The complete D’Artagnan saga in one unabridged volume. Five novels. Fifty years of French history. One immortal hero.
For the first time in a single edition, all five novels of Alexandre Dumas’s D’Artagnan Romances:
The Three Musketeers — D’Artagnan arrives in Paris, befriends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and crosses swords with Cardinal Richelieu and the legendary Milady de Winter.Twenty Years After — The four friends reunite during the Fronde, divided across political lines, racing to save Charles I from the executioner’s axe.The Vicomte de Bragelonne — A new generation rises. Charles II returns to the English throne, Mazarin’s France gives way to Louis XIV, and old loyalties are tested anew.Louise de la Vallière — The young Sun King’s forbidden passion for Athos’s ward sets in motion the conspiracy that will undo a kingdom.The Man in the Iron Mask — The legendary climax. A king replaced. A friend betrayed. The fall of Porthos beneath the cavern at Locmaria. The last ride of D’Artagnan at Maastricht. Only one of the four will survive.Together, the five novels form one of the greatest sagas in world literature — over one million words spanning the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the rise and fall of cardinals and ministers, sieges and conspiracies, duels and royal intrigues, the Stuart restoration in England, and the slow consummation of an era.
Why this edition?
Most English editions of Dumas present these novels separately, often abridged. The classic Routledge translation, prepared within months of the original French serialization and long established as the authoritative English rendering, has rarely been collected as Dumas conceived it — a single continuous narrative.
This Erato Press edition presents the complete, unabridged translation of all five novels, carefully prepared and freshly typeset:
All five novels in their integral form — over one million wordsLight editorial preparation to correct printer’s errors and normalize chapter numberingAn extensive critical introduction — The Immortal Gascon: Reading the D’Artagnan RomancesBiographical portrait of Alexandre Dumas and his collaborator Auguste MaquetDesigned for serious readers and collectors alikeAbout the saga
Dumas began The Three Musketeers in 1844 with no certainty that he would continue beyond it. The novel’s overwhelming success drove him back to D’Artagnan one year later, then through the long years of The Vicomte de Bragelonne. By the time he wrote the death of D’Artagnan at the Siege of Maastricht — a historical fact Dumas turned into one of literature’s great farewells — he had created what may be the most ambitious historical fiction project of the nineteenth century: a fictional life lived entirely across the actual reigns of three French kings, with the great political events of the age woven into the fabric of friendship, ambition, and loss.
The four musketeers age. They quarrel and reunite. They serve kings they distrust and oppose ministers they admire. They lose women they love and friends they cannot replace. They die one by one, each death rendered with a craft that has rarely been matched in adventure fiction.
For readers who have only encountered The Three Musketeers — or one of its countless film adaptations — the rest of the saga is a revelation. Dumas grew darker, more reflective, more politically incisive with each volume. By the closing chapters of The Man in the Iron Mask, the swashbuckling has given way to something nearly tragic: an elegy for friendship, for a generation, and for an idea of honor the modern world was already abandoning.
