#let me add that book!aramis may indeed be the most questionable of the four

[highfunctioningflailgirl]

Dumas's extraordinary ability to give popular fiction a mythical thrust is very evident in his handling of the Musketeers themselves. None is merely a swashbuckler, for each is made complex and memorable in different ways which nevertheless unite in a group expression of true friendship.

Athos, the languid aristocrat, harbours a romantic soul beneath his casual exterior.

The least likeable of the comrades, the studious Aramis, 'a musketeer by accident but a churchman at heart', has yet to choose between love and his vocation but meantime is ready to cross swords with whoever stands in his path.

With Porthos, the group dunce, always slightly ridiculous but endlessly engaging, Dumas pulls off the rare feat of creating a genuinely good-hearted man: villains are much easier to manage.

But d'Artagnan, the Gascon with the short fuse, resourceful, passionate, and eternally 20, enshrines the spirit of youth and adventure. He is not only ageless but immortal: he leaps out of time and enters the realm of legend. D'Artagnan has been universally famous for a century and a half in the way that man-made heroes rarely are.

David Coward, in the introduction to The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas