Book Eight of the Musketeers Cycle

By Alexandre Dumas, Edited and Translated by Lawrence Ellsworth

shadow of the bastille

At the French Court, romance and politics are two sides of the same coin, and in Shadow of the Bastille the intrigues finally boil over. Here the Four Musketeers return to the foreground in events that remind the reader why we fell in love with these heroes in the first place. While Aramis plots, d’Artagnan, Athos, and Porthos each, in his own distinctive way, get involved, support Raoul in his time of need, unexpectedly clashing with their royal master the king.

Shadow of the Bastille is the fourth part of Dumas’s mega-novel Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, a prelude leading to the epic climax of The Man in the Iron Mask. The novel is running now in chapter-by-chapter serial form in weekly episodes on the Substack platform. Check it out!

Substack