The Modern Library Children's Classics

by Kenneth Grahame

  This sleep, the sleep of one who was still a provincial, occupied him till morning. At nine o’clock he rose, dressed and set out for the mansion of the illustrious Monsieur de Tréville, the third personage in the kingdom, according to Monsieur d’Artagnan the elder.

  II

  THE ANTECHAMBER OF MONSIEUR DE TRÉVILLE

  Monsieur de Troisville, as his family was still called in Gascony, or Monsieur de Tréville, as he had ended by styling himself in Paris, had begun life exactly as D’Artagnan. He had marched on the capital without a sou to his name; but he possessed that wealth of audacity, shrewdness and intelligence whereby the poorest and humblest Gascon gentleman often derives brighter hopes from his paternal heritage than the richest and loftiest nobleman from Périgord or Berry realizes materially from his. His insolent bravery, his still more insolent success at a time when blows were thick as hops, sped him to the top of that difficult ladder called Court favor. He had scaled it four steps at a time.

  Monsieur de Tréville was a friend of the reigning King, Louis XIII, who, as is well known, venerated the memory of his father, Henry IV. Now Monsieur de Tréville’s father had served Henry IV with unfailing loyalty during the Wars of Religion. The monarch could not reward him in coin of the realm, for he was short of that commodity all his life long and he used to pay his debts with the only staple he never had cause to borrow—a ready wit! So Henry of Navarre, having captured Paris and become King of France, being short of money, as we have said, authorized the late Monsieur de Tréville to assume for arms a lion or passant upon gules—in non-heraldic terms a golden lion walking and looking towards the right, with right forepaw raised, with the motto of Fidelis et fortis, loyal and brave.

  This was of course a very great honor but it scarcely made for creature comfort, so that when the illustrious comrade of Henry IV died, he left his son his sword and his motto for only inheritance. Thanks to this double gift and the spotless name that accompanied it, Monsieur de Tréville was admitted into the household of the young prince. There he made such good use of his sword and proved so faithful to his motto that King Louis XIII, one of the good swordsmen of his kingdom, was wont to exclaim:

  “Had I a friend about to fight, I would advise him to choose me in the first place to support him, then Tréville—or no, perhaps Tréville in the first place, then myself!”

  Thus Louis XIII had a genuine liking for Tréville—a royal and selfish liking, true, but a liking nevertheless. At that unhappy period, it was important for the great to be surrounded by men made of such stuff as Tréville. Many might take for a motto the epithet of brave, which formed the second part of Tréville’s motto, but few gentlemen could boast that of loyal, which constituted the first. Tréville was of this small group, and high among them for the rare combination of virtues that were his. He was intelligent, obedient and tenacious as a bulldog and blindly passionate in his valor. Quick of eye and prompt of hand, he seemed to have been endowed with sight only to discern who displeased the King and with an arm only to strike down the culprit, whether a Besme, a Maurevers, a Poltrot, a Méré or a Vitry. In short, until now, Tréville had lacked nothing save the golden opportunity; but he had lain in wait for it and vowed to seize it by its three hairs if ever it came within reach. It did, and the sovereign appointed Tréville Captain of his Musketeers, who in devotion or rather in fanaticism were to Louis XIII what his Ordinaries had been to Henry III and his Scots Guards to Louis XI.

  Monseigneur Cardinal, Duc de Richelieu, did not lag behind the King in this respect. Seeing the impressive élite Louis XIII had recruited, this second—or shall we say this first?—the Cardinal, as actual ruler of France, determined to have his own private guard too. Thus there were two corps of guards, the King’s and the Cardinal’s, and these two powerful rivals vied with each other in attracting the most celebrated swordsmen, not only from all the provinces in France but from all the foreign states. Over their evening game of chess, Cardinal and King argued the merits of their respective soldiery, each vaunting the elegance and valor of his own. Officially, they condemned all duels and brawling but privately they incited their henchmen to quarrel, deriving immoderate pleasure in victory or acute chagrin in defeat. For this statement, we have the authority of a gentleman whose Memoirs attest that he was involved in some few of these defeats but in many more of these victories.

