Part 15

The two men who had kicked the wrestlers apart were assailed with insults by the sailors, who had just been reconciled.

One of them, half drunk with rage and wholly with beer, came in a threatening tone to demand of the smaller of these two wise men by what right he had touched with his foot creatures of the good Lord who were not dogs. And as he spoke this challenge, he placed, to make it more direct, his big fist under the nose of Monsieur d'Artagnan's recruit.

The man turned pale, without one being able to tell whether he paled from fear or from anger; seeing which, the sailor concluded it was from fear, and raised his fist with the very manifest intention of letting it fall upon the stranger's head.

But without the threatened man having been seen to move, he dealt the sailor such a rough shove in the stomach that the latter rolled to the far end of the room with frightful cries. At the same instant, rallied by esprit de corps, all the defeated man's comrades fell upon the victor.

The latter, with the same coolness he had already shown, without committing the imprudence of laying hand to his weapons, seized a beer pot with a pewter lid and knocked out two or three assailants; then, as he was about to succumb beneath their numbers, the seven other silent ones from within, who had not stirred, understood that their cause was at stake and rushed to his aid.

At the same time the two indifferent men at the door turned about with a frown that indicated their very pronounced intention of taking the enemy in the rear if the enemy did not cease his aggression.

The host, his waiters, and two night guards who were passing and who, out of curiosity, penetrated too far into the room were caught up in the brawl and beaten with blows.

The Parisians struck like Cyclopes, with a unity and tactics delightful to behold; at length, forced to retreat before numbers, they took up their entrenchment on the other side of the great table, which they lifted together, four of them, while the other two armed themselves each with a trestle, so that, using it as a gigantic battering ram, they overturned at one blow eight sailors upon whose heads they had made their monstrous catapult play.

The floor was thus strewn with wounded men and the room full of cries and dust, when d'Artagnan, satisfied with the trial, advanced sword in hand, and, striking with the pommel every upright head he met, he gave a vigorous holà! which instantly put an end to the struggle. There was a great recoiling from the center to the circumference, so that d'Artagnan found himself isolated and dominant.

"What is this?" he then asked the assembly, with the majestic tone of Neptune pronouncing his Hic ego...

At that very instant and at the first accent of that voice, to continue the Virgilian metaphor, Monsieur d'Artagnan's recruits, each severally recognizing their sovereign lord, sheathed at once both their angers, and their plank-beatings, and their trestle-blows. For their part, the sailors, seeing this bare long sword, this martial air, and this nimble arm coming to the aid of their enemies in the person of a man who seemed accustomed to command, for their part, the sailors gathered up their wounded and their pitchers. The Parisians wiped their foreheads and drew their reverence to the chief.

D'Artagnan was overwhelmed with congratulations by the host of the Grand-Monarque.

He received them as a man who knows that nothing too good is offered him, then declared that, while awaiting supper, he was going to walk upon the port. Thereupon each of the enlisted men, who understood the call, took his hat, brushed his coat, and followed d'Artagnan. But d'Artagnan, while sauntering, while examining each thing, took good care not to stop; he directed his steps toward the dune, and the ten men, astonished to find themselves thus on one another's track, uneasy at seeing to their right, to their left, and behind them companions they had not counted on, followed him, casting furious glances at one another.

It was only in the hollow of the deepest dune that d'Artagnan, smiling to see them outdistanced, turned back toward them, and, making them a peaceful sign with his hand:

"Ho there, there! gentlemen," said he, "let us not devour one another; you are made to live together, to understand one another in all points, and not to devour one another."

Then all hesitation ceased; the men breathed as if drawn from a coffin, and complaisantly examined one another. After this examination, they turned their eyes upon their chief, who, long acquainted with the great art of speaking to men of that temper, improvised for them the following little speech, accentuated with a thoroughly Gascon energy.

"Gentlemen, you all know who I am. I have engaged you, knowing you for brave men and wishing to associate you in a glorious expedition. Picture to yourselves that, in working with me, you work for the king. I warn you only that if you let anything of this supposition appear, I shall see myself forced to break your heads immediately, in the manner most convenient to me. You are not ignorant, gentlemen, that affairs of state are like a deadly poison; so long as this poison is in its box and the box is shut, it does no harm; out of the box, it kills. Now, draw near to me, and you are about to learn of this secret as much as I may tell you."

All drew near with a movement of curiosity.

"Draw near," continued d'Artagnan, "and may the bird that passes above our heads, may the rabbit that plays in the dunes, may the fish that leaps from the water not be able to hear us. It is a question of knowing and reporting to the Superintendent of Finances how much damage English smuggling does to French merchants. I shall enter everywhere and see everything. We are poor Picard fishermen thrown upon the coast by a squall. It goes without saying that we shall sell fish no more and no less than true fishermen.

