On the first Monday of the month of April 1625, the town of Meung looked as if it were in as complete a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.

Alexandre Dumas , pere, was born near Paris on July 24, 1802. His grandfather was a marquis, and his grandmother was a black slave. Dumas’ father was soldier in Napoleon’s army. Dumas himself was a prolific writer; he wrote hundreds of plays and novels. However, his critics were numerous also. They said he plagiarized mnay of his works, and he made no secret of the fact that he employed several anonymous collaborators who wrote much of what Dumas published in his own name. Often Dumas provided the plot summaries, and his stable of writers fleshed out the stories and plays. His son, Alexandre Dumas, fils, became a famous playwright who wrote the story upon which the opera La Traviata is based.

The Three Musketeers is Dumas’ best-known novel. It is the first in a trilogy which consists of three novels:
Les Trois Mousquetaires,
Vingt Ans Après (Twenty Years After), and
Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix Ans Plus Tard (Ten Years Later).
This third novel is often split up into three pieces when published in English:
The Vicomte of Bragelonne,
Louise de la Vallire, and
The Man in the Iron Mask.
Dumas also wrote The Count of Monte Cristo.

If you’ ve never read these, you should. If you’ve only seen movie versions, you should read the book(s). You might get the impression from the movies that have been made that the musketeers were quite amoral or even immoral; however, in the books they are only chilvalrous and rather foolish knights who, in the romantic tradition, have lady loves, mostly worshipped from afar or at least chastely. There are all sorts of intrigues and plots, but the musketeers are loyal to their king and to one another. And the books are great fun.

Edgar Degas, b. 1834.

Eve Merriam, b. 1916, d. 1992. She is the author of the picture book A Gaggle of Geese and also a poet, writing mostly poems for children and young adults.

John Newbery, b. 1713, d.1756.

I wrote about Thackeray here and here.

I really like Victorian novelists, almost all of them: Dickens, Thackeray, WIlkie Collins, the Brontes, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope. They could all tell a story, make up characters that entice the reader to care what happened to them, come to a satisfying conclusion. Modern novels are so often lurid, sexually explicit, and inconclusive. I’d much rather lose myself in a Victorian literary world where certainly bad things happen: Becky Sharp prostitutes herself for money and security; David Copperfield is put to work in a sweat shop by his evil step-father; Jane Eyre is almost trapped into a bigamous marriage. Nevertheless, the authors don’t describe violence and sin in excruciating, and ultimately boring, detail. And still in Vanity Fair, I read the story of a young girl who becomes a fallen woman, trapped in a vain and empty life by her own evil desires. Anthony Trollope said of Thackeray, “Whatever Thackeray says, the reader cannot fail to understand; and whatever Thackeray attempts to communicate, he succeeds in conveying.”

And he did it without spending multiple pages describing the intimate details of Becky’s dissolute life. Nor is Thackeray concerned in describing the Battle of Waterloo with giving us a gory narration of every nasty thing that happens in war. He describes George Osborne’s death thusly: �Darkness came down on the field and the city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.� Can you imagine what distracting and lengthy description a modern novelist would have given of such a death scene? Because the Victorians had some sense of propriety, we’re allowed to get on with the story instead of skimming through the gore.

And it’s a great story, too. Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair to illustrate the emptiness and futility of life without God. “Thackeray expressed this sentiment in a letter to his mother: ‘What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase) greedy pompous mean perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior virtue.'”
Writers who complain about the restrictions Christian publishers place on the treatment of sensitive subjects could learn a few lessons from the Victorians. They certainly didn’t let such restraints keep them from writing fine literary fiction.