The three musketeers
it yesterday to the great satisfaction of all; and while we are still
gaping with wonder at the news, you come and tell us today, ‘Let us say
no more about it.’”
“Well, then, let us talk about it, since you desire it,” replied
Aramis, patiently.
“This Rochefort,” cried Porthos, “if I were the esquire of poor
Chalais, should pass a minute or two very uncomfortably with me.”
“And you—you would pass rather a sad quarter-hour with the Red Duke,”
replied Aramis.
“Oh, the Red Duke! Bravo! Bravo! The Red Duke!” cried Porthos, clapping
his hands and nodding his head. “The Red Duke is capital. I’ll
circulate that saying, be assured, my dear fellow. Who says this Aramis
is not a wit? What a misfortune it is you did not follow your first
vocation; what a delicious abbé you would have made!”
“Oh, it’s only a temporary postponement,” replied Aramis; “I shall be
one someday. You very well know, Porthos, that I continue to study
theology for that purpose.”
“He will be one, as he says,” cried Porthos; “he will be one, sooner or
later.”
“Sooner,” said Aramis.
“He only waits for one thing to determine him to resume his cassock,
which hangs behind his uniform,” said another Musketeer.
“What is he waiting for?” asked another.
“Only till the queen has given an heir to the crown of France.”
“No jesting upon that subject, gentlemen,” said Porthos; “thank God the
queen is still of an age to give one!”
“They say that Monsieur de Buckingham is in France,” replied Aramis,
with a significant smile which gave to this sentence, apparently so
simple, a tolerably scandalous meaning.
“Aramis, my good friend, this time you are wrong,” interrupted Porthos.
“Your wit is always leading you beyond bounds; if Monsieur de Tréville
heard you, you would repent of speaking thus.”
“Are you going to give me a lesson, Porthos?” cried Aramis, from whose
usually mild eye a flash passed like lightning.
“My dear fellow, be a Musketeer or an abbé. Be one or the other, but
not both,” replied Porthos. “You know what Athos told you the other
day; you eat at everybody’s mess. Ah, don’t be angry, I beg of you,
that would be useless; you know what is agreed upon between you, Athos
and me. You go to Madame d’Aguillon’s, and you pay your court to her;
you go to Madame de Bois-Tracy’s, the cousin of Madame de Chevreuse,
and you pass for being far advanced in the good graces of that lady.
Oh, good Lord! Don’t trouble yourself to reveal your good luck; no one
asks for your secret—all the world knows your discretion. But since you
possess that virtue, why the devil don’t you make use of it with
respect to her Majesty? Let whoever likes talk of the king and the
cardinal, and how he likes; but the queen is sacred, and if anyone
speaks of her, let it be respectfully.”
“Porthos, you are as vain as Narcissus; I plainly tell you so,” replied
Aramis. “You know I hate moralizing, except when it is done by Athos.
As to you, good sir, you wear too magnificent a baldric to be strong on
that head. I will be an abbé if it suits me. In the meanwhile I am a
Musketeer; in that quality I say what I please, and at this moment it
pleases me to say that you weary me.”
“Aramis!”
“Porthos!”
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” cried the surrounding group.
“Monsieur de Tréville awaits Monsieur d’Artagnan,” cried a servant,
throwing open the door of the cabinet.
At this announcement, during which the door remained open, everyone
became mute, and amid the general silence the young man crossed part of
the length of the antechamber, and entered the apartment of the captain
of the Musketeers, congratulating himself with all his heart at having
so narrowly escaped the end of this strange quarrel.
Chapter III.
THE AUDIENCE
M. de Tréville was at the moment in rather ill-humor, nevertheless he
saluted the young man politely, who bowed to the very ground; and he
smiled on receiving D’Artagnan’s response, the Béarnese accent of which
recalled to him at the same time his youth and his country—a double
remembrance which makes a man smile at all ages; but stepping toward
the antechamber and making a sign to D’Artagnan with his hand, as if to
ask his permission to finish with others before he began with him, he
called three times, with a louder voice at each time, so that he ran
through the intervening tones between the imperative accent and the
angry accent.
“Athos! Porthos! Aramis!”
The two Musketeers with whom we have already made acquaintance, and who
answered to the last of these three names, immediately quitted the
group of which they had formed a part, and advanced toward the cabinet,
the door of which closed after them as soon as they had entered. Their
appearance, although it was not quite at ease, excited by its
carelessness, at once full of dignity and submission, the admiration of
D’Artagnan, who beheld in these two men demigods, and in their leader
an Olympian Jupiter, armed with all his thunders.
When the two Musketeers had entered; when the door was closed behind
them; when the buzzing murmur of the antechamber, to which the summons
which had been made had doubtless furnished fresh food, had
recommenced; when M. de Tréville had three or four times paced in
silence, and with a frowning brow, the whole length of his cabinet,
passing each time before Porthos and Aramis, who were as upright and
silent as if on parade—he stopped all at once full in front of them,
and covering them from head to foot with an angry look, “Do you know
what the king said to me,” cried he, “and that no longer ago than
yesterday evening—do you know, gentlemen?”
“No,” replied the two Musketeers, after a moment’s silence, “no, sir,
we do not.”
“But I hope that you will do us the honor to tell us,” added Aramis, in
his politest tone and with his most graceful bow.
