Skeleton of Three Musketeers hero d’Artagnan may have been found

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.Skeleton found in Dutch church may be famous musketeer D'Artagnan – videoThe 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.Wim Dijkman, a retired archaeologist from Maastricht who has spent 28 years searching for the musketeer’s final resting place, was called to the Church of St Peter and St Paul in the Wolder district of the city after the deacon told him a skeleton had turned up.“A section of the floor in the church had subsided, and during the repair work, we discovered a skeleton,” Deacon Jos Valke told the local L1 Nieuws broadcaster. “I immediately called Wim because he has been working on d’Artagnan for more than 20 years.”Matthew Macfadyen, Logan Lerman, Ray Stevenson and Luke Evens in the 2011 film The Three Musketeers, in which Lerman plays d’Artagnan. Photograph: Summit Entertainment/Sportsphoto/AllstarValke 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.”The skeleton has been removed from the church and is now in an archaeological institute in Deventer.A DNA sample taken from the skeleton on 13 March is being analysed in a laboratory in Munich. It will then be tested alongside DNA samples provided by descendants of d’Artagnan’s father to determine whether there is a match.Dijkman said that while he understood the news value of the possible discovery, he was anxiously waiting for the lab results.“It is an incredibly exciting story, after all,” he told L1 Nieuws. “This is about the most famous and well-known person linked to Maastricht. [But] I’m always very cautious, I’m a scientist.”Interest in the potential discovery is certainly not limited to Maastricht. Dijkman said: “All kinds of analyses and investigations are under way both domestically and abroad. It has truly turned into a top-level investigation. We want to be absolutely certain that it is d’Artagnan.”The soldier achieved huge posthumous fame after Dumas published the Three Musketeers in 1844. Dumas had taken inspiration from an earlier book on the musketeer, Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan, which was written in 1700 by the French soldier and writer Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras.Dumas’s book has been adapted for the screen numerous times over the past century, with d’Artagnan being played by actors including Douglas Fairbanks, Michael York, Chris O’Donnell, Logan Lerman and François Civil. The character was also reimagined as the eponymous, sword-wielding beagle in the early 1980s animated series Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds.Agence France-Presse contributed to this report