The Three Musketeers (French: Les Trois Mousquetaires) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, p¿¿re, first serialized in March¿CJuly 1844. Set in the 17th century, it recounts the adventures of a young man named dArtagnan after he leaves home to become a guard of the musketeers. DArtagnan is not one of the musketeers of the title; those are his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, inseparable friends who live by the motto "all for one, one for all" ("tous pour un, un pour tous").
The story of dArtagnan is continued in Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Those three novels by Dumas are together known as the dArtagnan Romances.