Part 1

Alexandre Dumas

THE VISCOUNT OF BRAGELONNE

VOLUME I

(1848 — 1850)

Table of Contents

Chapter I -- The Letter Chapter II -- The Messenger Chapter III -- The Interview Chapter IV -- The Father and the Son Chapter V -- Wherein Shall Be Spoken of Cropoli, of Cropole, and of a Great Unknown Painter Chapter VI -- The Unknown Man Chapter VII -- Parry Chapter VIII -- What His Majesty Louis XIV Was Like at the Age of Twenty-Two Chapter IX -- Wherein the Unknown Man of the Medici Inn Loses His Incognito Chapter X -- The Arithmetic of M. de Mazarin Chapter XI -- The Politics of M. de Mazarin Chapter XII -- The King and the Lieutenant Chapter XIII -- Marie de Mancini Chapter XIV -- Wherein the King and the Lieutenant Each Display a Retentive Memory Chapter XV -- The Outlaw Chapter XVI -- Remember! Chapter XVII -- Wherein They Seek Aramis, and Find Only Bazin Chapter XVIII -- Wherein d'Artagnan Seeks Porthos and Finds Only Mousqueton Chapter XIX -- What d'Artagnan Had Come to Paris to Do Chapter XX -- Of the Company Formed in the Rue des Lombards at the Sign of the Golden Pestle, to Exploit M. d'Artagnan's Idea Chapter XXI -- Wherein d'Artagnan Prepares to Travel for the Firm of Planchet and Company Chapter XXII -- D'Artagnan Travels for the Firm of Planchet and Company Chapter XXIII -- Wherein the Author Is Forced, Much Against His Will, to Make a Little History Chapter XXIV -- The Treasure Chapter XXV -- The Marsh Chapter XXVI -- The Heart and the Mind Chapter XXVII -- The Next Day Chapter XXVIII -- The Contraband Goods Chapter XXIX -- Wherein d'Artagnan Begins to Fear He Has Sunk His Own Money and Planchet's in a Lost Cause Chapter XXX -- The Shares of the Planchet and Company Society Rise to Par Chapter XXXI -- Monck Takes Shape Chapter XXXII -- How Athos and d'Artagnan Once More Meet at the Inn of the Stag's Horn Chapter XXXIII -- The Audience Chapter XXXIV -- Of the Embarrassment of Riches Chapter XXXV -- On the Canal Chapter XXXVI -- How d'Artagnan, Like a Fairy, Drew a Pleasure-House from a Fir-Wood Box Chapter XXXVII -- How d'Artagnan Settled the Liabilities of the Company Before Establishing Its Assets Chapter XXXVIII -- Wherein It Is Seen That the French Grocer Had Already Rehabilitated Himself in the Seventeenth Century Chapter XXXIX -- The Game of M. de Mazarin Chapter XL -- A Matter of State Chapter XLI -- The Account Chapter XLII -- Wherein M. de Mazarin Turns Prodigal Chapter XLIII -- Guénaud Chapter XLIV -- Colbert Chapter XLV -- Confession of an Honest Man Chapter XLVI -- The Gift Chapter XLVII -- How Anne of Austria Gave Louis XIV a Counsel, and How M. Fouquet Gave Him Another Chapter XLVIII -- Agony Chapter XLIX -- The First Appearance of Colbert Chapter L -- The First Day of the Reign of Louis XIV Chapter LI -- A Passion Chapter LII -- The Lesson of M. d'Artagnan Chapter LIII -- The King Chapter LIV -- The Houses of M. Fouquet Chapter LV -- The Abbé Fouquet Chapter LVI -- The Wine of M. de La Fontaine Chapter LVII -- The Gallery of Saint-Mandé Chapter LVIII -- The Epicureans Chapter LIX -- A Quarter of an Hour Late Chapter LX -- Plan of Battle Chapter LXI -- The Tavern of the Image-of-Our-Lady Chapter LXII -- Long Live Colbert! Chapter LXIII -- How the Diamond of M. d'Emerys Passed Through the Hands of d'Artagnan Chapter LXIV -- Of the Notable Difference d'Artagnan Found Between M. the Intendant and Monseigneur the Superintendent Chapter LXV -- Philosophy of the Heart and of the Mind Chapter LXVI -- Journey Chapter LXVII -- How d'Artagnan Made the Acquaintance of a Poet Who Had Made Himself a Printer So That His Verses Might Be Printed Chapter LXVIII -- D'Artagnan Continues His Investigations Chapter LXIX -- Wherein the Reader Will Doubtless Be as Astonished as d'Artagnan Was to Find an Old Acquaintance Chapter LXX -- Wherein d'Artagnan's Ideas, at First Much Troubled, Begin to Clear Up a Little Chapter LXXI -- A Procession at Vannes

