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The birth of a masterpiece:
the Three Musketeers
or the “Miracle Child of Alexandre Dumas”.

On Thursday, March 14, 1844, the readers of Le Siècle discovered on the front page of their Parisian magazine the first chapter of a new novel signed by Alexandre Dumas. It is only with reluctance that the French writer, who considered himself a dramatist, contemplated writing serial novels, a literary genre which required that each new instalment had a certain number of pages or line requirements while each subsequent issue of the serialized magazine meant an additional suspenseful styled section of the story. While working on his historical study Louis XIV and His Century, Dumas familiarized himself with the annals of the Grand Siècle by reading the memoirs of La Rochefoucault and the works of Lomélie de Brienne which inspired him with the sequence on the Queen’s diamond pendants or “ferrets” as they were called at the time. The apocryphal memoir-novel of French novelist Courtilz de Sandras entitled Mémoires de Monsieur d'Artagnan was to serve as a model for the portrayal of d'Artagnan, his friends Athos, Porthos and Aramis and the she-villain Milady de Winter. The production of The Three Musketeers marked the apogee of the literary collaboration between Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet, a man of great learning. While Maquet outlined the plot, the characters and the dialogues in draft form, Dumas rewrote each chapter prior to publication.