“And under what pretext does the Cardinal execute Chalais? Under the stupid pretext that Chalais plotted to kill the King and marry off Monsieur, the King’s brother, to our Queen. No one knew a word about this intrigue. Yesterday you unraveled it to our general satisfaction. And now, while we are still gaping at the news, you say: ‘Let’s drop the subject!’ ”
“Very well, then,” Aramis agreed. “Since you wish it, let us discuss the matter.”
“Were I the esquire of poor Monsieur de Chalais,” Porthos blustered, “I would give that criminal Rochefort a pretty hard time of it for a minute or two.”
“Yes, I know!” Aramis countered suavely. “And you would get a pretty hard time of it yourself from the Red Duke!”
“The Red Duke! Bravo, bravo! The Red Duke!” Porthos cried, clapping his hands and nodding approval. “The Red Duke! What a capital coiner of mots you are, my dear Aramis. I shall make it my business to put that epithet in circulation all over the city, you may be sure! What a wit this lad Aramis is! What a pity you did not follow your early vocation! What a delightful abbé you would have made!”
“A temporary postponement!” Aramis answered, picking imaginary dust off his sleeve. “Some day I shall be a priest! Why do you suppose I am going on with my theological studies?”
“Ay, a priest he’ll be, sooner or later!”
“Sooner!”
Another musketeer intervened:
“Aramis is waiting for one thing before he dons the cassock hanging behind his uniform.”
“What is that?”
“For the Queen to produce an heir to the throne of France!”
“That is no subject for jesting!” Porthos objected. “Thank God the Queen is still of an age to bear a child!”
“My Lord Buckingham is said to be in France …”
The fleeting, sharp smile that accompanied this apparently simple statement left it open to a somewhat scandalous interpretation.
“Aramis, my friend, this time you are wrong. Your wit is forever leading you astray. If Monsieur de Tréville heard you, you would rue it.”
“Are you presuming to lecture me, Porthos?”
“No, I—”
A flash of lightning blazed in the eyes of Aramis, eyes habitually so placid and kindly.
“Well?”
“My dear Aramis, make up your mind. Are you to be an abbé or a musketeer? Be one or the other, not both.” Porthos paused. “You know what Athos told you the other day. He said you were all things to all men.”
Aramis raised his arm violently.
“Come, let us not get angry,” Porthos continued. “You know what Athos, you and I have agreed upon. Well, you visit Madame d’Aiguillon to pay court to her, you visit Madame de Bois-Tracy and you pay court to her, too. May I remind you that she is a cousin of Madame de Chevreuse? Rumor has it that you are quite far advanced in the good graces of Madame de Bois-Tracy.”
Again, Aramis made an impatient gesture.
“Good Lord, don’t bother to tell us about your luck with the ladies. No one wants to discover your secret; everybody knows you for a model of discretion. But since you possess that virtue, why the devil not apply it when you speak of Her Majesty the Queen? I don’t care who plays fast and loose with King or Cardinal. But the Queen is sacred. If a man speaks of her, let it be with respect.”
Aramis looked at his friend. He sighed.
“Porthos,” he declared, “You are vain as Narcissus. I have told you this before, I tell you again. You know how I loathe moralizing, unless Athos does it. As for yourself, my fine friend, your baldric is far too magnificent to chime with your philosophy. If I care to become an abbé, I shall do so. Meanwhile I am a musketeer and as such I shall say what I please. At this moment, I am pleased to say that I find you very boring.”
“Aramis!”
“Porthos!”
Their comrades hastily interfered:
“Come, come, gentlemen … Stop, Porthos … Look, Aramis … After all, he didn’t mean it … Now, now.…”
The door of Monsieur de Tréville’s study flew open. A lackey stood on the doorsill.
“Monsieur de Tréville will receive Monsieur d’Artagnan,” he announced.
The door being open, those in the antechamber suddenly stopped talking.
Amid the general silence, D’Artagnan walked across the room and entered the office, congratulating himself with all his heart at having so narrowly escaped the end of the extraordinary altercation.
