Los tres mosqueteros

The Three Musketeers is undoubtedly a serialized novel. A torrent of adventures with all the typical flaws of works of its kind, but also a distinguished serial far superior to the common standards of the genre. It remains fresh and alive, and it triggers echoes, intimate springs in the imagination and feelings of whoever faces its pages, immersing them in a thrilling adventure and making them run, gallop breathlessly on the road from Calais to Belle-Isle, fighting in inns or on the roads, dodging poison and daggers in the corridors of the Louvre, loving, killing and dying in an adventure that is really nothing other than "Adventure," as Robert Louis Stevenson said referring to Dumas, that beats in every human heart: ardent will, melancholy, a little vain strength, friendship, subtle and gallant elegance, courage, loyalty and that tone of skeptical wisdom, of light pessimism or tempered optimism that permeates the story, and is nothing other than the lucid knowledge of the human condition with what it has, at once, of the despicable and the endearing.