Fame and fiction

 

“The True Story of d´Artagnan” is a French documentary about – wait for it – the musketeer d´Artagnan. Its original French title is “La Véritable Histoire de d´Artagnan”. I always assumed that d´Artagnan and his indefatigable peers Athos, Porthos and Aramis were purely fictional characters, invented by Alexandre Dumas (père) in 1844. The true story turns out to be more complex. D´Artagnan was a real person, but his story was heavily fictionalized already in 1700 by the author Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, whose picaresque novel “Les mémoires de M. d´Artagnan” inspired Dumas one and a half century later. The three original musketeers of Dumas´ story are also mentioned in de Sandras´ account and are equally heavy “freely based on a not-so-true story”…

D´Artagnan´s original name was Charles de Batz de Castlemore. He was originally from Gascony in southwest France, and while his family wasn´t rich, the mother was of aristocratic descent. The name d´Artagnan comes from her, and Charles de Batz adopted it when moving to Paris to join the Musketeers. Despite his later fame, nobody knows the exact year of his birth, where he is buried, or even how he looked like, although the portrait included in de Sandras´ novel is often considered genuine, perhaps based on a lost portrait painting. Even the place of his birth and upbringing was long unknown.

The Musketeers were the elite soldiers of the French king, and their real motto wasn´t “One for all, all for one” but rather “Where it falls, it brings death”, referring to the canons used by the Musketeers during sieges! D´Artagnan served both in the original Musketeer corps of King Louis XIII and the later, historically more famous version under “the Sun King” Louis XIV. He was the close confidant of both Cardinal Mazarin (the successor of Cardinal Richelieu) and Louis XIV. At the time, France was a whirlpool of political intrigue and rebellion, with d´Artagnan loyally serving the cause of an increasingly absolutist monarchy. He personally protected the king (then just a child) against angry mobs during the rebellion known as the Fronde, carried out “sensitive missions” for Mazarin (they are never specified in the documentary) and participated in various military actions. The most well known event of his career seems to have been the arrest of Louis XIV´s scheming minister of finance, Nicolas Fouquet, whom the king wanted speedily removed from the centers of power.

D´Artagnan was killed in combat (ironically by a bullet from a musket) on 25 June 1673 during the siege of Maastricht, an otherwise successful military campaign of the French army. Well, at least we know the exact date of his death! The Sun King is said to have been devastated. The documentary points out that d´Artagnan is the only historical person in French history who has become famous through his fictional counterpart. Indeed, a large portion of the docu consist of clips from various modern French, British and American films based on Dumas´ “The Three Musketeers”. We also get a sneak peak at the costume drama “Le Roi danse”.

Relatively interesting, if you can find it for free somewhere on the web…