D'Artagnan

D'Artagnan is a fictional character, the protagonist in all three novels The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas, père (see D'Artagnan Romances). Although The Three Musketeers begins with him setting out to Paris to become a musketeer, he is not one of the three mentioned in the title; those are Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, whom he meets and befriends in Paris.

D'Artagnan is loosely based on the historical musketeer Charles de Batz-Castelmore, count d'Artagnan, whose life had already been fictionalized in Gatien Courtilz de Sandras's novel Les mémoires de Mr d'Artagnan. Charles, like Dumas' hero, was born 1611 in Gascony, became a musketeer's captain and died 1673 at Maastricht.

However there was another Comte D'Artagnan, Pierre de Montesquiou (1645-1725), from which Dumas' character earned his marshal baton.

Film and Television

Actors who have played D'Artagnan on screen include:

• Aimé Simon-Girard, in Les trois mousquetaires (1921)
• Walter Abel, in The Three Musketeers (1935)
• Gene Kelly, in The Three Musketeers (1948)
• Maximilian Schell, in The Three Musketeers (TV movie) (1960)
• Michael York, in The Three Musketeers (1973), The Four Musketeers (1974), The Return of the Musketeers (1989), and La Femme Musketeer (TV miniseries) (2003)
• Cornel Wilde, in The Fifth Musketeer (1979)
• Chris O'Donnell, in The Three Musketeers (1993)
• Gabriel Byrne, in The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)

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