The d'Artagnan Romances

The d'Artagnan Romances are a set of three novels by Alexandre Dumas that tell the story of the seventeenth-century musketeer d'Artagnan. Dumas based the character on Charles de Batz-Castelmore d'Artagnan, a captain of musketeers who lived from about 1611 to 1673, and leaned heavily on the semi-fictionalized memoirs that Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras published in 1700, some 27 years after the real man's death. The first book, The Three Musketeers, is set between 1625 and 1628 and appeared in serial form in Le Siecle between March and July 1844. Twenty Years After, set in 1648 and 1649, was serialized in 1845, and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, set between 1660 and 1673, ran from October 1847 to January 1850 and has been split into three, four or five volumes. Dumas also left The Red Sphinx, a sequel in story terms, incomplete after 75 chapters, and other writers have produced unofficial sequels and loose adaptations of the cycle.