Charles de Batz de Castelmore d'Artagnan

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, later Count d'Artagnan, was born around 1611 and rose to serve Louis XIV as captain of the Musketeers of the Guard. He fell at the siege of Maastricht on 25 June 1673 during the Franco-Dutch War. Decades after his death, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras published a fictionalised account of his life, which Alexandre Dumas mined for his d'Artagnan Romances — most famously The Three Musketeers in 1844. The swashbuckler of page and screen, rakish and larger than life, is now what the world knows, while the soldier himself has vanished behind his own myth.