Chapter I — The Letter

Toward the middle of the month of May in the year 1660, at nine o'clock in the morning, when the already warm sun was drying the dew upon the wallflowers of the château of Blois, a small cavalcade, composed of three men and two pages, re-entered by the town bridge, producing upon the walkers along the quay no other effect than a first movement of the hand to the head to salute, and a second movement of the tongue to express this idea in the purest French spoken in France:

— Here is Monsieur returning from the hunt.

And that was all.

Meanwhile, while the horses climbed the steep slope that leads from the river to the château, several shopboys approached the last horse, which bore, hung from the saddle-bow, various birds tied by the beak.

At this sight, the curious onlookers manifested with a wholly rustic frankness their disdain for so meagre a capture, and after a discussion they held among themselves upon the disadvantage of hawking, they returned to their occupations. Only one of the curious, a plump, rosy-cheeked, good-humored fellow, having asked why Monsieur, who could amuse himself so much thanks to his large revenues, contented himself with so pitiful a diversion:

— Do you not know, he was answered, that Monsieur's principal diversion is to be bored?

The merry lad shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that signified as clear as day: "In that case, I would rather be Hodge than a prince." And each returned to his work.

Meanwhile Monsieur continued on his way with an air at once so melancholy and so majestic that he would certainly have won the admiration of the spectators had there been any; but the burghers of Blois did not forgive Monsieur for having chosen that so cheerful a town in which to be bored at his leisure; and every time they caught sight of the august bored one, they slipped away yawning or drew their heads back inside their rooms, to escape the soporific influence of that long pale face, those drowned eyes, and that languishing bearing. So that the worthy prince was all but sure to find the streets deserted whenever he ventured into them.

Now, this was a culpable irreverence on the part of the inhabitants of Blois, for Monsieur was, after the king, and perhaps even before the king, the greatest lord in the kingdom. Indeed, God, who had granted to Louis XIV, then reigning, the happiness of being the son of Louis XIII, had granted to Monsieur the honor of being the son of Henri IV. It was therefore not, or at least ought not to have been, a slight subject of pride for the town of Blois, that this preference shown it by Gaston d'Orléans, who kept his court in the old States' château.

But it was in the destiny of this great prince to excite but moderately, wherever he went, the attention and admiration of the public. Monsieur had made his peace with this as a habit. That is perhaps what gave him that air of tranquil boredom. Monsieur had been much occupied in his life.

One does not have a dozen of one's best friends beheaded without that causing some trouble. Now, since the advent of M. Mazarin no one had been beheaded, so Monsieur had no longer any occupation, and his spirits felt the effect. The life of the poor prince was therefore very sad. After his little morning hunt along the banks of the Beuvron or in the woods of Cheverny, Monsieur crossed the Loire, went to breakfast at Chambord with or without appetite, and the town of Blois heard no more of its sovereign and master until the next hunt. So much for the boredom extra-muros; as for the boredom within, we shall give the reader an idea of it if he will follow us with the cavalcade and mount to the majestic porch of the States' château. Monsieur rode a small pacing horse, equipped with a wide saddle of red Flemish velvet, with stirrups shaped like half-boots; the horse was of a fawn color; Monsieur's doublet, made of crimson velvet, blended with the cloak of the same shade, with the horse's trappings, and it was only by this reddish ensemble that one could distinguish the prince from his two companions, one dressed in violet, the other in green. The one on the left, dressed in violet, was the equerry; the one on the right, dressed in green, was the master of the hunt. One of the pages carried two gerfalcons on a perch, the other a hunting-horn, into which he blew nonchalantly some twenty paces from the château.

