Just Finished Reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

The Three Musketeers, by French novelist Alexandre Dumas, is one of those books that I probably should have read back in school...better late than never, I say.  Dumas published in it 1844, but this historical novel's theme goes back to the 1620s during the reign of France's Louis XIII and England's Charles I.  The two kingdoms seem to be in a perennial state of conflict, either in war or preparing for it.  The French king has a special guard unit, called the musketeers, that operates independently of other forces, and the Cardinal has his own guard that often battles that of the King's...most particularly those musketeers.  There are special musketeers, called "the inseparables", named Athos, Parthos, and Aramis...hence the book's title.  A young man from Gascony province, d'Artagnan, has arrived seeking to be accepted by the musketeers and trained into their group.  But he gets drawn into a scuffle with a mystery man and loses his father's letter to their leader.  Disappointed, d'Artagnan finds himself first accidentally drawn into duels with the three musketeers and then, united with them, fends off an attack from the Cardinal's guards...in doing so gaining the good graces of the King and resulting in his appointment to the King's guard...

The Three Musketeers is full of "honor" and dueling to the death in its defense, something I'm not very enthusiastic about.  It all seems so immature and pointless as it is near-to-impossible for one man to have a simple conversation with another without it ending in an insult and an invitation to fight it out.  While this nonsense is going on, there is intrigue between the King of France, his wife Anne (who is also Queen of Austria), the Cardinal, and Lord Buckingham of England...the most powerful man there behind King Charles.  Rochefort, the mystery man d'Artagnan earlier encountered and is always seeking for revenge, along with Milady de Winter, one of literature's greatest villainesses, work for Cardinal Richelieu while Constance Bonacieux, working for the Queen, is d'Artagnan's love interest.  The plot gets pretty convoluted, and predictably in this context of international conflict and intrigue, not all survive to the end...

There apparently really was a historical d'Artagnan as well as the three musketeers: Dumas derived much of his material from his knowledge of that era's history as well as another Frenchman's semi-fictional work from 1700.  As it turns out, The Three Musketeers was the first of a series that Alexandre Dumas wrote, and he had a collaborator with these novels: August Maquete.  Probably needless to say, I read an English translation of this work, not the French original.  Did I like this novel?  Once I got past the buffoonery with the incessant dueling, I began to enjoy the different characters as well as learning quite a bit about early 17th century European history...including an important assassination that occurred in 1628...