III
THE AUDIENCE
Though Monsieur de Tréville was in a very bad humor at the moment, he greeted his young caller politely. D’Artagnan bowed to the ground and in his sonorous Béarn accent paid his profound respects. His southern intonation and diction reminded Monsieur de Tréville of both his youth and his country, a twofold remembrance which brings a smile to the lips of any man, old or young. But before bidding D’Artagnan to be seated, Monsieur de Tréville stepped toward the antechamber, waving his hand toward D’Artagnan as though to ask his permission to finish with other business before he began with him.
Standing by the open door, Monsieur de Tréville called three names. At each name, his voice gained in volume so that he ran the gamut between command and anger.
“Athos! Porthos! Aramis!”
At his summons, only two soldiers appeared, the musketeer of the golden baldric and the musketeer who would be an abbé. No sooner had they entered than the door closed behind them. Though they were not quite at ease, D’Artagnan admired their bearing; they were at once carefree, dignified and submissive. In his eyes they were as demigods and their leader an Olympian Jove, armed with all his thunderbolts.
D’Artagnan took stock of the situation. The two musketeers were here now, the door closed behind them, and the hum of conversation in the antechamber rose again, doubtless revived by speculation about why Porthos and Aramis were on the carpet. Monsieur de Tréville was pacing up and down in silence, his brows knit; he covered the entire length of his office, back and forth, three or four times, passing directly in front of the musketeers, who stood smartly at attention, as if on parade. Suddenly he stopped squarely in front of them, wheeled round to face them, and, surveying them angrily from top to toe:
“Do you gentlemen know what the King said to me no later than yesterday evening?” he demanded. “Do you know, gentlemen?”
There was a moment’s silence. Then one of them replied:
“No … No, Monsieur, we do not.”
“I hope that Monsieur will do us the honor to tell us,” Aramis suggested in his most honeyed tone as he made a deep bow.
“He told me that from now on he would recruit his musketeers from among the Cardinal’s Guards.”
“The Cardinal’s Guards!” Aramis asked indignantly. “But why, Monsieur?”
“Because His Majesty realizes that his inferior wine needs improving by blending it with a better vintage.”
The two musketeers blushed to the roots of their hair. D’Artagnan, completely in the dark about what was happening and considerably embarrassed, wished himself a hundred feet underground.
“Ay,” Monsieur de Tréville went on, growing angrier apace, “His Majesty was perfectly right, for upon my word, the musketeers certainly cut a sorry figure at Court. Do you know what happened yesterday evening when His Eminence was playing chess with the King? Well, I’ll tell you.…
“His Eminence looked at me with a commiserating air which frankly vexed me. Then he told me that my daredevil musketeers—those daredevils, he repeated with an irony that vexed me even more—had required disciplining. Then, his tiger-cat eye cocked at me, he informed me that my swashbucklers had made a night of it in a tavern in the Rue Férou and that a patrol of his Guards (I thought he was going to laugh in my face!) had been forced to arrest the rioters.”
Monsieur de Tréville paused for breath.
“Morbleu! God’s death, you must know something about it,” he resumed. “My musketeers—arrested! And
you were among them, don’t deny it; you were identified and the Cardinal named you! But it’s all my own fault, ay, it’s my own fault because it is I who choose my men. Come, Aramis, tell me why the devil you asked me for a musketeer’s uniform when a cassock would have suited you so much better? And you, Porthos? Of what use is that fine golden baldric of yours if all it holds up is a sword of straw? And Athos?… By the way, where is Athos?”
“Monsieur,” Aramis explained mournfully, “Athos is ill, very ill.”
“Ill, you say? What’s the matter with him?”
“We’re afraid it’s chicken-pox, Monsieur,” Porthos improvised, determined at all costs to take part in the conversation. “But we hope not, because it would certainly disfigure him.”
“The pox. There’s a cock-and-bull story, Porthos! Chicken-pox at his age! No, I know better. He was probably wounded or killed, I dare say. Oh, if only I knew what has happened to him!”
