Twenty Years After (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading). This item is unavailable.Twenty Years After (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

Twenty Years After (1845) resumes the adventures of Alexandre Dumas' fabulous four begun in The Three Musketeers. “The inseparables”―Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and the irrepressible Gascon, d'Artagnan―are once again called upon to save France from itself. This time, the paragons of honor, chivalry, and justice find themselves embroiled not only in court intrigue and royal affairs (including the Queen's illicit liaison with her first minister, Cardinal Mazarin), but also popular revolution. Set during the minority of King Louis XIV, the English Revolution is about to reach its climax in the execution of Charles I and the revolt against the French crown known as the first Fronde is coming to a head. If the politics are more complex, the personalities are as well. Twenty years have wrought their changes on the impetuous young musketeers. They are older, grayer, and wiser, and each has more to lose.

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was a volcanic producer of plays, novels, journalism and other writings, and one of the dominant figures of the Romantic period. He showed the way for later historical novelists, traveling widely in search of material and background and employing a series of collaborators and researchers. Not simply an armchair adventurer, Dumas participated in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and later ran guns for Giuseppe Garibaldi.