Peace in 1627 France is threatened by religious tensions between the ruling catholics and the protestant separatists of LaRochelle, who are supported by France’s sworn enemy, England. His stories have bestowed upon him immortality, evidenced by the first of a new two-part film adaptation, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan ( Les trois mousquetaires: D’Artagnan), directed by Martin Bourboulon, written by Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière. More than 200 years after his death, Dumas’ legacy endures. His prose paints images of honourable and heroic deeds, political intrigue, conspiracies, and assumed identities. Without Dumas’ swashbuckling adventures, literature would miss some of its masterpieces. Then President Jacques Chirac played tribute to this giant of French literature, whose prolific oeuvre includes, The Three Musketeers ( Les Trois Mousquetaires, 1844), Twenty Years After ( Vingt ans après, 1845), The Man in the Iron Mask ( L’Homme au Masque de Fer), and The Count of Monte Cristo ( Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, 1844-1846). In 2002, on the bicentenary of French writer Alexandre Dumas’ birth, his ashes were re-interred at the mausoleum of the Panthéon, Paris.

With you, we were D’Artagnan, Monte Cristo, or Balsamo, riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles - with you, we dream.

Musketeers twenty years after