The Musketeers: Complete D'Artagnan Series by Alexandre Dumas. lexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was a French writer. The complete adventures of d'Artagnan are told in the D'Artagnan Series that includes The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte of Bragelonne, Ten Years Later, Louise de la Valliere and The Man in the Iron Mask. Those novels by Dumas are together known as the d'Artagnan Romances. Set in the 17th century, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to travel to Paris, to join the Musketeers of the Guard. D'Artagnan is not one of the musketeers of the title; those are his friends Athos, Porthos and Aramis, inseparable friends who live by the motto "all for one, one for all", a motto which is first put forth by d'Artagnan. Dumas based the life and character of d'Artagnan on the 17th-century captain of musketeers Charles de Batz-Castelmore from his humble beginnings in Gascony to his death as a marshal of France in the Siege of Maastricht in 1673.