Part 26

— Come now, my dear master, said Planchet, making a superhuman effort, while all his contracted muscles, his pallor, and his trembling betrayed the most acute anguish. Come now, I was a soldier, and therefore I have courage; so do not keep me in suspense, dear Monsieur d'Artagnan: our money is lost, is it not?

D'Artagnan, before replying, took a pause that seemed a century to the poor grocer.

Yet he had only turned around on his chair.

— And if it were so, he said slowly, nodding his head up and down, what would you say, my poor friend?

Planchet, from pale that he was, turned yellow. One would have said he was about to swallow his tongue, so swollen was his throat, so red his eyes.

— Twenty thousand livres! he murmured, twenty thousand livres, and yet!...

D'Artagnan, his neck relaxed, his legs stretched out, his hands idle, resembled a statue of discouragement; Planchet tore a painful sigh from the deepest hollows of his chest.

— Well, he said, I see how it is. Let us be men. It is over, is it not? The main thing, sir, is that you saved your life.

— No doubt, no doubt, life is something; but meanwhile, I am ruined, I am.

— God's body! sir, said Planchet, if that is the case, one must not despair for that; you shall set up as grocer with me; I take you into partnership in my business; we will share the profits, and when there are no more profits, well! we will share the almonds, the raisins, and the prunes, and we will nibble together the last quarter of Dutch cheese.

D'Artagnan could resist no longer.

— Morbleu! he cried, quite moved, you are a brave fellow, upon my honor, Planchet! Come now, you were not acting? Come now, you had not seen down there in the street, under the awning, the horse with the saddlebags?

— What horse? what saddlebags? said Planchet, whose heart tightened at the thought that d'Artagnan was going mad.

— Why, the English saddlebags, morbleu! said d'Artagnan, all radiant, all transfigured.

— Ah! my God! articulated Planchet, drawing back before the dazzling fire of his looks.

— Imbecile! cried d'Artagnan, you think I am mad. Morbleu! never, on the contrary, have I had a sounder head and a merrier heart. To the saddlebags, Planchet, to the saddlebags!

— But what saddlebags, for God's sake?

D'Artagnan pushed Planchet toward the window.

— Under the awning, down there, he said to him, do you see a horse?

— Yes.

— Do you see its back loaded?

— Yes, yes.

— Do you see one of your lads talking with the postilion?

— Yes, yes, yes.

— Well, you know the name of that lad, since he is yours. Call him.

— Abdon! Abdon! shouted Planchet out the window.

— Bring the horse, breathed d'Artagnan.

— Bring the horse! bellowed Planchet.

— Now, ten livres to the postilion, said d'Artagnan in the tone he would have used to command a maneuver; two lads to carry up the first two bags, two others for the last two, and fire, morbleu! action!

Planchet precipitated himself down the stairs as if the devil had bitten his breeches. A moment later, the lads were climbing the stairs, bending under their burden. D'Artagnan sent them back to their garret, carefully locked the door, and, addressing Planchet, who in his turn was going mad:

— Now, just the two of us! said he.

And he spread a vast blanket on the floor and emptied the first bag upon it. Planchet did likewise with the second; then d'Artagnan, all a-tremble, slit open the third with knife strokes. When Planchet heard the irritating sound of silver and gold, when he saw the shining crowns bubble out of the sack, fluttering like fish out of a net, when he felt himself steeped up to the calf in that ever-rising tide of tawny or silver pieces, a fit seized him, he spun around like a struck man, and came crashing heavily upon the enormous heap, whose weight made it collapse with an indescribable crash. Planchet, suffocated by joy, had lost consciousness. D'Artagnan threw a glass of white wine in his face, which instantly recalled him to life.

— Ah! my God! Ah! my God! Ah! my God! said Planchet, wiping his mustache and beard.

In those days as today, grocers wore the cavalry mustache and the landsknecht beard; only the silver baths, already very rare in that time, have become almost unknown today.

— Morbleu! said d'Artagnan, there are a hundred thousand livres there for you, Monsieur my partner. Draw your share, if you please; I am going to draw mine.