"Only, one might guess who we are and trouble us; it is therefore urgent that we be in a state to defend ourselves. That is why I have chosen you as men of wit and courage. We shall lead a good life and run no great danger, seeing that we have behind us a powerful protector, thanks to whom no difficulty is possible. One thing alone vexes me, but I hope that after a short explanation you will get me out of my perplexity. This thing that vexes me is to take with me a crew of stupid fishermen, which crew will enormously encumber us, whereas if, by chance, there were among you men who had seen the sea..."

"Oh! never mind that!" said one of d'Artagnan's recruits; "I was prisoner of the pirates of Tunis for three years, and I know the maneuvering like an admiral."

"Do you see," said d'Artagnan, "the admirable thing that chance is!"

D'Artagnan pronounced these words with an indefinable accent of feigned good-nature; for d'Artagnan knew perfectly well that this victim of the pirates was a former corsair, and he had engaged him knowingly. But d'Artagnan never said more than he needed to say, to leave people in doubt. He was therefore content with the explanation, and accepted the effect without seeming to concern himself with the cause.

"And I," said a second, "I have, by chance, an uncle who directs the works of the port of La Rochelle. As a child I played upon the boats; I therefore know how to handle oar and sail, defying the first Ponant sailor that comes."

That one lied no more than the other; he had rowed six years upon His Majesty's galleys, at La Ciotat.

Two others were more frank; they simply avowed that they had served aboard a vessel as penitence soldiers; they were not ashamed of it. D'Artagnan thus found himself chief of ten men of war and four sailors, having at once a land and sea force, which would have carried Planchet's pride to the height, had Planchet known this detail. Nothing remained but the general order, and d'Artagnan gave it precisely. He enjoined his men to hold themselves ready to set out for The Hague, some following the coast that leads to Breskens, others the road that leads to Antwerp.

The rendezvous was given, calculating each day's march, at fifteen days thence, upon the principal square of The Hague. D'Artagnan recommended his men to pair themselves as they should see fit, by sympathy, two by two. He himself chose from among the least hangdog faces two guards he had formerly known, and whose only faults were being gamblers and drunkards. These men had not lost all idea of civilization, and, under clean clothes, their hearts would have begun to beat again. D'Artagnan, so as not to give jealousy to the others, sent the others on ahead. He kept his two preferred ones, dressed them in his own rags, and set out with them.

It was to those, whom he seemed to honor with an absolute confidence, that d'Artagnan made a false confidence destined to guarantee the success of the expedition. He avowed to them that it was a question, not of seeing how much damage English smuggling could do to French commerce, but on the contrary how much damage French smuggling could do to English commerce. These men seemed convinced; they were effectively so.

D'Artagnan was well sure that at the first debauch, when they should be dead-drunk, one of the two would divulge this capital secret to the whole band. His game seemed to him infallible.

Fifteen days after what we have just seen take place at Calais, the whole troop found itself assembled at The Hague.

Then d'Artagnan perceived that all his men, with a remarkable intelligence, had already disguised themselves as sailors more or less maltreated by the sea. D'Artagnan let them sleep in a hovel in Newkerkestreet, and lodged himself, cleanly, upon the great canal.

He learned that the King of England had returned near his ally William II of Nassau, Stadtholder of Holland. He learned further that the refusal of King Louis XIV had somewhat chilled the protection that had been accorded him up to then, and that in consequence he had gone to confine himself in a little house in the village of Scheveningen, situated in the dunes, on the seashore, at a small league from The Hague.

There, it was said, the unhappy banished man consoled himself for his exile by looking, with that melancholy peculiar to the princes of his race, upon this immense northern sea, which separated him from his England, as it had formerly separated Mary Stuart from France. There, behind a few trees of the beautiful wood of Scheveningen, upon the fine sand where grow the golden heaths of the dune, Charles II vegetated like them, more unhappy than they, for he lived the life of thought, and he hoped and despaired by turns. D'Artagnan went once as far as Scheveningen, so as to be quite sure of what was reported of the prince. He saw indeed Charles II, pensive and alone, issue by a little door opening upon the wood, and, walking upon the shore, at the setting sun, without even attracting the attention of the fishermen who, returning in the evening, drew, like the ancient sailors of the Archipelago, their barks upon the sand of the strand.

