Twenty-seven hours of Dumas in French. That's what I signed up for on a rainy Saturday, and honestly, I wasn't sure I'd make it past hour three.
Let me back up. I teach English, not French. But I studied French in undergrad, lived with it in grad school, and have spent the last decade letting it rust in some neglected corner of my brain. So when I saw JC Guan's narration of Les Trois Mousquetaires on my feed, something in me said: go back to the source. Read Dumas the way Dumas wrote. Not the Penguin translation, not the Dover thrift edition I assign to sophomores who will absolutely not read it. The real thing.
Best decision I've made in months.
D'Artagnan Sounds Like He Should
Here's what struck me first about JC Guan's performance: there's a musicality to it that a French listener described as "un peu chantante" — a little sing-song — and that's exactly right. It's not monotone, it's not theatrical in the BBC drama way. It's somewhere between a storyteller at a dinner party and a grandmother reading to you before bed. Guan reads Dumas like someone who genuinely enjoys the sentences, who's savoring the rhythm of Dumas's long, comma-heavy constructions rather than just surviving them.
And Dumas's sentences are long. This is a man who was paid by the line, and you can feel it — the digressions, the elaborate descriptions of Milady's manipulations, the three-page conversations where characters circle each other verbally before anyone draws a sword. In English translation, those passages can feel bloated. In French, with Guan's pacing, they feel like the point. The prose deserves to be savored, and Guan clearly agrees.
Now, I should be honest about what I can't tell you. My research turned up almost nothing about how Guan differentiates character voices — no detailed breakdowns of whether Athos sounds different from Porthos, whether Milady gets a particular register. From my own listening, the differentiation is subtle rather than dramatic. You won't get wildly distinct voices for every character. What you get instead is tonal shifts — a conspiratorial drop for Richelieu's scheming, a brighter energy when d'Artagnan is being young and reckless and impossibly confident. It works for Dumas, whose characters announce themselves through action and dialogue content more than vocal quirk.
What 27 Hours of Dumas Teaches You About Pacing
This is a 27-hour audiobook. Let's talk about what that means.
The first third — d'Artagnan arriving in Paris, the duels, the bonding with the Musketeers — flies. Dumas was brilliant at momentum. You get sword fights, mistaken identities, that beautiful early scene where d'Artagnan accidentally challenges all three Musketeers to separate duels and then they all end up fighting the Cardinal's guards together. It's the kind of setup that makes you understand why this novel has survived since 1844.
The middle section, though — the affair of the diamond studs, the political intrigue around Anne d'Autriche — slows down considerably. Dumas loved his political machinery, and there are stretches where you're tracking who sent which letter to whom and why Buckingham is involved and what Richelieu knows. I was grading papers during these sections (it was 11 PM, the stack wasn't getting shorter, Denise had gone to bed), and I'll admit my attention drifted. Not because Guan loses energy — he doesn't — but because the plot architecture demands patience.
And then Milady de Winter takes center stage in the final third, and suddenly you're wide awake. Her manipulation of Felton, the slow revelation of the fleur-de-lis brand, the way Dumas builds her into something genuinely menacing — this is where the novel earns its reputation. Guan handles Milady's scenes with a kind of measured intensity that reminded me why Dumas wrote villains better than heroes. That same careful restraint in narrating morally complex women is something I noticed in Mansfield Park (dramatic reading), where the cast lets Austen's quiet cruelties land without overselling them. My students would hate the political middle section. I love it. But I'd tell them to push through for Milady.
Who This Is Actually For
If your French is intermediate or above and you've only ever read Dumas in translation — this is the version to try. You'll catch things the translations flatten. Dumas's humor, especially, lands differently in French. The way d'Artagnan talks himself into and out of trouble has a swagger that English translations often sand down into generic adventure-hero dialogue.
If your French is rusty like mine, you'll struggle in spots. I rewound more than I'd like to admit. But that's part of the pleasure — re-engaging with a language through a story that refuses to let you get bored for long.
If you don't speak French at all, this obviously isn't your edition. Go find a good English narration. But know that you're missing something.
This is a LibriVox recording, so the production is clean but no-frills — no music, no sound effects, just Guan and Dumas and 27 hours of swashbuckling in its original language. At 1.0x speed, obviously. The author chose those words.
The Lesson Plan I'd Never Assign
I've taught The Three Musketeers in excerpt for years. I've never assigned the full novel because, let's be real, getting 16-year-olds through 700 pages of 19th-century adventure fiction is a battle I'd lose. But listening to it unabridged, in French, reminded me of something I needed reminding of: Dumas wasn't writing literature with a capital L. He was writing entertainment. Popular, serialized, unapologetically fun entertainment. And somehow it became a classic anyway. This is why we still read the classics — not because they're medicine, but because the best ones never stopped being a good time.
Forty-seven podcast listeners and my mom would understand.