— Oh! a fine sum, Monsieur d'Artagnan, a fine sum!

— I was a little sorry for the sum that falls to you, half an hour ago, said d'Artagnan; but now, I am sorry no longer, and you are a brave grocer, Planchet. Come! let us make good accounts, since good accounts, they say, make good friends.

— Oh! tell me the whole story first, said Planchet: it must be even finer than the money.

— Faith, replied d'Artagnan, stroking his mustache, I do not say no, and if ever the historian thinks to ask me for information, he may say he will not have drawn from a bad source. Listen then, Planchet, I am going to tell.

— And I will make piles, said Planchet. Begin, dear patron.

— Here it is, said d'Artagnan, drawing breath.

— There it is, said Planchet, gathering his first handful of crowns.

Chapter XXXIX — Monsieur de Mazarin's Game

In a large room of the Palais-Royal, hung with dark velvet set off by the gilded borders of a great number of magnificent pictures, one saw, on the very evening of the arrival of our two Frenchmen, the whole court assembled before the alcove of Monsieur the Cardinal Mazarin, who was giving the king and queen to play.

A small screen separated three tables set up in the room. At one of these tables sat the king and the two queens; Louis XIV, placed facing the young queen, his wife, smiled at her with an expression of very real happiness.

Anne of Austria held the cards against the cardinal, and her daughter-in-law helped her at play, when she was not smiling at her husband. As for the cardinal, who was lying down with a much emaciated, much fatigued face, his hand was held by the Countess of Soissons, and he plunged into it an incessant gaze full of interest and cupidity.

The cardinal had had himself painted by Bernouin; but the red that shone only on the cheekbones made the sickly pallor of the rest of the face and the shining yellow of the forehead stand out all the more. Only the eyes took from it a livelier brightness, and upon these sick man's eyes were from time to time fastened the anxious glances of the king, the queens, and the courtiers. The fact is that the two eyes of the signor Mazarin were the more or less brilliant stars upon which seventeenth-century France read its destiny each evening and each morning.

My Lord was winning neither nor losing; he was therefore neither gay nor sad. It was a stagnation in which Anne of Austria, full of compassion for him, would not have wished to leave him; but, to attract the invalid's attention by some brilliant stroke, it would have been necessary to win or lose. To win was dangerous, because Mazarin would have changed his indifference into an ugly grimace; to lose was dangerous also, because it would have been necessary to cheat, and the infanta, watching her mother-in-law's play, would no doubt have protested at her good disposition toward Monsieur de Mazarin.

Profiting from this calm, the courtiers talked. Monsieur de Mazarin, when he was not in a bad humor, was a good-natured prince, and he, who prevented no one from singing, provided one paid, was not tyrant enough to prevent one from speaking, provided one decided to lose.

So they talked. At the first table, the king's young brother, Philippe, Duke of Anjou, admired his handsome face in the mirror of a box. His favorite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, leaning on the prince's armchair, listened with secret envy to the Count de Guiche, another favorite of Philippe, who was relating, in chosen terms, the various vicissitudes of fortune of the adventurer king Charles II. He told, as fabulous events, the whole history of his wanderings in Scotland, and his terrors when enemy parties tracked him; the nights passed in trees; the days passed in hunger and combat. Little by little, the fate of this unhappy king had interested the listeners to such a point that the game languished, even at the royal table, and that the young king, pensive, his eye lost, followed, without seeming to pay it attention, the slightest details of this odyssey, very picturesquely told by the Count de Guiche.

The Countess of Soissons interrupted the narrator:

— Admit, Count, she said, that you are embroidering.

— Madame, I recite, like a parrot, all the stories that different Englishmen have told me. I shall even say, to my shame, that I am textual as a copy.

— Charles II would be dead if he had endured all that.

Louis XIV lifted his intelligent and proud head.

— Madame, he said in a measured voice that still smelled of the timid child, Monsieur the Cardinal will tell you that, during my minority, the affairs of France were by adventure... and that if I had been taller and obliged to put sword in hand, it would have been sometimes for the evening soup.

— God be thanked! replied the cardinal, who spoke for the first time, Your Majesty exaggerates, and his supper has always been cooked to a turn with that of his servants.

