meanwhile since godfathers are second fathers as it were we beg the reader to lay to our account and not to that of the Comte de la Fère the pleasure or the ennui he may experience.This being understood let us proceed with our story.The Three Musketeers is primarily a historical and adventure novel. However Dumas frequently portrays various injustices abuses and absurdities of the Ancien Régime giving the novel an additional political significance at the time of its publication a time when the debate in France between republicans and monarchists was still fierce. The story was first serialised from March to July 1844 during the July Monarchy four years before the French Revolution of 1848 violently established the Second Republic.The story of dArtagnan is continued in Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later.