More than three-and-a-half centuries after a musket ball to the throat put an end to decades of exemplary swashbuckling, the French soldier who inspired Alexandre Dumas and went on to be immortalised on the stage and screen – not to mention as a plucky cartoon dog – may rise again.
Workers repairing a church in the Dutch city of Maastricht have discovered a skeleton that could belong to the 17th-century Gascon nobleman Charles de Batz-Castelmore – better known as d’Artagnan – whose exploits led Dumas to make him the hero of the Three Musketeers.
The real-life d’Artagnan was a spy and musketeer for King Louis XIV who died during the siege of Maastricht in 1673. Three hundred and fifty-three years later, the longstanding mystery of where the warrior came to be buried may finally have been solved, thanks to a set of bones found under a collapsed church floor.
Valke said several clues pointed to the skeleton belonging to the famous musketeer.
“He lay buried under the altar in consecrated ground,” he said. “There was a French coin from that time in the grave. And the bullet that killed him was lying at chest level, exactly as described in the history books. The indications are very strong.”
Apart from the obvious king, queen, and cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, only d’Artagnan was real among the main team. And he was in fact involved in a bunch of high profile shadowy events - although the real letters we have don’t actually detail what he did himself, beside being close to the king; we only know a few things, like how he was the one who arrested Nicolas Fouquet (another high profile guy in a scandal). You could write a dozen stories about the real guy in countless spy and bodyguard situations.
The names of the other musketeers are also real, but for people who were around over a decade before d’Artagnan, and there’s not much relevant about them beside being nobles and musketeers. They were just some guys with cool names that show up on some lists. There were also a few other people named d’Artagnan in the following years, but they’re also unrelated.
Dumas based his book on a memoir that was compiled by someone presumably close to him, but which was likely already heavily romanced.