It seemed the tale had originally appeared in newspaper serial form from 1865 to ’66, but Dumas had never finished it, and it didn’t receive book publication in France until 1946, after a copy of the original manuscript in Dumas’s unmistakable handwriting turned up in a French attic. Intrigued, I tried to find a copy, but had no luck. In my research I came across several references to a later novel by Dumas set in the same period, a story called The Count of Moret, or sometimes The Red Sphinx. Dissatisfied with the available English translations, I turned to the original French versions and was delighted with what I found-Dumas was a strikingly modern writer for his time, with dynamic prose and crackling dialogue that was all too often stilted and stiffened when rendered into English by his 19th-century translators. I’d been a fan of Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers novels since Richard Lester’s 1973 film of The Three Musketeers had sent me looking for the source material, but it wasn’t until around 2000, when I was sketching out a novel set in the same period, that I really started digging into The Three Musketeers (1844) and its sequels.
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