Three Musketeers (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 22

  “Place this man in the care of his guards again, and let him wait till I send for him.”

  “No, monseigneur, no, it is not he!” cried Bonacieux; “no, I was deceived. This is quite another man, and does not resemble him at all. Monsieur is, I am sure, an honest man.”

  “Take away that fool!” said the cardinal.

  The officer took Bonacieux by the arm, and led him into the antechamber, where he found his two guards.

  The newly introduced personage followed Bonacieux impatiently with his eyes till he had gone out; and the moment the door closed, “They have seen each other,” said he, approaching the cardinal eagerly.

  “Who?” asked his Eminence.

  “He and she.”

  “The queen and the duke?” cried Richelieu.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Louvre.”

  “Are you sure of it?”

  “Perfectly sure.”

  “Who told you of it?”

  “Madame de Lannoy, who is devoted to your Eminence, as you know.”

  “Why did she not let me know sooner?”

  “Whether by chance or mistrust, the queen made Madame de Surgis sleep in her chamber, and detained her all day.”

  “Well, we are beaten! Now let us try to take our revenge.”

  “I will assist you with all my heart, monseigneur; be assured of that.”

  “How did it come about?”

  “At half past twelve the queen was with her women—”

  “Where?”

  “In her bedchamber—”

  “Go on.”

  “When someone came and brought her a handkerchief from her laundress.”

  “And then?”

  “The queen immediately exhibited strong emotion; and despite the rouge with which her face was covered evidently turned pale—”

  “And then, and then?”

  “She then arose, and with altered voice, ‘Ladies,’ said she, ‘wait for me ten minutes, I shall soon return.’ She then opened the door of her alcove, and went out.”

  “Why did not Madame de Lannoy come and inform you instantly?”

  “Nothing was certain; besides, her Majesty had said, ‘Ladies, wait for me,’ and she did not dare to disobey the queen.”

  “How long did the queen remain out of the chamber?”

  “Three-quarters of an hour.”

  “None of her women accompanied her?”

  “Only Donna Estafania.”

  “Did she afterward return?”

  “Yes; but only to take a little rosewood casket, with her cipher upon it, and went out again immediately.”

  “And when she finally returned, did she bring that casket with her?”

  “No.”

  “Does Madame de Lannoy know what was in that casket?”

  “Yes; the diamond studs which his Majesty gave the queen.” “And she came back without this casket?”

  “Yes.”

  “Madame de Lannoy, then, is of opinion that she gave them to Buckingham?”

  “She is sure of it.”

  “How can she be so?”

  “In the course of the day Madame de Lannoy, in her quality of tire-woman of the queen, looked for this casket, appeared uneasy at not finding it, and at length asked information of the queen.”

  “And then the queen?”

  “The queen became exceedingly red, and replied that having in the evening broken one of those studs, she had sent it to her goldsmith to be repaired.”

  “He must be called upon, and so ascertain if the thing be true or not.”

  “I have just been with him.”

  “And the goldsmith?”

  “The goldsmith has heard nothing of it.”

  “Well, well! Rochefort, all is not lost; and perhaps—perhaps everything is for the best.”

  “The fact is that I do not doubt your Eminence’s genius——”

  “Will repair the blunders of his agent—is that it?”

  “That is exactly what I was going to say, if your Eminence had let me finish my sentence.”

  “Meanwhile, do you know where the Duchesse de Chevreuse and the Duke of Buckingham are now concealed?”

  “No, monseigneur; my people could tell me nothing on that head.”

  “But I know.”

  “You, monseigneur?”

  “Yes; or at least I guess. They were, one in the Rue de Vaugirard, No. 25; the other in the Rue de la Harpe, No. 75.”

  “Does your Eminence command that they both be instantly arrested?”

  “It will be too late; they will be gone.”

  “But still, we can make sure that they are so.”

  “Take ten men of my Guardsmen, and search the two houses thoroughly.”

  “Instantly, monseigneur.” And Rochefort went hastily out of the apartment.