All that surrounded this nonchalant prince did what it had to do with nonchalance.

At this signal, eight guards who were walking in the sun in the square court ran to take up their halberds, and Monsieur made his solemn entry into the château. When he had disappeared beneath the depths of the porch, three or four loafers, who had come up from the mall to the château behind the cavalcade, showing one another the hung birds, dispersed, making in their turn their comments upon what they had just seen; then, when they were gone, the street, the square, and the court remained deserted. Monsieur dismounted without a word, passed into his apartment, where his valet de chambre changed his clothes; and, as Madame had not yet sent to receive his orders for breakfast, Monsieur stretched out upon a lounge and fell asleep as heartily as if it had been eleven o'clock at night.

The eight guards, who understood that their service was finished for the rest of the day, lay down on stone benches in the sun; the grooms disappeared with their horses into the stables, and, save for some merry birds startling one another with shrill chirpings among the tufts of wallflowers, one would have said that all in the château slept like Monseigneur.

Suddenly, in the midst of that sweet silence, rang out a nervous, bursting peal of laughter, which made more than one of the halberdiers sunk in their siesta open an eye. This peal of laughter issued from a casement of the château, at that moment visited by the sun, which engulfed it in one of those great angles that, before noon, the profiles of the chimneys trace upon the courts. The little wrought-iron balcony that jutted beyond this window was furnished with a pot of red wallflowers, another of primroses, and an early rose-tree, whose foliage, of a magnificent green, was dappled with several red specks announcing roses. In the chamber lit by this window, there was seen a square table clad in an old tapestry with large Haarlem flowers; in the middle of this table, a long-necked stoneware flask, into which iris and lily-of-the-valley plunged; at each end of this table, a young girl. The attitude of these two children was singular: one would have taken them for two schoolgirls escaped from the convent. The one, both elbows leaning on the table, a pen in her hand, was tracing characters upon a sheet of fine Holland paper; the other, kneeling on a chair, which allowed her to thrust her head and bust over the back and clear to the middle of the table, was watching her companion write. Whence a thousand cries, a thousand taunts, a thousand laughs, one of which, more ringing than the rest, had frightened the birds of the wallflowers and disturbed the sleep of Monsieur's guards. We are upon portraits, so the last two of this chapter will, we hope, be excused us.

She who was leaning on the chair, that is to say the noisy, laughing one, was a fine girl of nineteen to twenty years, dark of skin, dark of hair, resplendent, through her eyes, which kindled beneath vigorously traced eyebrows, and above all through her teeth, which burst like pearls beneath her lips of bloody coral. Each of her movements seemed the result of a mime's play; she did not live, she bounded.

The other, she who was writing, looked at her turbulent companion with a blue eye, limpid and pure as was the sky that day. Her hair, of an ash-blond, rolled with an exquisite taste, fell in silky clusters upon her pearly cheeks; she passed over the paper a fine hand, but whose thinness betrayed her extreme youth. At each peal of laughter from her friend, she raised, as if vexed, her white shoulders of a poetic and suave shape, but to which was lacking that luxuriance of vigor and modeling one could have wished to see in her arms and hands.

— Montalais! Montalais! said she at last in a voice sweet and caressing as a song, you laugh too loud, you laugh like a man; not only will you be noticed by the gentlemen guards, but you will not hear Madame's bell, when Madame calls.

The young girl called Montalais, ceasing neither to laugh nor to gesticulate at this admonition, answered:

— Louise, you do not say what you think, my dear; you know that the gentlemen guards, as you call them, begin their nap, and that cannon would not wake them; you know that Madame's bell is heard from the bridge of Blois, and that consequently I shall hear it when my service calls me to Madame. What annoys you is that I laugh when you write; what you fear is that Mme de Saint-Remy, your mother, may come up here, as she sometimes does when we laugh too much; that she may surprise us, and that she may see this enormous sheet of paper upon which, for a quarter of an hour, you have yet traced only these words: Monsieur Raoul. Now you are right, dear Louise, because, after those words, Monsieur Raoul, one may put so many others, so significant and so incendiary, that Mme de Saint-Remy, your dear mother, would have the right to breathe fire and flame. Eh! isn't that so, say?

