“I’m a scientist, but my expectations are high,” Wim Dijkman, archaeologist and curator for the city of Maastricht, who excavated the skeleton, told the BBC. “I’ve already been researching d’Artagnan’s grave for 28 years. This could be the highlight of my career.”

“After all, it is our business to risk our lives”

The King’s Musketeers are best known to most of us today from Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers. They were the top-tier unit of the 17th-century French military, two companies of light cavalry under the king’s personal command, made up entirely of noblemen with muskets and fast horses. They served as the king’s personal guard whenever he left the palace (he had a whole other guard unit at home, where they presumably didn’t need the fast horses). D’Artagnan became their captain-lieutenant in 1667, and his command would very briefly include a young Marquis de Lafayette, who later went on to do some other stuff.

And in 1673, the Musketeers were part of the French forces besieging the Dutch city of Maastricht because Louis XIV had decided to invade what was then called the Dutch Republic. It ended rather poorly for d’Artagnan, among numerous others, as battles tend to do.

D’Artagnan probably attended Mass at Saints Peter and Paul on the morning of June 25, 1673, as he did most days during the siege. The French army had set up its headquarters nearby, in what was then the village of Wolder, just outside Maastrich’s city walls (today, Wolder is a district of the city). And by nightfall, as French historian Odile Bordaz suggested in 2008, d’Artagnan’s body was entombed beneath the altar where he had taken Communion that morning.

Based on parish registers from other churches in the area, high-ranking officers who died during the siege would have been buried at the nearest church. And based on maps of the area around Maastricht from the time of the siege, which Bordaz and her colleagues pored over, the closest church to the Musketeers’ camp would have been Saint Peter and Paul in Wolder.