The three musketeers
commissary.
“Oh, unhappy woman!” cried the commissary.
“How? What do you say? Of whom do you speak? It is not of my wife, I
hope!”
“On the contrary, it is of her. Yours is a pretty business.”
“But,” said the agitated mercer, “do me the pleasure, monsieur, to tell
me how my own proper affair can become worse by anything my wife does
while I am in prison?”
“Because that which she does is part of a plan concerted between you—of
an infernal plan.”
“I swear to you, Monsieur Commissary, that you are in the profoundest
error, that I know nothing in the world about what my wife had to do,
that I am entirely a stranger to what she has done; and that if she has
committed any follies, I renounce her, I abjure her, I curse her!”
“Bah!” said Athos to the commissary, “if you have no more need of me,
send me somewhere. Your Monsieur Bonacieux is very tiresome.”
The commissary designated by the same gesture Athos and Bonacieux, “Let
them be guarded more closely than ever.”
“And yet,” said Athos, with his habitual calmness, “if it be Monsieur
d’Artagnan who is concerned in this matter, I do not perceive how I can
take his place.”
“Do as I bade you,” cried the commissary, “and preserve absolute
secrecy. You understand!”
Athos shrugged his shoulders, and followed his guards silently, while
M. Bonacieux uttered lamentations enough to break the heart of a tiger.
They locked the mercer in the same dungeon where he had passed the
night, and left him to himself during the day. Bonacieux wept all day,
like a true mercer, not being at all a military man, as he himself
informed us. In the evening, about nine o’clock, at the moment he had
made up his mind to go to bed, he heard steps in his corridor. These
steps drew near to his dungeon, the door was thrown open, and the
guards appeared.
“Follow me,” said an officer, who came up behind the guards.
“Follow you!” cried Bonacieux, “follow you at this hour! Where, my
God?”
“Where we have orders to lead you.”
“But that is not an answer.”
“It is, nevertheless, the only one we can give.”
“Ah, my God, my God!” murmured the poor mercer, “now, indeed, I am
lost!” And he followed the guards who came for him, mechanically and
without resistance.
He passed along the same corridor as before, crossed one court, then a
second side of a building; at length, at the gate of the entrance court
he found a carriage surrounded by four guards on horseback. They made
him enter this carriage, the officer placed himself by his side, the
door was locked, and they were left in a rolling prison. The carriage
was put in motion as slowly as a funeral car. Through the closely
fastened windows the prisoner could perceive the houses and the
pavement, that was all; but, true Parisian as he was, Bonacieux could
recognize every street by the milestones, the signs, and the lamps. At
the moment of arriving at St. Paul—the spot where such as were
condemned at the Bastille were executed—he was near fainting and
crossed himself twice. He thought the carriage was about to stop there.
The carriage, however, passed on.
Farther on, a still greater terror seized him on passing by the
cemetery of St. Jean, where state criminals were buried. One thing,
however, reassured him; he remembered that before they were buried
their heads were generally cut off, and he felt that his head was still
on his shoulders. But when he saw the carriage take the way to La
Grêve, when he perceived the pointed roof of the Hôtel de Ville, and
the carriage passed under the arcade, he believed it was over with him.
He wished to confess to the officer, and upon his refusal, uttered such
pitiable cries that the officer told him that if he continued to deafen
him thus, he should put a gag in his mouth.
This measure somewhat reassured Bonacieux. If they meant to execute him
at La Grêve, it could scarcely be worth while to gag him, as they had
nearly reached the place of execution. Indeed, the carriage crossed the
fatal spot without stopping. There remained, then, no other place to
fear but the Traitor’s Cross; the carriage was taking the direct road
to it.
This time there was no longer any doubt; it was at the Traitor’s Cross
that lesser criminals were executed. Bonacieux had flattered himself in
believing himself worthy of St. Paul or of the Place de Grêve; it was
at the Traitor’s Cross that his journey and his destiny were about to
end! He could not yet see that dreadful cross, but he felt somehow as
if it were coming to meet him. When he was within twenty paces of it,
he heard a noise of people and the carriage stopped. This was more than
poor Bonacieux could endure, depressed as he was by the successive
emotions which he had experienced; he uttered a feeble groan which
might have been taken for the last sigh of a dying man, and fainted.
Chapter XIV.
THE MAN OF MEUNG
The crowd was caused, not by the expectation of a man to be hanged, but
by the contemplation of a man who was hanged.
The carriage, which had been stopped for a minute, resumed its way,
passed through the crowd, threaded the Rue St. Honoré, turned into the
Rue des Bons Enfants, and stopped before a low door.
The door opened; two guards received Bonacieux in their arms from the
officer who supported him. They carried him through an alley, up a
flight of stairs, and deposited him in an antechamber.
All these movements had been effected mechanically, as far as he was
concerned. He had walked as one walks in a dream; he had a glimpse of
objects as through a fog. His ears had perceived sounds without
comprehending them; he might have been executed at that moment without
his making a single gesture in his own defense or uttering a cry to
implore mercy.
He remained on the bench, with his back leaning against the wall and
his hands hanging down, exactly on the spot where the guards placed
him.