And Montalais redoubled her laughs and turbulent provocations. The blonde young girl grew quite vexed; she tore the leaf upon which, indeed, those words, Monsieur Raoul, were written in a fine hand, and, crumpling the paper in her trembling fingers, she threw it out the window.

— There! there! said Mlle de Montalais, there is our little lamb, our Infant Jesus, our dove who grows angry!... Have no fear, Louise; Mme de Saint-Remy will not come, and if she did come, you know I have a fine ear.

Besides, what could be more permissible than to write to an old friend dating from twelve years back, especially when one begins the letter with these words: Monsieur Raoul?

— Very well, I shall not write to him, said the young girl.

— Ah! in truth, there is Montalais well punished! cried the brown taunting girl, still laughing. Come, come, another sheet of paper, and let us finish our courier quickly. Good! there is the bell ringing now! Ah! faith, too bad! Madame will wait, or will do without her first lady-in-waiting this morning!

A bell was indeed ringing; it announced that Madame had finished her toilet and was awaiting Monsieur, who gave her his hand in the salon to pass to the refectory. This formality accomplished with great ceremony, the two spouses breakfasted and separated until dinner, invariably fixed at two o'clock.

The sound of the bell caused to open, in the offices situated to the left of the court, a door through which filed two masters of the household, followed by eight kitchen boys who carried a litter laden with dishes covered with silver bells.

One of these masters of the household, he who appeared the first in rank, silently touched with his wand one of the guards who snored upon a bench; he even went so far in kindness as to put into the hands of this man, drunk with sleep, his halberd standing against the wall near him; after which, the soldier, asking no questions, escorted to the refectory the meat of Monsieur, preceded by a page and the two masters of the household.

Wherever the meat passed, the sentinels presented arms.

Mlle de Montalais and her companion had followed from their window the detail of this ceremonial, to which yet they must have been accustomed. They, however, looked on with such curiosity only to be sure of not being disturbed. So, once the kitchen boys, guards, pages, and masters of the household had passed, they returned to their table, and the sun, which, in the framing of the window, had for an instant lit these two charming faces, lit no longer aught but the wallflowers, the primroses, and the rose-tree.

— Bah! said Montalais, resuming her place, Madame will breakfast well enough without me.

— Oh! Montalais, you will be punished, answered the other young girl, sitting down very gently at hers.

— Punished! ah! yes, that is to say deprived of a walk; that is all I ask, to be punished! To go out in that great coach, perched on a door; to turn left, veer right by rutted roads where one advances a league in two hours; then to come straight back to the wing of the château where is the window of Marie de Médicis, so that Madame never fails to say: "Would one believe it is by there the queen Marie escaped... Forty-seven feet high!... The mother of two princes and three princesses!" If that is a diversion, Louise, I ask to be punished every day, especially when my punishment is to remain with you and to write letters as interesting as those we are writing.

— Montalais! Montalais! one has duties to fulfill.

— You speak of it at your ease, my heart, you whom they leave free in the midst of this court. You are the only one who reap its advantages without its burdens, you more lady-in-waiting to Madame than I myself, because Madame makes her affections ricochet from your father-in-law to you; so that you enter this sad house like the birds into this tower, breathing the air, pecking the flowers, nibbling the seeds, without having the least service to do, nor the least boredom to bear. It is you who speak to me of duties to fulfill! In truth, my fine lazy one, what are your duties, if not to write to that handsome Raoul? Still we see that you do not write to him, so that you too, it seems to me, are a little neglectful of your duties.

Louise assumed her serious air, rested her chin upon her hand, and in a tone full of candor:

— Reproach me then for my comfort, said she. Will you have the heart? You have a future, you; you are of the court; the king, if he marries, will call Monsieur near him; you will see splendid feasts, you will see the king, who is said to be so handsome, so charming.