  The cardinal being left alone, reflected for an instant and then rang the bell a third time. The same officer appeared.

  “Bring the prisoner in again,” said the cardinal.

  M. Bonacieux was introduced afresh, and upon a sign from the cardinal, the officer retired.

  “You have deceived me!” said the cardinal, sternly.

  “I,” cried Bonacieux, “I deceive your Eminence!”

  “Your wife, in going to Rue de Vaugirard and Rue de la Harpe, did not go to find linen drapers.”

  “Then why did she go, just God?”

  “She went to meet the Duchesse de Chevreuse and the Duke of Buckingham.”

  “Yes,” cried Bonacieux, recalling all his remembrances of the circumstances, “yes, that’s it. Your Eminence is right. I told my wife several times that it was surprising that linen drapers should live in such houses as those, in houses that had no signs; but she always laughed at me. Ah, monseigneur!” continued Bonacieux, throwing himself at his Eminence’s feet, “ah, how truly you are the cardinal, the great cardinal, the man of genius whom all the world reveres!”

  The cardinal, however contemptible might be the triumph gained over so vulgar a being as Bonacieux, did not the less enjoy it for an instant; then, almost immediately, as if a fresh thought had occurred, a smile played upon his lips, and he said, offering his hand to the mercer, “Rise, my friend, you are a worthy man.”

  “The cardinal has touched me with his hand! I have touched the hand of the great man!” cried Bonacieux. “The great man has called me his friend!”

  “Yes, my friend, yes,” said the cardinal, with that paternal tone which he sometimes knew how to assume, but which deceived none who knew him; “and as you have been unjustly suspected, well, you must be indemnified. Here, take this purse of a hundred pistoles, and pardon me.”

  “I pardon you, monseigneur!” said Bonacieux, hesitating to take the purse, fearing, doubtless, that this pretended gift was but a pleasantry. “But you are able to have me arrested, you are able to have me tortured, you are able to have me hanged; you are the master, and I could not have the least word to say. Pardon you, monseigneur! You cannot mean that!”

  “Ah, my dear Monsieur Bonacieux, you are generous in this matter. I see it and I thank you for it. Thus, then, you will take this bag, and you will go away without being too malcontent.”

  “I go away enchanted.”

  “Farewell, then, or rather, au revoir, for I hope we shall meet again.”

  “Whenever Monseigneur wishes; I am always at his Eminence’s orders.”

  “And that will be frequently, I assure you, for I have found something extremely agreeable in your conversation.”

  “Oh, monseigneur!”

  “Au revoir, Monsieur Bonacieux, au revoir!”

  And the cardinal made him a sign with his hand, to which Bonacieux replied by bowing to the ground. He then went out backward, and when he was in the antechamber the cardinal heard him, in his enthusiasm, crying aloud, “Long life to Monseigneur! Long life to his Eminence! Long life to the great cardinal!” The cardinal listened with a smile to this vociferous manifestatio
n of the feelings of M. Bonacieux; and then, when Bonacieux’s cries were no longer audible, “Good!” said he, “that man would henceforward lay down his life for me.” And the cardinal began to examine with the greatest attention the map of La Rochelle, which, as we have said, lay open on the desk, tracing with a pencil the line in which the famous dyke was to pass which, eighteen months later, shut up the port of the besieged city. As he was in the deepest of his strategic meditations, the door opened, and Rochefort returned.

  “Well?” said the cardinal, eagerly, rising with a promptitude which proved the degree of importance he attached to the commission with which he had charged the count.

  “Well,” said the latter, “a young woman of about twenty-six or twenty-eight years of age, and a man of from thirty-five to forty, have indeed lodged at the two houses pointed out by your Eminence; but the woman left last night, and the man this morning.”

  “It was they!” cried the cardinal, looking at the clock; “and now it is too late to have them pursued. The duchess is at Tours, and the duke at Boulogne. It is in London they must be found.”

  “What are your Eminence’s orders?”