D'Artagnan recognized the king. He saw him fix his dark gaze upon the immense expanse of waters, and absorb upon his pale face the red rays of the sun already notched by the black line of the horizon. Then Charles II re-entered the isolated house, still alone, still slow and sad, amusing himself with making cry beneath his steps the friable and shifting sand. That very evening, d'Artagnan hired for a thousand livres a fisherman's boat that was worth four thousand. He gave those thousand livres in cash, and deposited the other three thousand with the burgomaster. After which he embarked, unseen and during the dark night, the six men who formed his land army; and, at the rising tide, at three in the morning, he won the open sea, maneuvering ostentatiously with the four others and relying upon the science of his galley-slave, as he would have done upon that of the first pilot of the port.

Chapter XXIII — Where the author is forced, much against his will, to make a little history

While kings and men thus occupied themselves with England, which governed itself alone, and which, be it said to its praise, had never been so ill governed, a man upon whom God had fixed his gaze and laid his finger, a man predestined to write his name in shining letters in the book of history, pursued in the face of the world a work full of mystery and boldness. He went, and none knew where he wished to go, although not only England, but France, but Europe, watched him walk with a firm step and head high. All that was known of this man, we are going to tell.

Monck had just declared himself for the liberty of the Rump Parliament, or, if one prefers, the Croupion Parliament, as it was called, that Parliament which General Lambert, imitating Cromwell, whose lieutenant he had been, had just so strictly blocked, to make it do his will, that no member, during the whole blockade, had been able to get out, and that only one, Peter Wentwort, had been able to get in.

Lambert and Monck, all was summed up in these two men, the first representing military despotism, the second representing pure republicanism. These two men were the only two political representatives of that revolution in which Charles I had first lost his crown and then his head. Lambert, besides, dissembled not his views; he sought to establish a wholly military government and to make himself the chief of that government.

Monck, a rigid republican, said some, wished to maintain the Rump Parliament, that visible, though degenerate, representation of the republic. Monck, a crafty ambitious man, said others, simply wished to make of this Parliament, which he seemed to protect, a solid step for mounting to the throne that Cromwell had made vacant, but upon which he had not dared to sit.

Thus Lambert, in persecuting the Parliament, Monck in declaring himself for it, had mutually declared themselves enemies one of the other. Also Monck and Lambert had at first thought each to make himself an army: Monck in Scotland, where were the Presbyterians and the royalists, that is to say the malcontents; Lambert at London, where was found, as always, the strongest opposition against the power it had before its eyes.

Monck had pacified Scotland; he had there formed an army and made of it an asylum: the one guarded the other; Monck knew that the day was not yet come, the day marked by the Lord, for a great change; also his sword seemed glued to its scabbard. Inexpugnable in his fierce and mountainous Scotland, absolute general, king of an army of eleven thousand old soldiers, whom he had more than once led to victory; as well and better instructed in the affairs of London than Lambert, who held garrison in the City, such was the position of Monck when, a hundred leagues from London, he declared himself for the Parliament. Lambert, on the contrary, as we have said, dwelt in the capital. He had there the center of all his operations, and he united there about him both all his friends and all the lower people, eternally inclined to cherish the enemies of constituted power. It was therefore at London that Lambert learned of the support Monck, from the borders of Scotland, lent to the Parliament. He judged that there was no time to lose, and that the Tweed was not so far from the Thames that an army might not stride from one river to the other, especially when well commanded. He knew besides that, in proportion as they penetrated into England, Monck's soldiers would form upon the road that snowball, emblem of the globe of fortune, which is for the ambitious only a continually growing step to lead him to his goal. He gathered his army, formidable at once by its composition and by its number, and ran to meet Monck, who, he, like a prudent navigator sailing amid reefs, advanced by very short days' marches and nose to the wind, listening to the noise and scenting the air that came from London. The two armies caught sight of one another at the level of Newcastle; Lambert, arrived first, encamped in the town itself.

Monck, ever circumspect, stopped where he was and placed his headquarters at Coldstream, on the Tweed.

The sight of Lambert spread joy in Monck's army, while on the contrary the sight of Monck cast disorder into Lambert's army. One would have believed that these intrepid fighters, who had made so much noise in the streets of London, had set out in the hope of meeting no one, and that now, seeing they had met an army and that this army displayed before them, not only a standard, but a cause and a principle, one would have believed, we say, that these intrepid fighters had begun to reflect that they were less good republicans than Monck's soldiers, since the latter upheld the Parliament, while Lambert upheld nothing, not even himself. As for Monck, if he had to reflect or if he reflected, it must have been very sadly, for history relates, and this modest lady, it is known, never lies, for history relates that on the day of his arrival at Coldstream a sheep was sought in vain throughout the whole town. Had Monck commanded an English army, there had been reason to make the whole army desert. But it is not with Scots as with English, to whom this flowing flesh called blood is of all necessity; the Scots, a poor and sober race, live on a little barley crushed between two stones, diluted with spring water and cooked upon a reddened gritstone.