— And moreover I shall see Raoul, who is near M. the prince, added Montalais maliciously.

— Poor Raoul! sighed Louise.

— There is the moment to write to him, dear beauty; come, let us begin again that famous Monsieur Raoul, which shone at the head of the torn leaf.

Then she held out the pen to her, and, with a charming smile, encouraged her hand, which quickly traced the designated words.

— Now? asked the younger of the two young girls.

— Now, write what you think, Louise, answered Montalais.

— Are you quite sure that I think something?

— You think of someone, which comes to the same, or rather which is much worse.

— You believe so, Montalais?

— Louise, Louise, your blue eyes are deep as the sea I saw at Boulogne last year. No, I mistake, the sea is treacherous, your eyes are deep as the azure here above, look, above our heads.

— Well! since you read so well in my eyes, tell me what I think, Montalais.

— First, you do not think Monsieur Raoul; you think My dear Raoul.

— Oh! — Do not blush for so little. My dear Raoul, say we, you beseech me to write to you in Paris, where the service of M. the prince detains you. As you must be bored there to seek distractions in the memory of a provincial girl...

Louise rose suddenly.

— No, Montalais, said she, smiling, no, I do not think a word of that. See, this is what I think.

And she boldly took the pen and traced in a firm hand the following words:

"I should have been most unhappy had your instances to obtain a remembrance of me been less eager. All here speaks to me of our first years, so swiftly spent, so softly fled, that never shall others replace their charm in the heart."

Montalais, who watched the pen run, and who read backward as her friend wrote, interrupted her with a clapping of hands.

— That's the way! said she, there is frankness, there is heart, there is style! Show those Parisians, my dear, that Blois is the town of fair speech.

— He knows that for me, answered the young girl, Blois has been paradise.

— That is what I meant, and you speak like an angel.

— I am finishing, Montalais.

And the young girl continued indeed:

"You think of me, you say, Monsieur Raoul; I thank you for it; but this cannot surprise me, who know how many times our hearts have beaten one near the other."

— Oh! oh! said Montalais, take care, my lamb, there you scatter your wool, and there are wolves yonder.

Louise was about to answer, when the gallop of a horse rang under the porch of the château.

— What is that? said Montalais, approaching the window. A fine cavalier, faith!

— Oh! Raoul! cried Louise, who had made the same movement as her friend, and who, become all pale, fell palpitating near her unfinished letter.

— There is a clever lover, upon my word, cried Montalais, and who arrives most opportunely!

— Withdraw, withdraw, I beg you! murmured Louise.

— Bah! he does not know me; let me see what he comes to do here.

Chapter II — The Messenger

Mlle de Montalais was right, the young cavalier was good to look upon.

He was a young man of four-and-twenty to five-and-twenty years, tall, slim, wearing with grace upon his shoulders the charming military costume of the epoch. His funnel-topped boots enclosed a foot that Mlle de Montalais would not have disowned had she travestied herself as a man. With one of his fine and nervous hands he stopped his horse in the middle of the court, and with the other raised the hat with long plumes that shadowed his face, at once grave and naive.

The guards, at the noise of the horse, awoke and were quickly on their feet.

The young man let one of them approach his saddle-bow, and, inclining toward him, in a clear and precise voice, which was perfectly heard at the window where the two young girls hid:

— A messenger for His Royal Highness, said he.

— Ah! ah! cried the guard; officer, a messenger!

But this brave soldier knew well that no officer would appear, seeing that the only one who could have appeared remained at the back of the château, in a small apartment overlooking the gardens.

So he hastened to add:

— My gentleman, the officer is on his rounds, but in his absence we shall warn M. de Saint-Remy, the master of the household.

— M. de Saint-Remy! repeated the cavalier, blushing.

— You know him?

— But yes... Warn him, I pray you, so that my visit may be announced as soon as possible to His Highness.

— It seems it is pressing, said the guard, as if speaking to himself, but in the hope of obtaining a reply.

The messenger made an affirmative sign with his head.

— In that case, resumed the guard, I shall go myself to find the master of the household.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”