René d'Herblay, alias Aramis, is a fictional character in the novels The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas, père. He and the other two musketeers, Athos and Porthos, are friends of the novels' protagonist, d'Artagnan.[1]

The fictional Aramis is loosely based on the historical musketeer Henri d'Aramitz.

Aramis loves and courts women, which fits well with the opinions of the time regarding Jesuits and abbots. He is portrayed as constantly ambitious and unsatisfied: as a musketeer, he yearns to become an abbé; but when an abbé he wishes for the life of the soldier. In the books it is revealed he became a musketeer because of a woman and his arrogance: as a young man whose ambition was to become an abbé, he had the misfortune to be caught and thrown out of a house, while (innocently or not) reading to a young woman. For a year, he practiced fencing, every day with the best master swordsman in town to get his revenge. By the time he came back to confront the man who had mistreated him, he had become such an expert swordsman that the fight only lasted a couple of seconds. Because duels were forbidden by royal edict and Aramis was a novice, he had to disappear and adopt a very low profile, which led him to enlist in the Musketeers Corps. There he met Athos and Porthos, and later d'Artagnan. Together they worked to bring peace to the King's court, and to keep the Queen's affair with the Duke of Buckingham from being revealed by Cardinal Richelieu.

Aramis seems to succeed in much, but it is only a result of his Machiavellian plans and his audacity; every step forward must be used to climb to even greater power. This characteristic leads to his nomination as Superior General of the Jesuits, which is precisely what saves his life, at the end of Le Vicomte De Bragelonne, after he is betrayed by Nicolas Fouquet.

Despite his attitude, Aramis holds very firmly to the sacred concept of friendship: in fact, the only wrong moves Aramis ever made were done when he refused to harm a friend (or a friend's feelings). In Twenty Years After, he followed Athos's pleas to spare Mordaunt, while he was holding him at gunpoint and, in Le Vicomte De Bragelonne, he refused to suppress d'Artagnan, when he discovered the truth about Belle-Ile-En-Mer. Aramis even tells Porthos the true identity of the man in the iron mask, despite fearing that Porthos would kill the man. Friendship is so important to Aramis that, at the end of Le Vicomte De Bragelonne, it is strongly implied that he cried - for the first and only time in his entire life - after causing the death of one of his friends.