  Tréville knew how to appeal to and profit by his master’s foibles. His skill in appraising these explains how he enjoyed the long and steadfast favor of a monarch whom history does not record as particularly faithful in his friendships. He paraded his musketeers before Armand Duplessis, Cardinal and Duke, with a defiant air that made His Eminence’s gray mustaches bristle with impotent anger. Tréville had an admirable grasp of the war methods of his period; he realized that when soldiers could not live at the enemy’s expense they must live off their fellow-countrymen. His men formed a legion of devil-may-care fellows, quite undisciplined except in regard to their Commanding Officer.

  Loose in their ways, great drinkers, battle-scarred, His Majesty’s Musketeers—or rather Monsieur de Tréville’s—roamed the city. They were to be seen lounging in the taverns, strolling in the public walks and attending all civic sports and entertainments, shouting, twirling their mustachios and rattling their swords. They took immense pleasure in jostling the Guards of Monseigneur Cardinal when they met; then they would draw their swords in the open street, amid a thousand jests, as though it were all the greatest sport in the world. Sometimes they were killed, but they died certain of being mourned and avenged; often they did the killing, but they were certain of not languishing in jail, for Monsieur de Tréville was there to claim them. Obviously then they praised their Commanding Officer to the skies, they adored him, and, ruffians though they were, they trembled before him like schoolboys before the magister. Submissive to his least word, they were prepared to suffer death in order to wash out the slightest affront.

  Monsieur de Tréville employed this powerful weapon on behalf of the King and the King’s friends in the first place, then, in the second place on behalf of himself and his own friends. For the rest, no line in the memoirs of a period so fertile in memoirs, even those left by his enemies, accuses this worthy gentleman of acquiring personal profit from the cooperation of his minions—and heaven knows! he had enemies aplenty among both writers and soldiers! Gifted with a genius for intrigue which made him a match for the ablest intriguers, he remained a model of probity and honor. More, despite grueling training and murderous duels, Monsieur de Tréville had become one of the most gallant frequenters of boudoirs, the most subtle squire of dames and the most exquisite turner of pretty compliments of his day. Monsieur de Tréville’s triumphs in the lists of Venus were as widely bruited as those of Bassompierre twenty years before—and that was saying a good deal! The Captain of the Musketeers was therefore admired, feared and loved, a state which constitutes the zenith of human fortune.

  Louis XIV absorbed all the smaller stars of his Court in his own vast radiance, but his father, pluribus impar, more accommodating, suffered each of his favorites to retain his personal splendor, and each of his courtiers his individual value. Besides the levees of the King and the Cardinal, Paris at that time boasted more than two hundred others, minor ones but much frequented. Among these, Monsieur de Tréville’s levee was one of the most avidly sought after.

  In summer from six o’clock in the morning, in winter from eight, the courtyard of his mansion in the Rue du Vieux Colombier resembled an armed camp. Groups of fifty or sixty musketeers appeared to replace one another in relays so as always to present an imposing number; they paraded ceaselessly, armed to the teeth and prepared for any eventuality. In quest of favors, the office-seekers of Paris sped up and down one of those colossal staircases within whose space our modern civilisation could build an entire house. There were gentlemen from the provinces eager to enroll in the Musketeers and flunkeys in brilliant, multicolored liveries bringing and bearing back messages between thei
r masters and Monsieur de Tréville. In the antechamber on long circular benches sat the elect, that is to say those fortunate enough to have been summoned. A perpetual buzzing reigned in this room from morning till night while Monsieur de Tréville, in an adjoining office, received visits, listened to complaints and gave his orders. To review both his men and his arms, he had but to step to his window, much as at the Louvre the King had but to step out on his balcony.

  The day D’Artagnan appeared at the Hôtel de Tréville the assemblage was most imposing, particularly for a provincial newly arrived from his distant province. True, this provincial was a Gascon and at that period Gascons were reputed to be difficult to impress. Entering through the massive door with its long, square studs, he walked into the midst of a troop of swordsmen crossing one another as they passed, calling out, quarreling and playing tricks on one another. Only an officer, a great lord or a pretty woman could have moved through these turbulent, clashing waves of humanity.

