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Join Us in France · Sunday, June 28, 2026

Dumas' Literary Breakthrough: The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo

In 1844, at the age of 42, Alexandre Dumas published "The Three Musketeers," marking a massive success that was immediately followed by other iconic novels like "Twenty Years Later," "La Reine Margot," and "The Count of Monte Cristo." He achieved this prolific output often with the help of collaborator Alfred Maquet, who provided structural outlines for Dumas to flesh out.

personAlexandre DumaspersonAlfred Maquet

The tape

3 quotes
So, beginning was this one that I'm not going to repeat the name of, and then we get to 1844. He's 42 years old, and he publishes The Three Musketeers. Right. That was a huge success from the beginning.
Elyse Rivin
And he followed it immediately, with not only the other two parts, because it's, of course, the whole story of the Three Musketeers is in actually in three volumes. Right. Later, he wrote 20 Years Later, I think he called it.
Elyse Rivin
And so we, we have him on a roll, basically. I mean, this guy is going, and this is in the 1840s, he is publishing and turning out all of these novels, and all of them are a huge, huge, huge success, okay?
Elyse Rivin
Heard on Join Us in France — “Alexandre Dumas: Adventure, Scandal, and 100,000 Pages, published Sunday, June 28, 2026. Heardvine summarizes and quotes with attribution and timestamps, and links to the original everywhere.
Transcribed via publisher transcript · $0.00