Part 18

— That is why I am bringing him back to you, dear friend. He is mad, and proclaims his madness to everyone.

— What is to be done, then?

— It is very simple: do not allow him to communicate with anyone. You understand that, when his madness reached the ears of the king, who had pitied his misfortune and found himself repaid for his kindness with black ingratitude, the king was furious. So that, now, mark this well, dear Monsieur de Baisemeaux, for this concerns you; so that, now, there is a sentence of death against those who should let him communicate with anyone other than myself, or the king himself. Do you hear, Baisemeaux, a sentence of death!

— Do I hear, zounds!

— And now, go down, and take this poor devil back to his cell, unless you would prefer to have him brought up here.

— What would be the point?

— Yes, better to lock him up at once, wouldn't you say?

— Pardieu!

— Well then, let us go.

Baisemeaux had the drum beaten and the bell rung, warning everyone to withdraw, so as to avoid any encounter with a mysterious prisoner. Then, when the passages were clear, he went to fetch the prisoner from the carriage, whom Porthos, faithful to his orders, still held with his musket at his throat.

— Ah! there you are, wretch! cried Baisemeaux on catching sight of the king. That's good! that's good!

And straightway, helping the king down from the coach, he led him, still accompanied by Porthos, who had not removed his mask, and by Aramis, who had put his own back on, into the second Bertaudière, and opened for him the door of the chamber where Philippe had groaned for six years.

The king entered the cell without uttering a word. He was pale and wild-eyed.

Baisemeaux closed the door upon him, turned the key twice himself in the lock, and, returning to Aramis:

— It is, faith, true! he said to him in a low voice, that he resembles the king; yet less so than you claim.

— So, said Aramis, you would not have been taken in by the substitution, you?

— Ah! hardly!

— You are a precious man, my dear Baisemeaux, said Aramis. Now, set Seldon at liberty.

— That is right, I had forgotten... I will give the order.

— Bah! tomorrow; you have time.

— Tomorrow? No, no, this instant. God keep me from waiting a second longer!

— Then go about your business; I will go about mine. But this is understood, is it not.

— What is understood?

— That no one shall enter the prisoner's room except with an order from the king, an order I shall bring myself?

— Agreed. Farewell! my lord.

Aramis returned to his companion.

— Come, come, friend Porthos, to Vaux! and quickly!

— One is light when one has faithfully served one's king, and, in serving him, saved one's country, said Porthos. The horses will have nothing to drag. Let us depart.

And the carriage, relieved of a prisoner who might indeed have seemed heavy enough to Aramis, crossed the drawbridge of the Bastille, which rose again behind him.

Chapter CCXXIV — A Night at the Bastille

Suffering in this life is proportionate to a man's strength. We do not mean to say that God always measures to the creature's strength the anguish He makes him endure: that would not be accurate, since God permits death, which is sometimes the only refuge of souls too sharply pressed in the body. Suffering is proportionate to strength, that is to say that the weak man suffers more, at equal ill, than the strong. Now, of what does human strength consist? Is it not chiefly of exercise, of habit, of experience? This is something we shall not even take the trouble to demonstrate; it is an axiom moral as well as physical.

When the young king, stupefied and broken, saw himself conducted to a chamber in the Bastille, he first imagined that death is like a sleep, that it has its dreams, that the bed had sunk into the floor at Vaux, that death had thereupon followed, and that, pursuing his dream, Louis XIV, deceased, was dreaming one of those horrors, impossible to life, called the dethronement, the incarceration, and the insult of a king once all-powerful.

To be present, a palpable ghost, at his own grievous passion; to swim in an incomprehensible mystery between resemblance and reality; to see all, to hear all, without confounding a single one of those details of the agony—was not that, the king said to himself, a torment the more frightful in that it might be eternal?

— Is this what they call eternity, hell? murmured Louis XIV at the moment when the door closed upon him, pushed shut by Baisemeaux himself.