The king blushed.

— Oh! cried Philippe heedlessly, from his place and without ceasing to admire himself, I recall that once, at Melun, that supper was set for no one, and that the king ate two thirds of a piece of bread of which he abandoned the other third to me.

The whole assembly, seeing Mazarin smile, began to laugh.

Kings are flattered with the memory of a past distress, as with the hope of a future fortune.

— Be that as it may, the crown of France has always sat well on the heads of kings, Anne of Austria hastened to add, and it has fallen from that of the King of England; and when by chance this crown wavered a little, for there are sometimes tremblings of the throne, as there are earthquakes, each time, I say, that rebellion threatened, a good victory brought back tranquillity.

— With a few more fleurons on the crown, said Mazarin.

The Count de Guiche fell silent; the king composed his face, and Mazarin exchanged a glance with Anne of Austria as to thank her for her intervention.

— It matters not, said Philippe, smoothing his hair, my cousin Charles is not handsome, but he is very brave and has fought like a Landsknecht, and if he continues to fight thus, no doubt he will end by winning a battle!... like Rocroy...

— He has no soldiers, interrupted the Chevalier de Lorraine.

— The King of Holland, his ally, will give him some. I would have given him some, had I been King of France.

Louis XIV blushed excessively.

Mazarin affected to look at his game with more attention than ever.

— At this hour, resumed the Count de Guiche, the fortune of this unhappy prince is accomplished. If he has been betrayed by Monck, he is lost. Prison, perhaps death, will finish what exile, battles, and privations had begun.

Mazarin frowned.

— Is it quite sure, said Louis XIV, that His Majesty Charles II has left The Hague?

— Quite sure, Your Majesty, replied the young man. My father has received a letter that gives him details; it is even known that the king landed at Dover; fishermen saw him enter the port; the rest is still a mystery.

— I should like very much to know the rest, said Philippe impetuously. You know, you, my brother?

Louis XIV blushed again. It was the third time in an hour.

— Ask Monsieur the Cardinal, he replied in a tone that made Mazarin, Anne of Austria, and everyone lift their eyes.

— Which means, my son, interrupted Anne of Austria, laughing, that the king does not like affairs of state to be discussed outside the council.

Philippe accepted the rebuke in good will and made a great bow, smiling first at his brother, then at his mother. But Mazarin saw from the corner of his eye that a group was about to reform in a corner of the room, and that the Duke of Orleans with the Count de Guiche and the Chevalier de Lorraine, deprived of speaking aloud, might well say in whispers more than was necessary. He was therefore beginning to cast at them glances full of distrust and unease, inviting Anne of Austria to throw some disturbance into the conclave, when suddenly Bernouin, entering under the bed-curtain at the foot of the bed, came to say in his master's ear:

— My Lord, an envoy from His Majesty the King of England.

Mazarin could not hide a slight emotion that the king caught on the wing. To avoid being indiscreet, less still than to avoid seeming useless, Louis XIV therefore rose at once, and, approaching His Eminence, wished him good evening.

The whole assembly had risen with a great noise of rolling chairs and pushed tables.

— Let everyone leave little by little, said Mazarin very low to Louis XIV, and grant me a few minutes. I am dispatching a matter with which, this very evening, I wish to acquaint Your Majesty.

— And the queens? asked Louis XIV.

— And Monsieur the Duke of Anjou, said His Eminence.

At the same time, he turned in his bed-curtain, whose draperies, falling back, hid the bed. The cardinal, however, had not lost sight of his conspirators.

— Monsieur the Count de Guiche! he said in a quavering voice, all the while donning, behind the curtain, the dressing gown that Bernouin held out to him.

— Here I am, my Lord, said the young man, approaching.

— Take my cards; you have luck, you... Win me a little of these gentlemen's money.

— Yes, my Lord.

The young man sat down at the table, whence the king withdrew to talk with the queens.

A serious game began between the count and several rich courtiers.

Meanwhile, Philippe was discussing finery with the Chevalier de Lorraine, and one had ceased to hear behind the alcove curtains the rustle of the cardinal's silk robe.

