The Three Musketeers

In the spring of 1625, a hot-headed young Gascon named d'Artagnan rides into Paris on a yellow horse with a letter of introduction to Monsieur de Tréville, captain of the King's Musketeers. He hopes to win a place in that elite company. Before he even reaches the city, a stranger with a scar steals his letter at the inn of Meung — and d'Artagnan will spend the rest of the book chasing that man, the Comte de Rochefort, agent of Cardinal Richelieu.

In Paris, d'Artagnan blunders into three duels in one morning, with three different musketeers — the gloomy nobleman Athos, the vain giant Porthos, and the secretive priest-in-training Aramis. When the duels are interrupted by the Cardinal's Guards, the four men fight side by side instead. From that hour they are inseparable: "one for all, all for one."

D'Artagnan rents a room from a haberdasher named Bonacieux, whose pretty young wife Constance is a confidante of Queen Anne of Austria. Constance and d'Artagnan fall in love. Through her, d'Artagnan is drawn into a court intrigue: the Queen has given a set of diamond studs to her secret love, the Duke of Buckingham, in England. The Cardinal has discovered this and has persuaded King Louis XIII to ask the Queen to wear those very studs at a royal ball. If she cannot produce them, her marriage and her life are in danger.

D'Artagnan and his three friends ride hard for England. One by one Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are wounded or ambushed on the road; only d'Artagnan reaches London. Buckingham gives him the studs, two of which have been cut off by a beautiful blonde agent of the Cardinal — a woman known only as Milady de Winter. D'Artagnan races back to Paris in time to save the Queen.

Now Milady becomes the heroes' true enemy. She tries to seduce d'Artagnan, tries to murder him, and is finally unmasked — Athos recognises her as his own wife, whom he believed dead, branded with a fleur-de-lys for a long-ago crime. The story carries them to the siege of La Rochelle, where the four friends hold a breakfast in an enemy bastion on a wager, and where Milady kidnaps Constance, poisons her, and slips away to England to arrange the assassination of Buckingham. The musketeers pursue. They find her, judge her, and on a dark riverbank at midnight, by torchlight, they put an end to her. D'Artagnan returns to Paris a wiser man — and is, at last, made a lieutenant of the King's Musketeers.