Authorized edition. In a cold November night of the year 1640 three young men coincidentally meet in a Parisian tavern-a musketeer of the king, a poem reciting guardsman and an escapee from the Bastille, the infamous prison of the French king. Soon these three men will be part of an intrigue of Cardinal Richelieu in his struggle for power. Around the mysterious past of the fugitive and a damsel in distress enfolds a swashbuckling adventure by the "King of the Pulps" H. Bedford-Jones, using two immortal heroes of 19th-century French literature, Alexandre Dumas' musketeer d'Artagnan and Edmond Rostand's large-nosed poet Cyrano de Bergerac.