  “Not a word of what has passed. Let the queen remain in perfect security; let her be ignorant that we know her secret. Let her believe that we are in search of some conspiracy or other. Send me the keeper of the seals, Séguier.”

  “And that man, what has your Eminence done with him?”

  “What man?” asked the cardinal.

  “That Bonacieux.”

  “I have done with him all that could be done. I have made him a spy upon his wife.”

  The Comte de Rochefort bowed like a man who acknowledges the superiority of the master as great, and retired.

  Left alone, the cardinal seated himself again and wrote a letter, which he secured with his special seal. Then he rang. The officer entered for the fourth time.

  “Tell Vitray to come to me,” said he, “and tell him to get ready for a journey.”

  An instant after, the man he asked for was before him, booted and spurred.

  “Vitray,” said he, “you will go with all speed to London. You must not stop an instant on the way. You will deliver this letter to Milady. Here is an order for two hundred pistoles; call upon my treasurer and get the money. You shall have as much again if you are back within six days, and have executed your commission well.”

  The messenger, without replying a single word, bowed, took the letter, with the order for the two hundred pistoles, and retired.

  Here is what the letter contained:

  Milady, Be at the first ball at which the Duke of Buckingham shall be present. He will wear on his doublet twelve diamond studs; get as near to him as you can, and cut off two.

  As soon as these studs shall be in your possession, inform me.

  15

  MEN OF THE ROBE AND MEN OF THE SWORD20

  On the day after these events had taken place, Athos not having reappeared, M. de Tréville was informed by D’Artagnan and Porthos of the circumstance. As to Aramis, he had asked for leave of absence for five days, and was gone, it was said, to Rouen on family business.

  M. de Tréville was the father of his soldiers. The lowest or the least known of them, as soon as he assumed the uniform of the company, was as sure of his aid and support as if he had been his own brother.

  He repaired, then, instantly to the office of the lieutenant-criminel. The officer who commanded the post of the Red Cross was sent for, and by successive inquiries they learned that Athos was then lodged in the Fort l’Evêque.

  Athos had passed through all the examinations we have seen Bonacieux undergo.

  We were present at the scene in which the two captives were confronted with each other. Athos, who had till that time said nothing for fear that D‘Artagnan, interrupted in his turn, should not have the time necessary, from this moment declared that his name was Athos, and not D’Artagnan. He added that he did not know either M. or Mme. Bonacieux; that he had never spoken to the one or the other; that he had come, at about ten o‘clock in the evening, to pay a visit to his friend M. d’Artagnan, but that till that hour he had been at M. de Tréville’s, where he had dined. “Twenty witnesses,” added he, “could attest the fact”; and he named several distinguished gentlemen, and among them was M. le Duc de la Trémouille.

  The second commissary was as much bewildered as the first had been by the simple and firm declaration of the Musketeer, upon whom he was anxious to take the revenge which men of the robe like at all times to gain over men of the sword; but the name of M. de Tréville, and that of M. de la Trémouille, commanded a little reflection.

  Athos was then sent to the cardinal; but unfortunately the cardinal was at the Louvre with the king.

  It was precisely at this moment that M. de Tréville, on leaving the residence of the lieutenant-criminel and the governor of the Fort l’Evêque without being able to find Athos, arrived at the palace.

  As captain of the Musketeers, M. de Tréville had the right of entry at all times.

  It is well known how violent the king’s prejudices were against the queen, and how carefully these prejudices were kept up by the cardinal, who in affairs of intrigue mistrusted women infinitely more than men. One of the grand causes of this prejudice was the friendship of Anne of Austria for Mme. de Chevreuse. These two women gave him more uneasiness than the war with Spain, the quarrel with England, or the embarrassment of the finances. In his eyes and to his conviction, Mme. de Chevreuse not only served the queen in her political intrigues, but, what tormented him still more, in her amorous intrigues.

