Number Nine: The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas is one of the most classic stories that has ever been told.  When I started this book I was a little afraid of the length, but the fame of this book dispelled most of my fears.  Everyone knows about The Three Musketeers, and I was excited to read it.  I was certainly not let down by this book.  The most important theme that I found in this book was one that I really did not expect at all.
There are tons of wonderful themes in this book, but the one that made the biggest impression on me was the theme of true, pure evil.  Never before in any book have I found a character so devoid of virtue and so consumed by evil as Milady de Winter.  She really is the embodiment of evil who is capable of turning all but the best man to evil.  She kills and destroys people for the mere pleasure of it.  She is capable of making the most trustworthy man entirely untrustworthy with a few words from her mouth.  She is an adversary like no other.  Truly, death was the only solution to a disease such as her.
This depiction of evil is so vivid and so valuable that it has helped engrave much of this book into my mind.  When I consider evil, I think about that character every time.  Even with this picture of evil, most of this book was just plain fun.  With exceptional depictions of swordplay and jocularity, most of this book was exceptionally light.  The only problem that I had with this book was the relatively limited moral content.  Certainly courage, friendship, and sacrifice were very well depicted in this book, but adultery is considered to be quite normal in this book.  The protagonist, D'Artagnan, spends much of this book attempting to seduce a married woman and another main character, Porthos, spends much of this book manipulating another married woman, who he is already having an affair with, to give him tons of money.  The author does make a note early in the book that behavior such as this is quite unacceptable but it is still quite prevalent throughout the book and I did not approve of major characters acting like this.  Despite any problems I had with this book, I still highly recommend this book to anyone old enough to get through it, and especially to people old enough to really understand it.  This book was one of the most fun books I have ever read and it is one of the books which sticks out in my memory the best.

Really hoping that all of you will read this great book,
Jodath