Monsieur de Tréville began pacing his office again, then turned fiercely on the culprits:
“Sangdieu, gentlemen! God’s blood, I will not have my men haunting disreputable places, I will not have them brawling in the streets, and I will not have them fighting at every street corner. Above all, I will not have them make themselves the laughingstocks of Monseigneur Cardinal’s Guards. These Guards are decent fellows, they are law-abiding and tactful, they do not put themselves in a position to be arrested. And if they did—I swear it!—they wouldn’t allow themselves to be arrested. They would prefer dying in their tracks to yielding an inch. Whereas self-preservation, flight and surrender,” he sneered, “seem to be the watchwords of His Majesty’s Musketeers.”
During his long censure, Porthos and Aramis were shaking with rage; they would cheerfully have strangled Monsieur de Tréville had they not felt that it was the great love he bore them made him speak thus. Occasionally, one or the other would stamp on the carpet or bite his lips to the quick or grasp the hilt of his sword so firmly that his hand paled. Their ordeal was the worse because they knew that Monsieur de Tréville’s voice carried over into the antechamber. There, of course, the assembled musketeers had heard Monsieur de Tréville call for Athos, Porthos and Aramis, and they judged from his tone of voice that he was exceeding wroth. Dozens of eavesdroppers glued their ears to the tapestry covering the partition, shuddering at what they heard. Several glued their ears as near the keyhole as they could, and, by a relay system, repeated their leader’s insults word for word for the benefit of the entire audience. In a trice, from the door of the Captain’s office to the gate on the street, the whole mansion was seething.
“So His Majesty’s Musketeers are arrested by the Cardinal’s Guards, eh?” At heart Monsieur de Tréville was as furious as any of his soldiers. Yet he clipped his words, whetting and sharpening them until they were so many stilettos plunged into the breasts of the culprits.
“Yes, six of the Cardinal’s Guards arrest six Royal Musketeers! God’s death, I know what to do now. I shall go straight to the Louvre, submit my resignation as Captain of the Royal Musketeers and apply for a Lieutenant’s commission in the Cardinal’s Guards. And morbleu! if he refuses, I will turn abbé!”
At these last words, the murmur outside, which had been steadily rising, crescendo, burst into a veritable explosion. Jeers, oaths, curses and blasphemy rent the air; it was morbleu here, sangdieu there, morts de tous les diables, upstairs and down, all over the mansion, with God and Satan serving with their bodily parts as pegs upon which to hang the most violent imprecations. D’Artagnan looked vainly about him for some curtain behind which to hide; failing to find any, he was seized with a wild desire to crawl under the table.
“I beg your pardon, Captain,” said Porthos, flaring up, “but the truth is that we were evenly matched, six to six. They set upon us treacherously and unawares; before we could even draw our swords, two of our men were dead and Athos was grievously wounded. You know Athos, Monsieur! Well, Athos tried to get up on his feet twice and twice he fell down again. Meanwhile, we did not surrender, we were dragged forcibly away. Anyhow, before they got us in jail, we escaped.”
“And Athos?”
“Well, Monsieur, they thought Athos dead and left him lying comfortably on the field of battle. What point was there in carrying off a corpse? There’s the whole story for you. Devil take it, Captain, nobody ever won all the battles he fought in. Pompey the Great lost the Battle of Pharsala, I think, and King Francis the first, who so far as I have heard, was as good as the next man, suffered ignominious defeat at the Battle of Pavia.”
“I have the honor to assure you, Monsieur, that I killed one guardsman with his own sword,” Aramis put in. “Mine was broken at the first parry. I killed him or stabbed him, Monsieur; it is for you to choose which terminology you prefer.”
Monsieur de Tréville appeared to be somewhat mollified:
“I did not know all this,” he admitted. “From what I now hear, I suppose His Eminence was exaggerating.”
Profiting by the fact that his Commanding Officer seemed to have calmed down, Aramis hazarded:
“I beg you Monsieur not to say that Athos is wounded. He would be desperately unhappy if the King should hear of it. The wound is a very serious one; the blade passed through his shoulder and penetrated into his chest. So it is to be feared that—”
Suddenly the door opened, the tapestry curtain was raised and a man stood on the threshold. He stood at attention, his noble head erect, his shoulders squared. His features were drawn, his face white.