His Eminence had followed Bernouin into the cabinet adjacent to the bedchamber.

Chapter XL — A Matter of State

The cardinal, passing into his cabinet, found the Count de La Fère waiting, much occupied in admiring a very beautiful Raphael placed above a sideboard furnished with silverware.

His Eminence arrived softly, light and silent as a shadow, and surprised the count's physiognomy, as was his habit to do, claiming to divine, from the simple inspection of an interlocutor's face, what should be the result of the conversation. But, this time, Mazarin's expectation was deceived; he read absolutely nothing on Athos's face, not even the respect he was accustomed to read on all physiognomies.

Athos was dressed in black with a simple silver embroidery.

He wore the Holy Spirit, the Garter, and the Golden Fleece, three orders of such importance that only a king or an actor could unite them.

Mazarin searched long in his somewhat troubled memory to recall the name he must put to that glacial face, and did not succeed.

— I knew, he said at last, that a message from England was arriving for me.

And he sat down, dismissing Bernouin and Brienne, who, in his capacity as secretary, was preparing to hold the pen.

— From His Majesty the King of England, yes, Your Eminence.

— You speak French very purely, sir, for an Englishman, said Mazarin graciously, still looking through his fingers at the Holy Spirit, the Garter, the Fleece, and above all the messenger's face.

— I am not English, I am French, Monsieur the Cardinal, replied Athos.

— That is peculiar, the King of England choosing Frenchmen for his embassies; it is of excellent augury... Your name, sir, if you please?

— Count de La Fère, replied Athos, bowing more slightly than the ceremonial and the pride of the all-powerful minister required.

Mazarin shrugged his shoulders as to say: "I do not know that name." Athos did not blink.

— And you come, sir, continued Mazarin, to tell me....

— I came on behalf of His Majesty the King of Great Britain to announce to the King of France...

Mazarin frowned.

— To announce to the King of France, pursued Athos imperturbably, the happy restoration of His Majesty Charles II to the throne of his fathers.

This nuance did not escape the cunning Eminence. Mazarin had too much habit of men not to see, in Athos's cold and almost haughty politeness, an index of hostility that was not the ordinary temperature of that hothouse called the court.

— You have his powers, no doubt? asked Mazarin in a brusque and quarrelsome tone.

— Yes... my Lord.

This word: "My Lord" came painfully from Athos's lips; one would have said he was flaying them.

— In that case, show them.

Athos drew from a embroidered velvet pouch he wore beneath his doublet a dispatch. The cardinal extended his hand.

— Pardon, my Lord, said Athos; but my dispatch is for the king.

— Since you are French, sir, you must know what a Prime Minister is worth at the court of France.

— There was a time, answered Athos, when I did indeed occupy myself with what Prime Ministers are worth; but I formed, several years ago now, the resolution to treat only with the king.

— Then, sir, said Mazarin, who was beginning to be irritated, you will see neither the minister nor the king.

And Mazarin rose. Athos replaced his dispatch in the pouch, bowed gravely, and took a few steps toward the door. This coolness exasperated Mazarin.

— What strange diplomatic proceedings! he cried. Are we still in the time when Mr. Cromwell sent us slayers in place of chargés d'affaires? You lack only, sir, the pot on the head and the bible at the belt.

— Monsieur, replied Athos dryly, I never had, as you did, the advantage of treating with Mr. Cromwell, and I saw his chargés d'affaires only with sword in hand; I therefore know not how he treated with Prime Ministers. As for the King of England, Charles II, I know that, when he writes to His Majesty King Louis XIV, it is not to His Eminence the Cardinal Mazarin; in this distinction I see no diplomacy.

— Ah! cried Mazarin, raising his emaciated head and striking his hand upon it, I remember now!

Athos looked at him astonished.

— Yes, that is it! said the cardinal, continuing to look at his interlocutor; yes, that is indeed it... I recognize you, sir. Ah! diavolo! I am no longer astonished.

— Indeed, I was astonished that, with Your Eminence's excellent memory, replied Athos smiling, Your Eminence had not yet recognized me.