  At the first word the cardinal spoke of Mme. de Chevreuse—who, though exiled to Tours and believed to be in that city, had come to Paris, remained there five days, and outwitted the police—the king flew into a furious passion. Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

  But when the cardinal added that not only Mme. de Chevreuse had been in Paris, but still further, that the queen had renewed with her one of those mysterious correspondences which at that time was named a cabal; when he affirmed that he, the cardinal, was about to unravel the most closely twisted thread of this intrigue; that at the moment of arresting in the very act, with all the proofs about her, the queen’s emissary to the exiled duchess, a Musketeer had dared to interrupt the course of justice violently, by falling sword in hand upon the honest men of the law, charged with investigating impartially the whole affair in order to place it before the eyes of the king—Louis XIII could not contain himself, and he made a step toward the queen’s apartment with that pale and mute indignation which, when it broke out, led this prince to the commission of the most pitiless cruelty. And yet, in all this, the cardinal had not yet said a word about the Duke of Buckingham.

  At this instant M. de Tréville entered, cool, polite, and in irreproachable costume.

  Informed of what had passed by the presence of the cardinal and the alteration in the king’s countenance, M. de Tréville felt himself something like Samson before the Philistines.

  Louis XIII had already placed his hand on the knob of the door; at the noise of M. de Tréville’s entrance he turned round. “You arrive in good time, monsieur,” said the king, who, when his passions were raised to a certain point, could not dissemble; “I have learned some fine things concerning your Musketeers.”

  “And I,” said Tréville, coldly, “I have some pretty things to tell your Majesty concerning these gownsmen.”

  “What?” said the king, with hauteur.

  “I have the honor to inform your Majesty,” continued M. de Tréville, in the same tone, “that a party of procureurs, commissaries, and men of the police—very estimable people, but very inveterate, as it appears, against the uniform—have taken upon themselves to arrest in a house, to lead away through the open street, and throw into the Fort l’Evê
que, all upon an order which they have refused to show me, one of my, or rather your Musketeers, sire, of irreproachable conduct, of an almost illustrious reputation, and whom your Majesty knows favorably, Monsieur Athos.”

  “Athos,” said the king, mechanically; “yes, certainly I know that name.”

  “Let your Majesty remember,” said Tréville, “that Monsieur Athos is the Musketeer who, in the annoying duel which you are acquainted with, had the misfortune to wound Monsieur de Cahusac so seriously. A propos, monseigneur,” continued Tréville, addressing the cardinal, “Monsieur de Cahusac is quite recovered, is he not?”

  “Thank you,” said the cardinal, biting his lips with anger.

  “Athos, then, went to pay a visit to one of his friends absent at the time,” continued Tréville, “to a young Béarnais, a cadet in his Majesty’s Guards, the company of Monsieur Dessessart, but scarcely had he arrived at his friend’s and taken up a book, while waiting his return, when a mixed crowd of bailiffs and soldiers came and laid siege to the house, broke open several doors—”

  The cardinal made the king a sign, which signified, “That was on account of the affair about which I spoke to you.”

  “We all know that,” interrupted the king; “for all that was done for our service.”

  “Then,” said Tréville, “it was also for your Majesty’s service that one of my Musketeers, who was innocent, has been seized, that he has been placed between two guards like a malefactor, and that this gallant man, who has ten times shed his blood in your Majesty’s service and is ready to shed it again, has been paraded through the midst of an insolent populace?”

  “Bah!” said the king, who began to be shaken, “was it so managed?”

  “Monsieur de Tréville,” said the cardinal, with the greatest phlegm, “does not tell your Majesty that this innocent Musketeer, this gallant man, had only an hour before attacked, sword in hand, four commissaries of inquiry, who were delegated by myself to examine into an affair of the highest importance.”

  “I defy your Eminence to prove it,” cried Tréville, with his Gascon freedom and military frankness; “for one hour before, Monsieur Athos, who, I will confide it to your Majesty, is really a man of the highest quality, did me the honor after having dined with me to be conversing in the saloon of my hotel, with the Duc de la Trémouille and the Comte de Châlus, who happened to be there.”