As a historical novel, The Three Musketeers organizes its story around some of the major characters and events of 17th-century French history. Cardinal Richelieu, Anne of Austria, and other important characters really lived and acted at least roughly the way they do in the novel. The Three Musketeers is inspired by a 17th-century work entitled Memoires de d'Artagnan by Gatien de Cortilz de Sandras, which Dumas and Maquet stumbled across in their research. At the time, Dumas did not believe that the Cortilz novel was historical but thought he was simply plagiarizing and developing a previous writer's work. But Dumas claimed in his original introduction to The Three Musketeers that he thought the work was historical, not wanting to seem plagiaristic himself.
