The Three Musketeers

A young Gascon arrives in Paris with a letter of introduction, a borrowed horse and a talent for being challenged to duels, and by nightfall he has three of them arranged. Dumas - grandson of an enslaved woman, son of one of Napoleon's generals - ran a fiction factory with collaborators and outsold everyone in France; the swagger of this book has never dated. Behind the swordplay sits a queen's necklace and a cardinal's patience.