HN Reader

When I read the book in my youth, I remember being surprised not only by the lack of muskets, but also that it was more about D'Artagnan than about the titular Three Musketeers.

Anyway, if you think about it, it makes sense: muskets were a new and unproven technology that still needed a lot of development to actually become usable firearms. While you were busy lighting the fuse on your musket, your opponent could attack and kill you with his sword. So, of course, the king's elite troops needed to be equipped with these "high-tech" weapons for prestige reasons, but due to their impracticality, it's not surprising that they didn't actually see much use...

Matchlock Musket took forever to fire. It needed all these steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KTS8PQ06Qo This is powerful when in actual battle, pretty impractical in the Paris streets and situations these guys find themselves in.

Comments here make big conclusions basically out of mundane historical realities. Our modern stories about soldiers feature soldiers using arms appropriate to occasion too - not just the most powerful but least practical gun assigned to their unit.

Tl;dr modern tank battalion guy is not driving tank everywhere either. Not because there is some profound disconnect with social class or system or other people, but because he is not an idiot.

My guess is that the use of mousquetaires was more a reference to a specific corps of the military than to the weapon itself.

It would be like the gendarmes today — literally "armed people", even if they don't always carry an arm.

Does anybody know which edition with the cheerful footnotes is referred here?

Fans might also look at Steven Brust's fantasy Dumas pastiches, especially The Phoenix Guards, set in the same world as his Vlad Taltos novels. Truly a hoot.