The Scots, their distribution of barley made, therefore troubled not themselves whether there was or was not meat at Coldstream. Monck, little familiarized with barley cakes, was hungry, and his staff, as famished at least as he, looked anxiously right and left to know what was being prepared for supper. Monck had himself informed; his scouts, on arriving, had found the town deserted and the sideboards empty; of butchers and bakers, none were to be counted on at Coldstream. There was therefore not found the least bit of bread for the general's table.

As the accounts succeeded one another, as little reassuring one as the other, Monck, seeing fright and discouragement upon all faces, affirmed that he was not hungry; besides, one would eat the next day, since Lambert was there probably with the intention of giving battle, and consequently to surrender his provisions if he were forced in Newcastle, or to deliver Monck's soldiers forever from hunger if he were victorious.

This consolation was efficacious only upon the few; but little mattered it to Monck, for Monck was very absolute beneath the appearances of the most perfect gentleness.

Force was therefore had to be satisfied, each one, or at least to seem so. Monck, as famished as his men, but affecting the most perfect indifference for that absent sheep, cut a fragment of tobacco, half an inch long, from the twist of a sergeant who formed part of his suite, and began to chew the said fragment, assuring his lieutenants that hunger was a chimera, and that besides one never had hunger so long as one had something to put under one's tooth. This pleasantry satisfied some of those who had resisted the first deduction Monck had drawn from the neighborhood of Lambert; the number of the recalcitrant diminished therefore by so much; the guard installed itself, the patrols began, and the general continued his frugal repast beneath his open tent.

Between his camp and that of the enemy rose an old abbey of which scarce a few ruins remain today, but which then was standing and which was called the Abbey of Newcastle. It was built upon a vast ground independent at once of the plain and of the river, because it was almost a marsh fed by springs and maintained by the rains. However, amid these pools of water covered with great grasses, rushes, and reeds, one saw advance solid grounds formerly consecrated to the kitchen garden, the park, the pleasure garden, and other dependencies of the abbey, like one of those great sea-spiders whose body is round, while the legs diverge from that circumference.

The kitchen garden, one of the most elongated legs of the abbey, extended to Monck's camp. Unfortunately one was, as we have said, in the early days of June, and the kitchen garden, besides abandoned, offered few resources.

Monck had had this place guarded as the most proper for surprises. One saw well beyond the abbey the fires of the enemy general; but between these fires and the abbey spread the Tweed, unrolling its luminous scales beneath the thick shade of some great green oaks. Monck knew perfectly this position, Newcastle and its environs having already more than once served him as headquarters. He knew that by day his enemy could no doubt throw scouts into these ruins and come there seeking a skirmish, but that by night he would take good care not to hazard himself there. He would therefore be in safety. Also his soldiers could see him, after what he called fastuously his supper, that is to say after the exercise of mastication reported by us at the beginning of this chapter, like Napoleon since, on the eve of Austerlitz, sleep wholly seated on his rush chair, half in the gleam of his lamp, half in the reflection of the moon that was beginning to mount to the skies.

Which signifies that it was about half past nine in the evening.

Suddenly Monck was drawn from this half-sleep, perhaps factitious, by a troop of soldiers who, running up with joyful cries, came to strike with their feet the tent-poles of Monck, all while humming to awake him.

So great a noise was not needed. The general opened his eyes.

"Well, my children, what is happening then?" asked the general.

"General," answered several voices, "general, you will sup."

"I have supped, gentlemen," replied the latter tranquilly, "and I was digesting tranquilly, as you see; but enter, and tell me what brings you."

"General, good news."

"Bah! does Lambert send us word he will fight tomorrow?"

"No, but we have just captured a fishing boat that was carrying fish to the camp of Newcastle."

"And you were wrong, my friends. Those gentlemen of London are delicate, they care for their first course; you are going to put them in a very bad humor; this evening and tomorrow they will be pitiless. It would be in good taste, believe me, to send back to Mr. Lambert his fish and his fishermen, unless..."

The general reflected an instant.

"Tell me," continued he, "who are these fishermen, if you please?"

"Picard sailors who were fishing on the coasts of France or Holland, and who have been thrown upon ours by a great wind."

"Do some among them speak our language?"

"The chief said us a few words of English."

The general's distrust had awakened as the information came to him.

"Very well," said he. "I wish to see these men, bring them to me."

An officer detached himself at once to go fetch them.

"How many are they?" continued Monck, "and what boat do they mount?"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”