He did not even look about him, and, in that chamber, leaning against some wall, he let himself be borne away by the terrible supposition of his own death, closing his eyes to avoid seeing something yet worse.

— How did I die? he said, half senseless. Would they not have had this bed lowered by some trick? But no, no memory of any bruise, of any shock... Would they rather have poisoned me in the food, or with wax fumes, as they did Jeanne d'Albret, my great-grandmother?

Suddenly, the cold of that chamber fell like a mantle upon Louis's shoulders.

— I have seen, he said, my father laid out dead upon his bed in his royal habit. That pale face, so calm and so sunken; those hands so skilled, grown insensible; those stiffened legs; none of that announced a sleep peopled with dreams. And yet what dreams God must have sent to that dead man!... to that dead man whom so many others had preceded, hurled by him into eternal death!... No, that king was still the king. He still throned upon that funereal bed, as upon the velvet chair. He had abdicted nothing of his majesty. God, who had not punished him, cannot punish me, who have done nothing.

A strange noise drew the young man's attention. He looked and saw upon the chimney piece, above an enormous Christ roughly painted in fresco, a rat of monstrous size, busy gnawing a crust of hard bread, while fixing upon the new lodger of the place an intelligent and curious gaze.

The king was afraid; he felt disgust; he recoiled toward the door with a great cry. And, as if that cry, escaped from his breast, were needed for him to recognize himself, Louis understood that he was alive, rational, and possessed of his natural conscience.

— Prisoner! he cried, I, I, prisoner!

He searched with his eyes for a bell to call.

— There are no bells at the Bastille, he said, and it is in the Bastille that I am locked up. Now, how was I made prisoner? It is a conspiracy of M. Fouquet, necessarily. I was drawn to Vaux into a trap. M. Fouquet cannot be alone in this affair. His agent... that voice... it was M. d'Herblay, I recognized him. Colbert was right. But what does Fouquet want with me? Will he reign in my place? Impossible! Who knows?... thought the king, grown gloomy. My brother the Duke of Orléans is perhaps doing against me what my uncle wished to do all his life against my father. But the queen? but my mother? but La Vallière? oh! La Vallière! she would be given over to Madame. Dear child! yes, that is it, they will have shut her up as I am myself. We are eternally separated!

And, at that single idea of separation, the lover burst into sighs, sobs, and cries.

— There is a governor here, resumed the king in fury. I will speak to him. Let us call.

He called. No voice answered his.

He took the chair and used it to strike upon the massive oak door. The wood rang upon the wood, and drew several lugubrious echoes from the depths of the stair; but, of creature that answered, not one.

It was for the king a fresh proof of the little esteem in which he was held at the Bastille. Then, after the first anger, having noticed a grated window through which passed a golden light that must be the luminous dawn, Louis began to cry out, gently at first, then with force. Nothing was answered him.

Twenty other attempts, made one after another, obtained no greater success.

The blood began to rebel and rose to the prince's head. That nature, accustomed to command, shuddered before a disobedience. Little by little the anger grew. The prisoner broke his chair, too heavy for his hands, and used it as a battering ram to strike the door. He struck so hard and so often that sweat began to flow from his brow. The noise became immense and continuous. A few stifled cries answered it here and there.

This noise produced a strange effect upon the king. He stopped to listen. They were the voices of the prisoners, once his victims, now his companions. These voices rose like vapors through thick ceilings, opaque walls. They accused anew the author of that noise, as, no doubt, the sighs and tears accused in a low voice the author of their captivity. Having taken liberty from so many people, the king had come among them to take away their sleep.

This idea nearly drove him mad. It doubled his strength, or rather his will, thirsting to obtain some information or conclusion. The chair's staff resumed its office. At the end of an hour, Louis heard something in the corridor, behind his door, and a violent blow, answered in the door itself, made his own cease.

— I say! are you mad? said a rough and coarse voice. What ails you this morning?

"This morning?" thought the king, surprised.

