More than 350 years after taking a musket ball to the body, the soldier who inspired The Three Musketeers may have finally been found, buried quietly beneath a church floor in the Dutch city of Maastricht.
Workers repairing the Church of St Peter and St Paul got rather more than they bargained for when a sunken section of floor revealed a skeleton that could belong to none other than Charles de Batz-Castelmore, the real-life Gascon nobleman behind Alexandre Dumas's beloved hero d'Artagnan.
The clues are hard to ignore. The bones were found buried under the altar in consecrated ground, a fitting spot for a man of his standing. Nearby lay a French coin from the 17th century, and (most strikingly) the bullet that killed him was found resting at chest level, exactly where historical accounts say it should be.
Retired archaeologist Wim Dijkman, who has spent a remarkable 28 years hunting for d'Artagnan's grave, was called to the scene almost immediately. A DNA sample is now being analysed in Munich and will be compared against material from the musketeer's known descendants.
Dijkman, to his credit, is keeping his hat on. "I'm always very cautious," he says (via The Guardian). "I'm a scientist."