— Always recalcitrant and scolding... sir... sir... what did they call you? Wait though... a name of a river... Potamos... no... a name of an island... Naxos... no, per Jove! a name of a mountain... Athos! I have it! Delighted to see you again, and to be no longer at Rueil, where you made me pay ransom with your damned accomplices... Fronde! always Fronde! accursed Fronde! oh! what leaven! Hark ye! sir, why have your antipathies survived mine? If anyone had cause to complain, yet, I believe it was not you, who came out of it not only with clean breeches, but still with the cordon of the Holy Spirit at your neck.

— Monsieur the Cardinal, replied Athos, permit me not to enter into considerations of that order. I have a mission to fulfill... will you facilitate the means of fulfilling this mission?

— I am astonished, said Mazarin, quite joyful at having recovered his memory, and all bristling with malicious barbs; I am astonished, sir... Athos... that a frondeur such as you should have accepted a mission near Mazarin, as was said in the good old days.

And Mazarin began to laugh, despite a painful cough that cut each of his phrases and made them sobs.

— I accepted a mission only with the King of France, Monsieur the Cardinal, retorted the count with less bitterness however, for he believed he had enough advantages to show himself moderate.

— It will always be necessary, sir the frondeur, said Mazarin gaily, that, from the king, the affair with which you charged yourself...

— With which I was charged, my Lord, I do not run after affairs.

— Be it so! it will be necessary, I say, that this negotiation pass a little through my hands... Let us not lose precious time... tell me the conditions.

— I had the honor of assuring Your Eminence that the letter alone of His Majesty King Charles II contains the revelation of his desire.

— Come now! you are ridiculous with your stiffness, Monsieur Athos. One sees that you have rubbed shoulders with the puritans over there... Your secret, I know better than you, and you were wrong, perhaps, not to have some regard for a very old and very suffering man, who has worked much in his life and held the field bravely for his ideas, as you for yours... You will say nothing? good; you will not communicate your letter to me?... admirably; come with me into my chamber, you are going to speak to the king... and before the king... Now, a last word: Who then gave you the Fleece? I recall that you passed for having the Garter; but as for the Fleece, I did not know...

— Recently, my Lord, Spain, on the occasion of the marriage of His Majesty Louis XIV, sent to King Charles II a blank patent of the Fleece; Charles II transmitted it to me at once, filling the blank with my name.

Mazarin rose, and, leaning on Bernouin's arm, re-entered his bed-curtain, at the moment when was announced in the chamber: "Monsieur the Prince!"

The Prince of Condé, first prince of the blood, the victor of Rocroy, Lens, and Nordlingen, was indeed entering Monsieur de Mazarin's rooms, followed by his gentlemen, and already he was saluting the king, when the Prime Minister lifted his curtain.

Athos had time to perceive Raoul pressing the Count de Guiche's hand, and to exchange a smile against his respectful salute. He had time also to see the cardinal's radiant face, when he perceived before him, on the table, an enormous mass of gold that the Count de Guiche had won, by a lucky vein, since His Eminence had entrusted him with the cards. Thus, forgetting ambassador, embassy, and prince, his first thought was for the gold.

— What! cried the old man, all that... from winnings?

— Something like fifty thousand écus; yes, my Lord, replied the Count de Guiche, rising. Shall I yield the place to Your Eminence or continue?

— Yield, yield! You are a fool. You would lose all you have won, pest!

— My Lord, said the Prince of Condé, saluting.

— Good evening, Monsieur the Prince, said the minister in a light tone; it is very kind of you to pay a visit to a sick friend.

— A friend!... murmured the Count de La Fère, seeing with stupor this monstrous alliance of words; friend! when it is a matter of Mazarin and Condé.

Mazarin divined the frondeur's thought, for he smiled at him with triumph, and immediately:

— Sire, he said to the king, I have the honor of presenting to Your Majesty Monsieur the Count de La Fère, ambassador of His British Majesty... Matter of state, gentlemen! he added, dismissing with his hand all those who filled the chamber, and who, the Prince of Condé at their head, vanished at Mazarin's single gesture.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”