On looking around him, however, as he could perceive no threatening
object, as nothing indicated that he ran any real danger, as the bench
was comfortably covered with a well-stuffed cushion, as the wall was
ornamented with a beautiful Cordova leather, and as large red damask
curtains, fastened back by gold clasps, floated before the window, he
perceived by degrees that his fear was exaggerated, and he began to
turn his head to the right and the left, upward and downward.
At this movement, which nobody opposed, he resumed a little courage,
and ventured to draw up one leg and then the other. At length, with the
help of his two hands he lifted himself from the bench, and found
himself on his feet.
At this moment an officer with a pleasant face opened a door, continued
to exchange some words with a person in the next chamber and then came
up to the prisoner. “Is your name Bonacieux?” said he.
“Yes, Monsieur Officer,” stammered the mercer, more dead than alive,
“at your service.”
“Come in,” said the officer.
And he moved out of the way to let the mercer pass. The latter obeyed
without reply, and entered the chamber, where he appeared to be
expected.
It was a large cabinet, close and stifling, with the walls furnished
with arms offensive and defensive, and in which there was already a
fire, although it was scarcely the end of the month of September. A
square table, covered with books and papers, upon which was unrolled an
immense plan of the city of La Rochelle, occupied the center of the
room.
Standing before the chimney was a man of middle height, of a haughty,
proud mien; with piercing eyes, a large brow, and a thin face, which
was made still longer by a _royal_ (or _imperial_, as it is now
called), surmounted by a pair of mustaches. Although this man was
scarcely thirty-six or thirty-seven years of age, hair, mustaches, and
royal, all began to be gray. This man, except a sword, had all the
appearance of a soldier; and his buff boots, still slightly covered
with dust, indicated that he had been on horseback in the course of the
day.
This man was Armand Jean Duplessis, Cardinal de Richelieu; not such as
he is now represented—broken down like an old man, suffering like a
martyr, his body bent, his voice failing, buried in a large armchair as
in an anticipated tomb; no longer living but by the strength of his
genius, and no longer maintaining the struggle with Europe but by the
eternal application of his thoughts—but such as he really was at this
period; that is to say, an active and gallant cavalier, already weak of
body, but sustained by that moral power which made of him one of the
most extraordinary men that ever lived, preparing, after having
supported the Duc de Nevers in his duchy of Mantua, after having taken
Nîmes, Castres, and Uzes, to drive the English from the Isle of Ré and
lay siege to La Rochelle.
At first sight, nothing denoted the cardinal; and it was impossible for
those who did not know his face to guess in whose presence they were.
The poor mercer remained standing at the door, while the eyes of the
personage we have just described were fixed upon him, and appeared to
wish to penetrate even into the depths of the past.
“Is this that Bonacieux?” asked he, after a moment of silence.
“Yes, monseigneur,” replied the officer.
“That’s well. Give me those papers, and leave us.”
The officer took from the table the papers pointed out, gave them to
him who asked for them, bowed to the ground, and retired.
Bonacieux recognized in these papers his interrogatories of the
Bastille. From time to time the man by the chimney raised his eyes from
the writings, and plunged them like poniards into the heart of the poor
mercer.
At the end of ten minutes of reading and ten seconds of examination,
the cardinal was satisfied.
“That head has never conspired,” murmured he, “but it matters not; we
will see.”
“You are accused of high treason,” said the cardinal, slowly.
“So I have been told already, monseigneur,” cried Bonacieux, giving his
interrogator the title he had heard the officer give him, “but I swear
to you that I know nothing about it.”
The cardinal repressed a smile.
“You have conspired with your wife, with Madame de Chevreuse, and with
my Lord Duke of Buckingham.”
“Indeed, monseigneur,” responded the mercer, “I have heard her
pronounce all those names.”
“And on what occasion?”
“She said that the Cardinal de Richelieu had drawn the Duke of
Buckingham to Paris to ruin him and to ruin the queen.”
“She said that?” cried the cardinal, with violence.
“Yes, monseigneur, but I told her she was wrong to talk about such
things; and that his Eminence was incapable—”
“Hold your tongue! You are stupid,” replied the cardinal.
“That’s exactly what my wife said, monseigneur.”
“Do you know who carried off your wife?”
“No, monseigneur.”
“You have suspicions, nevertheless?”
“Yes, monseigneur; but these suspicions appeared to be disagreeable to
Monsieur the Commissary, and I no longer have them.”
“Your wife has escaped. Did you know that?”
“No, monseigneur. I learned it since I have been in prison, and that
from the conversation of Monsieur the Commissary—an amiable man.”
The cardinal repressed another smile.
“Then you are ignorant of what has become of your wife since her
flight.”
“Absolutely, monseigneur; but she has most likely returned to the
Louvre.”
“At one o’clock this morning she had not returned.”
“My God! What can have become of her, then?”
“We shall know, be assured. Nothing is concealed from the cardinal; the
cardinal knows everything.”
“In that case, monseigneur, do you believe the cardinal will be so kind
as to tell me what has become of my wife?”
“Perhaps he may; but you must, in the first place, reveal to the
cardinal all you know of your wife’s relations with Madame de
Chevreuse.”