In Dumas' version of the story, Mazarin is the queen's lover, and she never makes a decision without his approval, so he is the real ruler of France. Cardinal Richelieu is dead, and Cardinal Mazarin has replaced him as chief minister. This particular volume, Twenty Years After, begins in 1648, when Louis XIV was ten years old and his mother, Anne of Austria, was regent. The Man in the Iron Mask is, of course, often read on its own, but, as another blogger explained once, that is like reading The Lord of the Rings beginning with The Return of the King: possible to do, but the reader would be missing a lot, and might get confused about what is going on. To make things more confusing, the last three volumes were originally published as one enormous book (about 2800 pages) called The Vicomte de Bragelonne, which was later divided into three parts, only the first of which retained the title The Vicomte de Bragelonne.
It is actually the second in a series of five books: The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Vallière, and The Man in the Iron Mask. Twenty Years After is Alexandre Dumas' first sequel to The Three Musketeers.
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