About the book: 2009 / Almost all the heroes of the famous novels of Alexandre Dumas were copied by him from real historical characters. The book by historian Sergei Nechaev tells about living people who served as prototypes for the central figures of such cult books as “The Three Musketeers”, “Twenty Years Later” and “The Vicomte de Bragelonne”. Relying on various sources previously unknown to the domestic reader, the author shows how Dumas created his d'Artagnan based on the biographies of three different people. In addition, from Nechaev’s book the reader will learn who could be hiding under the nicknames Athos, Porthos and Aramis, how they relate to their historical prototypes Mazarin and Colbert; what Milady really suffered for and what actually happened between the Duke of Buckingham and Queen Anne... Using Dumas’s novels as a kind of key to the historical era, the author unfolds before the reader a wide panorama of the turbulent and fascinating life of France in the 17th century.