Dumas presents his novel as one of a series of recovered manuscripts, turning the origins of his romance into a little drama of its own. In the preface, he tells of being inspired by a scene in Mémoires de Monsieur d'Artagnan (1700), a historical novel by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, printed by Pierre Rouge in Amsterdam, which Dumas discovered during his research for his history of Louis XIV.[3][4] According to Dumas, the incident where d'Artagnan tells of his first visit to M. de Tréville, captain of the Musketeers, and how, in the antechamber, he encountered three young Béarnese with the names Athos, Porthos and Aramis, made such an impression on him that he continued to investigate. That much is true – the rest is fiction: He finally found the names of the three musketeers in a manuscript titled Mémoire de M. le comte de la Fère, etc. Dumas "requested permission" to reprint the manuscript; permission was granted:
Now, this is the first part of this precious manuscript which we offer to our readers, restoring it to the title which belongs to it, and entering into an engagement that if (of which we have no doubt) this first part should obtain the success it merits, we will publish the second immediately.
In the meanwhile, since godfathers are second fathers, as it were, we beg the reader to lay to our account and not to that of the Comte de la Fère, the pleasure or the ennui he may experience.
This being understood, let us proceed with our story.[5]
The Three Musketeers was written in collaboration with Auguste Maquet, who also worked with Dumas on its sequels (Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later), as well as The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would suggest plot outlines after doing historical research; Dumas then expanded the plot, removing some characters, including new ones and imbuing the story with his unmistakable style.
The Three Musketeers was first published in serial form in the newspaper Le Siècle between March and July 1844.