Then, politely:

— Sir, said he, are you the governor of the Bastille?

— My good fellow, your brain is addled, replied the voice, but that is no reason to make such a clamor. Hold your tongue, zounds!

— Are you the governor? asked the king again.

A door closed. The turnkey had just departed without even deigning to reply a word.

When the king had certainty of that departure, his fury knew no bounds. Agile as a tiger, he sprang from the table to the window, whose bars he shook. He broke a pane whose fragments fell with a thousand harmonious tinklings into the courts. He called, growing hoarse: "The governor! the governor!" This fit lasted an hour, which was a period of burning fever.

His hair in disorder and plastered to his brow, his clothes torn, whitened, his linen in rags, the king stopped only at the end of all his strength, and, only then, he understood the pitiless thickness of those walls, the impenetrability of that cement, invincible to any other attempt than that of time, having for tool despair.

He leaned his brow against the door, and let his heart calm itself by degrees: one beat more would have made it burst.

— He will come, he said, a moment when they bring me the food given to all prisoners. I shall then see someone, I shall speak, I shall be answered.

And the king searched in his memory at what hour the first meal of the prisoners took place in the Bastille. He was ignorant even of that detail. It was a dull and cruel stab, that remorse of having lived twenty-five years, king and happy, without thinking of all that a wretched man unjustly deprived of his liberty suffers. The king blushed with shame. He felt that God, in permitting this terrible humiliation, did but render to a man the torture inflicted by that man upon so many others.

Nothing could be more efficacious to bring back to religion that soul stricken by the sense of pains. But Louis dared not even kneel to pray to God, to ask Him for the end of that trial.

— God does well, said he, God is right. It would be cowardly in me to ask of God what I have often refused to my fellow men.

He was at that point in his reflections, that is to say in his agony, when the same noise was heard behind his door, followed this time by the creaking of keys and the noise of bolts playing in their staples.

The king bounded forward to draw near him who was about to enter, but suddenly, thinking that it was a movement unworthy of a king, he stopped, assumed a noble and calm pose, which was easy for him, and waited, his back turned to the window, to hide a little of his agitation from the eyes of the new arrival.

It was only a key-porter laden with a basket full of provisions.

The king regarded this man with uneasiness: he waited for him to speak.

— Ah! said the latter, you have broken your chair, as I said you would. But you must have gone clean mad!

— Sir, said the king, take heed of all you are about to say: a very grave interest of yours is at stake.

The turnkey set his basket upon the table, and, looking at his interlocutor:

— Eh? said he with surprise.

— Have the governor brought up to me, added the king nobly.

— Come now, my child, said the turnkey, you have always been well behaved; but madness makes one wicked, and we are willing to warn you: you have broken your chair and made a noise; that is an offense punished by the dungeon. Promise me not to begin again, and I shall not speak of it to the governor.

— I wish to see the governor, replied the king without flinching.

— He will have you put in the dungeon, take care.

— I wish it! do you hear?

— Ah! there is your eye growing wild. Good! I withdraw your knife from you.

And the turnkey did as he said, closed the door and departed, leaving the king more astonished, more unhappy, more alone than ever.

In vain did he renew the play of the chair-staff, in vain did he send the plates and dishes flying through the window: nothing answered him any more.

Two hours later, it was no longer a king, a gentleman, a man, a brain: it was a madman tearing his nails upon the doors, trying to unpave the chamber, and uttering cries so frightful that the old Bastille seemed to tremble even to its roots at having dared revolt against its master.

As for the governor, he had not even stirred. The key-porter and the sentinels had made their report, but to what purpose? Were not madmen a common thing in the fortress, and were not the walls stronger than the madmen?

M. de Baisemeaux, imbued with all that Aramis had told him, and perfectly regular in his order from the king, asked but one thing, which was that the madman Marchiali might be mad enough to hang himself a little from his canopy or from one of his bars.

