Not too many centuries ago a foreign language teacher's job was simple enough: it consisted of dropping a book in some unknown language in the face of a generally unfortunate student and say I want you to translate 20 lines from this book for me while brandishing a thick wood ruler ready to punish the pupil's knuckles as soon as any mistake was made.
Much has happened since. Nowadays we have this thing called didactics. We also have the internet which is full of readily available resources to learn a second language: dictionaries, courses, textbooks, interactive software designed to recognize your voice and correct your accent, audio courses, video courses. The options are, for all practical purposes, unlimited. However, the old give-me-20-lines method, without any teachers or rulers, remains valuable for the autodidactic student and, together with the power of the net to provide free and relevant information, is a great opportunity to learn or practice a foreign language. Such is the aim of this webpage: to allow the study of other languages under the give-me-20-lines-from-this-book concept with The Three Musketeers as the book and Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian and German as the languages.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas is one of those rare novels written in a simple style which are entertaining and easy to read, yet engaging. It has captured the imagination of every generation since the french magazine Le siécle first published in 1844. It's the quintessential cloak and dagger novel. The humour, the stylistic austerity and the amenity in Dumas' prose make this text a pleasure to read in any language and allow a transparent reading when approached through a foreign language.
The Three Musketeers is a romanticized and fictionalized account of another romanticized and fictionalized account: Mémoires de Monsieur d’Artagnan, capitaine lieutenant de la premiére compagné des Mosquetaires du Roi by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, published in 1700, which tells the story of an authentic Musketeer by the name of Charles de Batz Castelmore, Count of Artagnan.
Dumas came across de Sandras' book in the Marseille public library, borrowed it and never returned it. The Mémoires inspired Dumas to write not one but three novels: The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne or Ten Years After, widely known worldwide as the The D'Artagnan Novels.
The young D'Artagnan is a young, ambitious and poor gascon gentleman. He moves to Paris in order to make himself a name and a fortune by joining the elite royal guards, the King's Musketeers. Once in the City of Light the young man finds he needs a reputation before he can join the Musketeers and manages to get in the bad books of three of the most notorious and contentious Muskteteers of the day: Athos, Porthos and Aramis but it's not too long before the four of them find themselves in the need to present a united front to some common foes: the cardinal's guards.
In time, the gascon gets entangled in the complex web of Richelieu's
conspiracies against Anne of Austria, queen of France, and drags his three new
friends along under the infamous lemma All for one and one for all.