The Three Musketeers

“Too big for a youth, too small for a grown man, an experienced eye might have taken him for a farmer’s son upon a journey had it not been for the long sword which, dangling from a leather baldric, hit against the calves of its owner as he walked, and against the rough side of his steed when he was on horseback.”

The introduction of d’Artagnan to this novel compares his relative lack of experience in conflict with his grand ambitions. He is at first like the hopeless would-be knight Don Quixote, eager to be chivalrous, but without the education or knowledge of how to fulfill this role. It is also important that d’Artagnan is not quite a boy, not yet a man—an in-between age that sets him up for a coming-of-age narrative and foreshadowing his rise to Musketeer.

“Endure nothing from anyone except Monsieur the Cardinal and the king. It is by his courage, please observe, by his courage alone, that a gentleman can make his way nowadays.”

D’Artagnan’s father advises d’Artagnan to respect the cardinal just as he does the king, which shows a provincial misunderstanding of the intrigue and power struggle going on at court. As a Musketeer-in-training, d’Artagnan will quickly discover seedy truths about the infrastructure of power in France and will find himself working against the cardinal. This quote also emphasizes that courage was considered to be the most important quality for men of action at the time.

“He was thinking of Mme. Bonacieux. For an apprentice Musketeer the young woman was almost an ideal of love. Pretty, mysterious, initiated in almost all the secrets of the court, which reflected such a charming gravity over her pleasing features, it might be surmised that she was not wholly unmoved; and this is an irresistible charm to novices in love. Moreover, d’Artagnan had delivered her from the hands of the demons who wished to search and ill treat her; and this important service had established between them one of those sentiments of gratitude which so easily assume a more tender character.”

For d’Artagnan, the ideal woman is one whose innate humanity is either absent or invisible. He instantly falls in love with Constance based on his own romantic