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.”
I did not realize those stories were based on real people.
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.
The best part of all of this is the phrase exemplary swashbuckling
Can’t even think what subpar swashbuckling would look like
It looks very short and ends in arrgghh
I can come over and give you a demonstration.
I definitely want that on my tombstone when I die.
[off topic]
My favorite film version of the novel.
Beautiful photography, clever script, and fun cast.
The fight scenes look great and it’s all pre-CGI
https://youtu.be/ssLVKLJ8ojUThe 2011 Paul W. S. Anderson adaptation (in 3D!), on the other hand, goes so far off the rails so fast that you see a Musketeer-ninja rock a rapid-fire crossbow and pre-Cousteau SCUBA gear I think before you even get to the title card. It’s a stupid, stupid movie and the absolute best kind of terrible, in my opinion.
Though I will say, as I left the theater dizzied by the honest to god airship cannon battle at the end of the film, I looked up the absurd plot and character names only to find that it was significantly more true to the book in overall story arc (ignoring the, ah, embellishments) than many other adaptations have been. Huh.
I got your airship battle right here!
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-guns-above-robyn-bennis/90734a18a40dfd82
The Guns Above. Napoleonic airships. Pretty much the only fantasy element in the book is an unlimited supply of helium. The author did a great job ‘engineering’ the ships.
I couldn’t sit through the 2011 movie, although the recent French language version with Eva Green as Milady was not bad.
By far the best film variant.
On a similar note there is a Fantasy homage series by Steven Brust, The Khaavren Romances, that is amazing if you liked the novels.
The screenwriter also did a script of one of his own novels.
If you want to see Malcolm MacDowell playing a lying, cheating, unscrupulous cad of the worst sort, watch ‘Royal Flash.’ Bonus appearance by Oliver Reed as Otto von Bismarck
Thanks for the suggestion, I’m actually reading the novel right now (I know it’s a trilogy), it will be cool to see the movie after I finish it.
