Dumas' "musketeers": their magnificent adventures break with the male stereotypes of honor and courage. In the midst of the civil war waged by the French aristocracy during the minority of Louis XIV, two women are faced with all their weapons: in the struggle for power, they put their beauty, their great capacity for intrigue, their love and jealousy, without denying their courage or their military skills. Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), author of some masterpieces of the romantic spirit like The Count of Montecristo, recreates a picture of the War of the Fronde, with two characters who want to be the feminine equivalents of their famous musketeers: the cunning and lit lover of the Duke d'Épernon, Nanon de Lartigues, faithful to an Anne of Austria and a cardinal Mazarin who try to safeguard the crown for who would later be the Sun King, Louis XIV; and the blond and courageous Claire de Cambes, who supports the rebellion of the princes of Condé with their intelligence and their cunning. These two musketeers with skirts, as they have been called, become the axis of a narrative containing the same ingredients of The Three Musketeers, Dumas' most celebrated novel: action, intrigue, and descriptive rapidity; but here the author privileges one aspect: the love, with its inevitable accompaniment of jealousy and feminine rivalry, because the two protagonists will fall in love with the same man.