Three Musketeers. I Mean, Four Musketeers. Wait. Five. Yes, Five Musketeers. Or Is It Three After All?

 OK, so here’s the way the Plan went originally:

(1) In 2017, year 1 of the current ten-year schedule, read the unabridged version of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, the English translation of which was only available in shortened form in the 1970s.

(2) Year 2, 2018: Reread The Three Musketeers, one of my favorite adventure books from teen years.

(3) Year 4, 2020: Read Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, inexplicably unread by me in the forty-three years since I first read TTM. (At least I thought it was the sequel.)

(4) Year 6, 2022: Read The Man in the Iron Mask, the only other Dumas novel whose name I had routinely seen on lists or sets of classic books throughout my life (Classics Illustrated comic books, Barnes & Noble cheap editions, and so on).

In pursuit of that plan, I looked on Amazon several years ago for a Kindle copy of The Three Musketeers. They offered a set called D’Artagnan and the Musketeers: The Complete Collection for free. (Here and there the edition has a few typos from OCR, but overall this free edition works great.) Another edition is entitled The D’Artagnan Romances. Dumas wrote more books about D’Artagnan? Stuff for the Fourth Decade List! Or so I thought.

So I open the book early in 2018 to begin the adventure, flip through the table of contents, and find to my surprise that The Man in the Iron Mask is the last book in the collection. Iron Mask is a D’Artagnan book? At this point in the post, I first wrote the word “Wonderful” with three exclamation points and decided the interjection did not adequately convey my excitement. Anybody reading this blog knows the joy of starting a sequel, of finding a good novel series, of discovering a favorite character in another of the same author’s works. Add to that familiar joy the excellence of D’Artagnan as a character, the love of a teenage boy for adventure stories, and the sentimentalism of a man old enough to get senior discounts at Flapjack’s Pancake House who is reliving his youth, and you get some idea of my elation.

But then, surprise upon surprise, I look at the ToC more closely and discover that The Man in the Iron Mask is not actually a complete novel but only the third of three parts of a longer work called The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Each part of TVoB:TYL is about as long as The Three Musketeers, so that puts the total word count of The Vicomte at about 700,000: 20% longer than War and Peace, about equal to David Copperfield and Anna Karenina combined.

Now, here are four facts whose conjunction I find highly problematic:
(1) I must read The Man in the Iron Mask because I’ve wanted to since I was 10.
(2) I have to read it in 2022 because I like Plans.
(3) I have to read 460,000 words worth of other non-Plan material before I get to Iron Mask.
(4) I read slowly.

All I can do to solve this crisis is to make some time to fit the rest of the work in. I usually have time to read a handful of books outside the regular schedule each year, so I just made sure this year to save up and see how far ahead of schedule I was near the end of the year. As it turned out, I had enough time for one-third of The Vicomte. (I’ve discovered that I have no problem reading part of the way through a long novel, stopping, and picking it up a year later.)

The first part of The Vicomte of Bragelonne is called The Vicomte of Bragelonne. (Maybe I wouldn’t have been so confused about all this if Dumas had been a better titler.) The book starts ten years after the action of Twenty Years After. Dumas introduces D’Artagnan in that way that authors of sequels sometimes do when they write about the hero at first as “a mysterious man sitting in the dark,” as if the reader has any trouble identifying his favorite character. Very soon Dumas reveals that the nameless creature has a Gascon accent. No one who loves The Three Musketeers can have any doubt at this moment that he is in the presence of the fourth musketeer, Monsieur D’Artagnan.

But then a second mystery man appears! Could it be? It is! Our old friend Athos, who is, outside of Dickens, one of my top three favorite characters ever. He and D’Artagnan go separately and unbeknownst to each other on the same errand of international intrigue and almost ruin it for each other. The tears of joy are hot on my face. About 70% of the way through this first third of the giant novel (I am reminded of Monty Python identifying the lower two-thirds of the nape of the neck), dear old Porthos appears! Then Aramis! I am as giddy as Scrooge in his Christmas Past reliving the appearance of Ali Baba! This is not just a D’Artagnan book. It is a second Three Musketeers sequel! And it is enormous!

Have my surprises come to an end? Is my happiness complete? No, they have not, and, no, it is not. In googling all these confusing titles, I discover – how did I miss this before? – that director Richard Lester and the original cast of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers made a film version of Twenty Years After. Clearly Lester learned how to entitle movies from Dumas himself: his films The Three M’s and The Four M’s together tell the story (oh, so faithfully!) of the novel The Three Musketeers, and the story of Twenty Years After is presented under the title The Return of the Musketeers. Michael York as D’Artagnan? Oliver Reed as Athos? Guess what’s on the top of my Christmas list!