Three Musketeers
First published in 1844,The Three Musketeersis the most famous of Alexandre Dumas' historical novels and one of the most popular adventure novels ever written.Dumas' swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of d'Artagnan, a brash young man from the countryside who journeys to Paris in 1625 hoping to become a musketeer and guard to King Louis XIII. Before long, he finds treachery and court intrigue,and also three boon companions, the daring swordsmen Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Together, the four strive heroically to defend the honor of their queen against the powerful Cardinal Richelieu and the seductive spy Milady.
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What Hacker News says
- You might also enjoy The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.
- - How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architecture ~~ Carol Davidson Cragoe
It's a quick crash course to historical architecture, teaching how to recognize the different parts from different time periods and why they where made this way.
- The Three Musketeers ~~ Alexandre Dumas
An old classic, funny and give an interesting overview of France in the XVIIe
- 97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
- The book's title is not from Clemenceau, but from Alexandre Dumas, in "Twenty years after" (the sequel to the Three Musketeers).
Fun fact: this passage is somehow excised from the English translation of the book used by Project Gutenberg and Wikisource! (you can see it in the original French version, chapter 68: "l'anglais n'est que du français mal prononcé")
- Alexandre Dumas serial published The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo - being paid by the word - which is why they're so long - but also extra impressive how good they turned out.
The stories were not finished while the beginnings were being published.
- Serialized novels used to be common, though. Many of Dickens's novels were famously serialized weekly. Alexandre Dumas' famous novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers were also published as serials. There are plenty of other examples. More recently, apparently In Cold Blood and Bonfire Of The Vanities were both initially published as serials.
Even today, comic books are effectively serialized narrative stories that are pretty reliably published on schedule and have writers who have to keep up for months at a time.
> Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between.
Different writers have different approaches to work. Some writers work in highly productive sprints with long fallow periods, and you're right this model probably wouldn't work well for them. But some novelists do work steadily (Stephen King I believe still tries to write for a couple hours every single day and only takes relatively short breaks between novels), and the fact that this model used to work for a number of books that are now considered classics seems to indicate it can still work in at least some cases.
I'd actually be more worried about the consumer side - the death of magazines makes this model tougher. A given author can reliably produce a novel over the course of a year or two, perhaps, but probably not indefinitely (comic books solve this problem by having writing teams do arcs and then swap out the writer). Magazines used to bundle multiple authors, so subscribers weren't affected by the break period of a single author. In a world where people subscribe to individual authors on Substack and there's no bundling of many authors writing, yeah, it's a tougher sell.
