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.
“Based on all the evidence, there is more than a 90 percent chance that d’Artagnan and other musketeers from the king’s staff were buried in the church next to their camp,” Bordaz told French newspaper Le Monde at the time.
It should have been an easy mystery to solve from there; if d’Dartagnan had been buried at Wolder, his name should have been on the church’s parish register of baptisms, marriages, and burials. But Wolder’s parish register had gone missing sometime in the last 335 years and several wars.
At the time, Dijkman was skeptical of Bordaz’s claim.
“Was d’Artagnan buried there? It’s far from certain: there is no historical or archaeological information to support that,” he told Le Monde in 2008. That wasn’t unfair of him; outside of the missing parish register, it seems nobody ever wrote down exactly where d’Artagnan was laid to rest, other than a note that it was in consecrated ground.
The priest of Saints Peter and Paul at the time said he wouldn’t authorize digging up the church floor without more concrete proof. Eighteen years later, with the floor needing to be torn up for repairs anyway, there was no reason not to take a look. And it seems to have been worthwhile.
After the battle on June 25, 1673, King Louis XIV wrote home to Queen Marie-Thérèse, “I have lost d’Artagnan, in whom I had the utmost confidence and who was kind to all.” Now it looks like he may finally have been found.
The original version of this story reported that Marquis de Lafayette served in the King’s Musketeers under d’Artagnan; Lafayette actually joined the unit about a century later. Your faithful correspondent apologizes for the error but not for any fanfiction it may have inspired.