“He told me that he should henceforth recruit his Musketeers from among
the Guards of Monsieur the Cardinal.”
“The Guards of the cardinal! And why so?” asked Porthos, warmly.
“Because he plainly perceives that his piquette* stands in need of
being enlivened by a mixture of good wine.”
* A watered liquor, made from the second pressing of the grape.
The two Musketeers reddened to the whites of their eyes. D’Artagnan did
not know where he was, and wished himself a hundred feet underground.
“Yes, yes,” continued M. de Tréville, growing warmer as he spoke, “and
his majesty was right; for, upon my honor, it is true that the
Musketeers make but a miserable figure at court. The cardinal related
yesterday while playing with the king, with an air of condolence very
displeasing to me, that the day before yesterday those _damned
Musketeers_, those _daredevils_—he dwelt upon those words with an
ironical tone still more displeasing to me—those _braggarts_, added he,
glancing at me with his tiger-cat’s eye, had made a riot in the Rue
Férou in a cabaret, and that a party of his Guards (I thought he was
going to laugh in my face) had been forced to arrest the rioters!
_Morbleu!_ You must know something about it. Arrest Musketeers! You
were among them—you were! Don’t deny it; you were recognized, and the
cardinal named you. But it’s all my fault; yes, it’s all my fault,
because it is myself who selects my men. You, Aramis, why the devil did
you ask me for a uniform when you would have been so much better in a
cassock? And you, Porthos, do you only wear such a fine golden baldric
to suspend a sword of straw from it? And Athos—I don’t see Athos. Where
is he?”
“Ill—”
“Very ill, say you? And of what malady?”
“It is feared that it may be the smallpox, sir,” replied Porthos,
desirous of taking his turn in the conversation; “and what is serious
is that it will certainly spoil his face.”
“The smallpox! That’s a great story to tell me, Porthos! Sick of the
smallpox at his age! No, no; but wounded without doubt, killed,
perhaps. Ah, if I knew! S’blood! Messieurs Musketeers, I will not have
this haunting of bad places, this quarreling in the streets, this
swordplay at the crossways; and above all, I will not have occasion
given for the cardinal’s Guards, who are brave, quiet, skillful men who
never put themselves in a position to be arrested, and who, besides,
never allow themselves to be arrested, to laugh at you! I am sure of
it—they would prefer dying on the spot to being arrested or taking back
a step. To save yourselves, to scamper away, to flee—that is good for
the king’s Musketeers!”
Porthos and Aramis trembled with rage. They could willingly have
strangled M. de Tréville, if, at the bottom of all this, they had not
felt it was the great love he bore them which made him speak thus. They
stamped upon the carpet with their feet; they bit their lips till the
blood came, and grasped the hilts of their swords with all their might.
All without had heard, as we have said, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis
called, and had guessed, from M. de Tréville’s tone of voice, that he
was very angry about something. Ten curious heads were glued to the
tapestry and became pale with fury; for their ears, closely applied to
the door, did not lose a syllable of what he said, while their mouths
repeated as he went on, the insulting expressions of the captain to all
the people in the antechamber. In an instant, from the door of the
cabinet to the street gate, the whole hôtel was boiling.
“Ah! The king’s Musketeers are arrested by the Guards of the cardinal,
are they?” continued M. de Tréville, as furious at heart as his
soldiers, but emphasizing his words and plunging them, one by one, so
to say, like so many blows of a stiletto, into the bosoms of his
auditors. “What! Six of his Eminence’s Guards arrest six of his
Majesty’s Musketeers! _Morbleu!_ My part is taken! I will go straight
to the Louvre; I will give in my resignation as captain of the king’s
Musketeers to take a lieutenancy in the cardinal’s Guards, and if he
refuses me, _morbleu!_ I will turn abbé.”
At these words, the murmur without became an explosion; nothing was to
be heard but oaths and blasphemies. The _morbleus_, the _sang Dieus_,
the _morts touts les diables_, crossed one another in the air.
D’Artagnan looked for some tapestry behind which he might hide himself,
and felt an immense inclination to crawl under the table.
“Well, my Captain,” said Porthos, quite beside himself, “the truth is
that we were six against six. But we were not captured by fair means;
and before we had time to draw our swords, two of our party were dead,
and Athos, grievously wounded, was very little better. For you know
Athos. Well, Captain, he endeavored twice to get up, and fell again
twice. And we did not surrender—no! They dragged us away by force. On
the way we escaped. As for Athos, they believed him to be dead, and
left him very quiet on the field of battle, not thinking it worth the
trouble to carry him away. That’s the whole story. What the devil,
Captain, one cannot win all one’s battles! The great Pompey lost that
of Pharsalia; and Francis the First, who was, as I have heard say, as
good as other folks, nevertheless lost the Battle of Pavia.”
“And I have the honor of assuring you that I killed one of them with
his own sword,” said Aramis; “for mine was broken at the first parry.
Killed him, or poniarded him, sir, as is most agreeable to you.”
“I did not know that,” replied M. de Tréville, in a somewhat softened
tone. “The cardinal exaggerated, as I perceive.”
“But pray, sir,” continued Aramis, who, seeing his captain become
appeased, ventured to risk a prayer, “do not say that Athos is wounded.
He would be in despair if that should come to the ears of the king; and
as the wound is very serious, seeing that after crossing the shoulder
it penetrates into the chest, it is to be feared—”