Indeed, that prisoner brought in little, and was becoming more troublesome than reasonable. Those complications of Seldon and Marchiali, those complications of deliverance and reincarceration, those complications of resemblance, would have found a very convenient ending. Baisemeaux even thought he had noticed that this would not displease M. d'Herblay overmuch.

— And then, really, said Baisemeaux to his major, an ordinary prisoner is already unhappy enough at being a prisoner; he suffers enough for one to be able charitably to wish him death. All the more when that prisoner has gone mad, and may bite and make noise in the Bastille; then, faith! it is no longer a charitable wish to make, to wish him death; it would be a good deed to accomplish, to suppress him quite gently.

And the good governor made thereupon his second breakfast.

Chapter CCXXV — The Shadow of M. Fouquet

D'Artagnan, still heavy with the interview he had just had with the king, asked himself if he were quite in his right mind; if the scene were indeed passing at Vaux; if he, d'Artagnan, were indeed captain of the musketeers, and M. Fouquet the proprietor of the château in which Louis XIV had just received hospitality. These reflections were not those of a drunken man. Yet there had been good banqueting at Vaux. The wines of the Surintendant had nevertheless done honor to the feast. But the Gascon was a man of cool blood: he knew, on touching his steel sword, to take morally the cold of that steel for great occasions.

— Come, said he, leaving the royal apartment, here I am thrown, all historically, into the destinies of the king and into those of the minister; it shall be written that M. d'Artagnan, cadet of Gascony, laid his hand on the collar of M. Nicolas Fouquet, surintendant of the finances of France. My descendants, if I have any, will make a renown for themselves from that arrest, as the gentlemen of Luynes made one from the cast-offs of that poor Marshal d'Ancre. It is a matter of executing cleanly the wishes of the king. Any man will know well how to say to M. Fouquet: "Your sword, sir!" But not everyone will know how to guard M. Fouquet without making anyone cry out. How then to operate, so that M. the Surintendant passes from extreme favor to last disgrace, so that he sees Vaux changed into a cell, so that, after tasting the incense of Ahasuerus, he touches the gibbet of Haman, that is to say of Enguerrand de Marigny?

Here, d'Artagnan's brow darkened pitiably. The musketeer had scruples. To deliver thus to death—for certainly Louis XIV hated M. Fouquet—to deliver, we say, to death him whom one had just dubbed a gentleman, was a true case of conscience.

— It seems to me, said d'Artagnan to himself, that, if I am not a clown, I shall let M. Fouquet know the king's thought of him. But, if I betray my master's secret, I am a perfidious traitor, a crime quite provided for by the military laws, insomuch that I have seen twenty times, in the wars, wretches hanged who had done in little what my scruple advises me to do in great. No, I think a man of wit must extricate himself from this with much more address. And now, do we admit that I have wit? That is debatable, having made for forty years such a consumption of it that, if there remains enough for a pistole, it will be great good fortune.

D'Artagnan took his head in his hands, plucked, willing or not, a few hairs from his mustache, and added:

— For what cause would M. Fouquet be disgraced? For three causes: the first, because he is not loved by M. Colbert; the second, because he wished to love Mlle de La Vallière; the third, because the king loves M. Colbert and Mlle de La Vallière. He is a lost man! But shall I set my foot upon his head, I, a man, when he succumbs beneath intrigues of women and clerks? Fie! If he is dangerous, I will strike him down; if he is but persecuted, we shall see! I have come to such a point that neither king nor man shall prevail over my opinion. Athos, were he here, would do as I do. Thus, instead of going brutally to M. Fouquet, of apprehending him in person and coffining him up, I shall try to conduct myself as a man of good manners. People will talk of it, agreed; but they will talk well of it.

And d'Artagnan, with a particular gesture raising his baldric upon his shoulder, went straight to M. Fouquet's, who, after taking leave of the ladies, was preparing to sleep tranquilly upon the triumphs of the day.

The air was still perfumed or infected, as one pleases, with the smell of the fireworks. The candles cast their dying lights, the flowers fell detached from the garlands, the clusters of dancers and courtiers unraveled in the salons.

