Although d'Artagnan is not able to join this elite corps immediately, he is befriended by three of the most formidable musketeers of the age – Athos, Porthos, and Aramis: "the three musketeers" or "the three inseparables" – and becomes involved in affairs of state and at court.
Set on the streets of 17th-century Paris, "The Musketeers" gives a contemporary take on the classic story about a group of highly trained soldiers and bodyguards assigned to protect King and country.
Human remains found in a church in the Netherlands could be those of d'Artagnan, one of the legendary French swordsmen who inspired the novel The Three Musketeers.
In France, an elite unit was formed out of the musketeers in 1622 when King Louis XIII provided a light cavalry unit in his army with muskets and formed them into the Musketeers of the Guard. These were then charged with providing defense to the royal household in Paris.
Dumas wrote two sequels that concerned D’Artagnan and the three musketeers: Vingt ans après (1845; Twenty Years After) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne; ou, dix ans plus tard (1848–50; The Vicomte de Bragelonne; or, Ten Years Later).
The musketeers, made famous by Alexandre Dumas and the many films his stories inspired, are the most well-known of the regiments of ancien regime France. Moreover, the heroes of Dumas’s stories – d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis – have real historical counterparts too.
In Great Foreign Language Writers, Barnett Shaw wrote, "Two hundred years from now, you can be sure that at any given moment, someone, in some far-off place, will be reading The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo in one of the dozens of languages into which Dumas has been translated."