  Young D’Artagnan advanced with beating heart through this tumult and confusion, holding his long rapier tight against his lanky leg and keeping one hand on the brim of his felt hat with the half-smile of your provincial who wishes to cut a figure. Having got past one group, he breathed more easily but he realized that people were turning round to stare at him, and, for the first time in his life, D’Artagnan, who had hitherto entertained a very good opinion of himself, felt ridiculous.

  Things were still worse when he reached the staircase to be confronted with the following scene. Four musketeers were amusing themselves fencing. Three were on the bottom steps, a fourth some steps above them; he, naked sword in hand, prevented or attempted to prevent the three from ascending, as they plied their agile swords against him. Ten or twelve comrades waited on the landing to take their turn at this sport. At first D’Artagnan mistook these weapons for foils and believed them to be buttoned, but he soon recognized by the scratches inflicted that every weapon was pointed as a needle and razor-sharp. Incidentally, at each scratch one of the fencers dealt an adversary, both spectators and the actors themselves roared with laughter.

  The soldier temporarily defending the upper step kept his adversaries marvelously in check. The circle about the fencers grew denser as fresh candidates swelled the audience. The rules of the game were that when a man was hit, he must yield his turn to another candidate, and the man who hit him received an extra turn. In five minutes, the defender of the stairway pinked three men very slightly, one on the wrist, another on the chin, and the third on the ear, while he himself remained intact. This feat, according to the rules, won him three extra turns.

  However difficult it might be—or rather, however difficult D’Artagnan pretended it might be—for them to impress him, this pastime left him gaping. In his home province, a land where every man is a hothead, he had seen somewhat more elaborate preliminaries before dueling; the gasconnade—that is, the impetuosity, courage, calm and swagger of these four fencers—eclipsed anything he had ever witnessed even in Gascony. It was as though he had been transported into that famous realm of giants which Gulliver was later to visit and where he was to be so frightened. But D’Artagnan had not yet reached his goal; he had still to cross the landing and the antechamber.

  At the head of the stairs, the musketeers were not fighting, they were exchanging stories about women; in the antechamber they were exchanging stories about the Court. On the landing, D’Artagnan blushed; in the antechamber he shuddered. In Gascony his lively and vagrant imagination had rendered him formidable to young chambermaids and even sometimes to their young mistresses; but even in his most delirious moments, he had never dreamed of half the amorous wonders or a quarter of the feats of dalliance which he heard exposed here, with no detail omitted or attenuated, in connection with the loftiest names of the realm. But if his love of decency was shocked on the landing, his respect for the Cardinal was scandalized in the antechamber. There, to D’Artagnan’s amazement, they were loudly and boldly criticizing the policy which made all Europe tremble; worse, they blamed the private life of the Cardinal, blithely indifferent to the fact that so many powerful nobles had been punished mercilessly for merely attempting to learn something about it. What! Was it possible that the great man whom Monsieur d’Artagnan the elder revered so deeply served as an object of ridicule to Monsieur de Tréville’s musketeers? D’Artagnan could scarcely believe his ears as he heard these soldiers cracking jokes about His Eminence’s bandy legs and His Eminence’s crooked back. Some sang scurrilous lampoons about Madame d’Aiguillon, his mistress, and Madame de Combalet, his niece; others formed parties and laid plans to annoy the pages and guards of Monseigneur Duke and Cardinal.

  However when by chance the King’s name was thoughtlessly uttered amid all these cardinalist jests, it was as though a gag had suddenly been clamped down over all these jeering mouths. The speakers glanced hesitantly about them, apparently doubting the thickness of the partition separating them from Monsieur de Tréville’s office. But a fresh allusion soon brought the conversation back to His Eminence and then laughter waxed boisterous as ever and a bright, cruel light was shed upon the least of his actions.

  “Upon my word, these fellows will all be imprisoned and hanged!” D’Artagnan thought. He was terrified. “And that will be my fate, too. I have been listening to them and I have heard them; I shall undoubtedly be held as an accomplice. What would my good father say—father who so earnestly counseled respect for My Lord Cardinal—what would my good father say if he knew I was in the society of such heathens?”

  Needless to say, then, D’Artagnan dared not join in the conversation. But he was all eyes and all ears, jealous lest he miss the merest detail. Despite his faith in the paternal injunction, his tastes and instincts led him to praise rather than to blame the unheard-of things he was witnessing.