In the center of his friends, who complimented him and received his compliments, the Surintendant half-closed his weary eyes. He aspired to rest, he fell upon the litter of laurels amassed for so many days. One would have said he bowed his head beneath the weight of new debts contracted to do honor to that feast.

M. Fouquet had just withdrawn into his chamber, smiling and more than half dead. He no longer listened, he no longer saw; his bed attracted him, fascinated him. The god Morpheus, lord of the dome, painted by Le Brun, had extended his power to the neighboring rooms, and launched his most efficacious poppies at the master of the house.

M. Fouquet, almost alone, was already in the hands of his valet de chambre, when M. d'Artagnan appeared upon the threshold of his apartment.

D'Artagnan had never been able to vulgarize himself at Court: in vain was he seen everywhere and always—he produced his effect always and everywhere. It is the privilege of certain natures, which resemble in that the lightning or the thunder. Everyone knows them, but their apparition astonishes, and, when one feels them, the last impression is always that which one believes to have been the strongest.

— Why, M. d'Artagnan? said M. Fouquet, whose right sleeve was already separated from the body.

— At your service, replied the musketeer.

— Come in, dear M. d'Artagnan.

— Thank you!

— Have you come to make me some criticism of the feast? You are an ingenious spirit.

— Oh! no.

— Is your service perhaps hindered?

— Not at all.

— You are badly lodged, perhaps?

— Marvelously.

— Well! I thank you for being so amiable, and it is I who declare myself your obliged for all the flattering things you say to me.

These words signified beyond contest: "My dear d'Artagnan, go to bed, since you have a bed, and let me do the same."

D'Artagnan did not appear to have understood.

— You are already going to bed? said he to the Surintendant.

— Yes. Have you something to communicate to me?

— Nothing, sir, nothing. You are going to bed here, then?

— As you see.

— Sir, you gave a very fine feast to the king.

— You think so?

— Oh! superb.

— The king is content?

— Enchanted.

— Would he have prayed you to make me acquainted with it?

— He would not choose so little worthy a messenger, my lord.

— You do yourself wrong, M. d'Artagnan.

— Is this your bed, this?

— Yes. Why that question? Are you not satisfied with yours?

— May I speak to you frankly?

— Certainly.

— Well! no.

Fouquet started.

— M. d'Artagnan, said he, take my chamber.

— Deprive you of it, my lord? Never!

— What to do, then?

— Permit me to share it with you.

M. Fouquet looked fixedly at the musketeer.

— Ah! ah! said he, you come from the king's?

— But yes, my lord.

— And the king would wish to see you sleep in my chamber?

— My lord...

— Very well, M. d'Artagnan, very well. You are master here. Go, sir.

— I assure you, my lord, that I do not wish to abuse...

M. Fouquet, addressing his valet de chambre:

— Leave us, said he.

The valet went out.

— You have something to say to me, sir? said he to d'Artagnan.

— I?

— A man of your wit does not come to chat with a man of mine, at this hour, without grave motives?

— Do not question me.

— On the contrary, what do you want of me?

— Nothing but your company.

— Let us go to the garden, said the Surintendant suddenly, to the park?

— No, replied the musketeer briskly, no.

— Why?

— The coolness...

— Come, confess that you are arresting me, said the Surintendant to the captain.

— Never! said the latter.

— You are watching over me, then?

— By honor, yes, my lord.

— By honor?... That is another thing! Ah! I am arrested in my own house?

— Do not say that!

— I shall cry it, on the contrary!

— If you cry it, I shall be forced to enjoin you to silence.

— Good! violence in my own house? Ah! that is very good!

— We do not understand each other at all. See, there is a chessboard: let us play, if you please, my lord.

— M. d'Artagnan, am I then in disgrace?

— Not at all, but...

— But I am forbidden to withdraw from your gaze?

“Stories of the world, in your language.”