“Athos!”
“Athos!” Monsieur de Tréville echoed in amazement.
“My comrades told me you had sent for me, Captain,” the newcomer said in a feeble yet perfectly even voice, “so I came here to report to you. What is your pleasure, Monsieur?”
He was in regulation uniform, buttons ashine, boots glittering, belted as usual for duty, every inch a soldier. With a tolerably firm step, he advanced into the room. Monsieur de Tréville, deeply moved by this proof of courage, sprang to meet him.
“I was telling these gentlemen that I forbid my musketeers to expose their lives needlessly,” he explained. “Brave men are very dear to the King and His Majesty knows that his musketeers are the bravest men on earth. Your hand, Athos!”
And without waiting for the other’s reaction, Monsieur de Tréville seized his right hand and pressed it with all his might. In his enthusiasm he failed to notice that Athos, mastering himself as he did, could not check a twitch of pain. Athos turned even whiter than before.
The arrival of Athos had created a sensation in the Hôtel de Tréville. Despite the precautions his comrades had taken to keep his wounds a secret, news of his condition was common gossip. The door to Monsieur de Tréville’s had remained open; his last words met with a burst of satisfaction in the antechamber. Jubilant, two or three musketeers poked their heads through the openings of the tapestry. Monsieur de Tréville was about to reprimand this breach of discipline when he felt the hand of Athos stiffen and, looking up, realized that Athos was about to faint. At that moment, Athos rallied all his energy to struggle against pain, but he was at length overcome and fell to the floor like a dead man.
“A surgeon!” Monsieur de Tréville ordered. “My surgeon or the King’s. Anyhow, the best surgeon you can find. God’s blood, unless you fetch a surgeon, my brave Athos will die.”
At this, many of the musketeers outside rushed into Monsieur de Tréville’s office (for he was too occupied with Athos to close the door upon them) and crowded around the wounded man. All this attention might have proved useless had not the physician so urgently summoned chanced to be in the mansion. Elbowing his way through the throng, he approached Athos. The musketeer was still unconscious, and, as all this noise and commotion was inconvenient, the first and most urgent thing the doctor asked was that Athos be removed to an adjoining room. Monsieur de Tréville immediately opened the door and pointed the way to Porthos and Aramis who carried off their comrade in their arms. Behind them wa
lked the surgeon, and behind the surgeon, the door closed. Then, momentarily, Monsieur de Tréville’s office, usually a place held sacred, became an annex to the antechamber as everybody commented, harangued, vociferated, swore, cursed and consigned the Cardinal and his guardsmen to all the devils.
An instant after, Porthos and Aramis reappeared, leaving only the surgeon and Monsieur de Tréville at their friend’s side. Presently Monsieur de Tréville himself returned. Athos, he said, had regained consciousness and, according to the surgeon, his condition need not worry his friends; his weakness was due wholly to loss of blood.
Then the Captain of Musketeers dismissed the company with a wave of the hand and all withdrew save D’Artagnan, who did not forget that he had an audience and who, with Gascon tenacity, sat tight.
“Pardon me, my dear compatriot,” Monsieur de Tréville said with a smile, “pardon me but I had completely forgotten you. You can understand that. A captain is nothing but a father charged with an even greater responsibility than the father of an ordinary family. Soldiers are just big children. But as I insist on the orders of the King, and more particularly the orders of the Cardinal, being carried out—”
D’Artagnan could not help smiling. Observing this Monsieur de Tréville judged that he was not dealing with a fool, and, changing the conversation, came straight to the point:
“I loved your father dearly,” he said. “What can I do for his son? Tell me quickly, for as you see my time is not my own.”
“Monsieur,” D’Artagnan explained, “on leaving Tarbes and coming here, I intended to request you, in remembrance of the friendship you have cited, to enroll me in the musketeers. But after what I have seen here during the last two hours, I understand what a tremendous favor this would be. I am afraid I do not deserve it.”
The Modern Library Children's Classics Page 62
