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"Three Musketeers", "The Iron Mask-Wearing Man", and "The adventure book" "The Count of Monte Cristo", written by Alexandre Dumas, was first released in serial form from August 1844 to January 1846. During the historical events of 1815-1838, the story is set in France, Italy, islands in the Mediterranean, and the Levant. It starts right before the Hundred Days era and lasts all the way up to Louis-Philippe's reign in France.

"We read The Three Musketeers to experience a sense of romance and for the sheer excitement of the story," reflected Clifton Fadiman. "In these violent pages all is action, intrigue, suspense, surprise--an almost endless chain of duels, murders, love affairs, unmaskings, ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, wild rides. It is all impossible and it is all magnificent." First published in 1844, Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of D'Artagnan, a gallant young nobleman who journeys to Paris in 1625 hoping to join the ranks of musketeers guarding Louis XIII. He soon finds himself fighting alongside three heroic comrades--Athos, Porthos, and Aramis--who seek to uphold the honor of the king by foiling the wicked plots of Cardinal Richelieu and the beautiful spy "Milady." "Dumas will be read a hundred, nay, three hundred years on," wrote John Galsworthy. "His greatest creation is undoubtedly D'Artagnan, type at once of the fighting adventurer and of the trusty servant, whose wily blade is ever at the back of those whose hearts have neither his magnanimity nor his courage. Few, if any, characters in fiction inspire one with such belief in their individual existences. . . . To one who made D'Artagnan all shall be forgiven." Clifton Fadiman agreed: "Dumas enjoyed writing his stories. . . . The pleasure he must have felt in creating D'Artagnan's troubles and triumphs flashes out of these pages. . . . Dumas rampaged through the history of France, inventing, changing, distorting--doing whatever was needed to produce a tale to hold the reader breathless."

This vintage book contains the second volume of Alexandre Dumas's famous adventure novel, "The Count of Monte Cristo." Set in early nineteenth century France during the time of the Bourbon Restoration, it tells the story of a man's wrongful imprisonment, his escape, and his indefatigable quest for revenge. A masterful tale of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy, and forgiveness, "The Count of Monte Cristo" is rightfully one the most famous novels of all time, and deserves a place on every bookshelf. Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) was a famous French writer. He is best remembered for his exciting romantic sagas, including "The Three Musketeers" and "Chicot the Jester." Despite making a great deal of money from his writing, Dumas was almost perpetually penniless thanks to his extravagant lifestyle. His novels have been translated into nearly a hundred different languages, and have inspired over 200 motion pictures. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing this antiquarian book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

For the first time in English in over a century, a new translation of the forgotten sequel to Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, continuing the dramatic tale of Cardinal Richelieu and his implacable enemies. In 1844, Alexandre Dumas published The Three Musketeers, a novel so famous and still so popular today that it scarcely needs introduction. Shortly thereafter he wrote a sequel, Twenty Years After, that resumed the adventures of his swashbuckling heroes. Later, toward the end of his career, Dumas wrote The Red Sphinx, another direct sequel to The Three Musketeers that begins, not twenty years later, but a mere twenty days afterward. The Red Sphinx picks up right where the The Three Musketeers left off, continuing the stories of Cardinal Richelieu, Queen Anne, and King Louis XIII—and introducing a charming new hero, the Comte de Moret, a real historical figure from the period. A young cavalier newly arrived in Paris, Moret is an illegitimate son of the former king, and thus half-brother to King Louis. The French Court seethes with intrigue as king, queen, and cardinal all vie for power, and young Moret soon finds himself up to his handsome neck in conspiracy, danger—and passionate romance! Dumas wrote seventy-five chapters of The Red Sphinx, all for serial publication, but he never quite finished it, and so the novel languished for almost a century before its first book publication in France in 1946. While Dumas never completed the book, he had earlier written a separate novella, The Dove, that recounted the final adventures of Moret and Cardinal Richelieu. Now for the first time, in one cohesive narrative, The Red Sphinx and The Dove make a complete and satisfying storyline—a rip-roaring novel of historical adventure, heretofore unknown to English-language readers, by the great Alexandre Dumas, king of the swashbucklers.