  Although a stranger in the throng of Monsieur de Tréville’s courtiers and making his first appearance in this antechamber, D’Artagnan was finally noticed. A flunkey went up to him and asked what he wanted. D’Artagnan gave his name very modestly, emphasized the fact that he was a fellow-countryman of Monsieur de Tréville and requested a moment’s audience. The servant with a somewhat patronizing air promised to transmit his request in due season.

  D’Artagnan, recovering from his first surprise, now had leisure to examine the persons and costumes of those about him.

  The center of the most lively group was a very tall, haughty-looking musketeer dressed in so peculiar a costume as to attract general attention. He was not wearing the uniform cloak (it was not compulsory in those days of less liberty and more independence) but, instead, a sky-blue doublet, somewhat faded and worn, and over it, a long cloak of crimson velvet that fell in graceful folds from his shoulders. Across his chest, from over his right shoulder to his left hip, blazed a magnificent baldric, worked in gold and twinkling like rippling waters in the sun. From it hung a gigantic rapier.

  This musketeer had just come off guard, coughed affectedly from time to time and complained of having caught a cold. That was why he was wearing his cloak, he explained to those around him, speaking with a lofty air and twirling his mustaches disdainfully. Everyone admired his gold-braided baldric, D’Artagnan more than anyone.

  “After all, baldrics are coming in to fashion,” said the musketeer. “It was wildly extravagant of me, but still they’re the fashion! Besides, a man must spend his inheritance somehow.”

  “Come, Porthos, don’t try to tell us your baldric comes from the paternal coffers!” another musketeer piped up. “I know better.”

  “What?”

  “It came from the heavily-veiled lady I met you with two Sundays ago over by the Porte Saint-Honoré.”

  “No, by my honor, I bought it myself!” the man designated as Porthos protested. “On my faith as a gentleman, I paid for it out of my own purse.”

  “Yes,” said a bystander. “Just as I bought this new purse with the money my mistress put in my old one!”

  “It’s true,
though,” Porthos insisted. “The proof of it is that I paid twelve pistoles for it.” The general wonderment grew but the general doubt subsisted. “Didn’t I, Aramis?” he concluded, turning to still another musketeer.

  The companion whose corroboration he invited offered a perfect contrast to Porthos. Aramis was a young man twenty-three years old at most with a delicate and ingenuous countenance … black gentle eyes … cheeks rosy and downy as an autumn peach … and tenuous mustaches that marked a perfectly straight line over his upper lip.… He seemed mortally afraid to lower his hands lest their veins swell up; he would pinch his ear-lobes from time to time to preserve their smooth, roseate transparency. Usually he spoke little and always slowly; he bowed frequently and laughed noiselessly, baring beautiful white teeth which he seemed to care for as attentively as he cared for the rest of his person. At his friend’s appeal, he nodded affirmatively.

  Another musketeer changed the subject, addressing no one in particular.

  “What do you think of the Chalais incident?” he inquired. “His esquire is telling the strangest tale!”

  “And what does the esquire say?” Porthos asked pompously.

  “He says he was in Brussels and there he met Rochefort, the âme damnée of the Cardinal. And guess in what circumstances?”

  “Well?”

  “Rochefort was disguised as a Capuchin friar, damn his soul! Thanks to his costume he was able to trick Monsieur de Laigues, fool that he is!”

  “De Laigues is a fool, certainly,” Porthos conceded. “But is this news reliable?”

  “I had it from Aramis.”

  “You did?”

  “Why yes, Porthos, I told you all about it yesterday. Let’s drop the subject!”

  “Drop the subject?” Porthos thundered. “That’s your opinion!” He drew a deep breath. “Drop the subject, indeed! A plague on you, you draw your conclusions too quickly! What! The Cardinal sets a spy upon a gentleman? The Cardinal has this gentleman’s letters stolen from him by a traitor, a brigand, a gallows bird? With the help of this scoundrel and thanks to this correspondence, the Cardinal has the head of Monsieur de Chalais severed skilfully from his shoulders? And you say ‘Drop the subject!’