Finally starting the Marie Antoinette series

I've read the complete Musketeers series, Monte Cristo, and The Black Tulip, and enjoyed them enough to put together a large Dumas collection that I've never gotten around to dipping into. I've decided to start with the biggie: his five-novel, >10-volume Marie Antoinette series.

This series was pretty badly abused by its English publishers. The initial novel, Memoirs of a Physician, has been divided into various numbers of volumes with numerous different titles (Joseph Balsamo being one, and probably the most familiar). Also, in addition to whatever trimming may have been done in the text, the last thirty chapters have been left out of almost every edition. The only completely unabridged English editions of the Antoinette series were published by Dent (UK) and Little Brown (US). Naturally, I didn't learn this until I'd already collected the series, so I ended up having to replace most of them.

So today I'll be starting Memoirs of a Physician, which I have in the three-book 1893 edition from Little Brown. It'll probably be a slow go; I don't want to bring these books outside, especially during winter, so I'll just be reading them at home and continuing my in-progress read, Peter Hamilton's mammoth Night's Dawn sci-fi trilogy, while on the bus.

Opinions and comments from others who have read this are most welcome, but please keep them spoiler-free or include appropriate warnings. I've never been much of a history buff, so even stuff that one might assume everyone knows, I probably don't.

This'll be the longest series I've read since I plowed through all of Harry Potter after the last book came out, and my roughly year-long Arthurian read a few years before that. I'm looking forward to it.