Part 2

It was at this moment that people came running from all sides to the scene. The host, fearing a scandal, carried the wounded man into the kitchen with the help of his servants, where he was given some care.

As for the gentleman, he had returned to take his place at the window and was looking with a certain impatience at all that crowd, which seemed by remaining there to cause him keen annoyance.

“Well, how is that madman?” he went on, turning at the sound of the door opening and addressing the host, who had come to inquire after his health.

“Your Excellency is safe and sound?” asked the host.

“Yes, perfectly safe and sound, my dear innkeeper, and it is I who ask you what has become of our young man.”

“He is better,” said the host; “he has quite fainted away.”

“Indeed?” said the gentleman.

“But before fainting he gathered all his strength to call you and defy you by name.”

“Why, that fellow is the very devil in person!” cried the stranger.

“Oh! no, Your Excellency, he is not the devil,” replied the host with a grimace of contempt, “for during his fainting fit we searched him, and he has in his bundle only a shirt and in his purse only eleven crowns, which did not prevent him from saying as he fainted that if such a thing had happened in Paris you would repent it at once, whereas here you will repent it only later.”

“Then,” said the stranger coldly, “he is some disguised prince of the blood.”

“I tell you this, my gentleman,” resumed the host, “so that you may be on your guard.”

“And did he name no one in his anger?”

“Yes, he struck his pocket and said: ‘We shall see what M. de Tréville thinks of this insult offered to his protégé.’”

“M. de Tréville?” said the stranger, becoming attentive; “he struck his pocket as he pronounced the name of M. de Tréville?… Come, my dear host, while your young man was fainting, you were not, I am quite sure, without also looking at that pocket. What was in it?”

“A letter addressed to M. de Tréville, captain of the musketeers.”

“Indeed!”

“It is as I have the honor to tell you, Excellency.”

The host, who was not endowed with great perspicacity, did not remark the expression his words had given to the stranger’s face. The latter left the sill of the casement, on which he had remained leaning on his elbow, and frowned like a man ill at ease.

“The devil!” he muttered between his teeth; “would Tréville have sent me this Gascon? He is very young! But a sword thrust is a sword thrust, whatever the age of him who gives it, and one distrusts a child less than anyone else; sometimes a slight obstacle suffices to thwart a great design.”

And the stranger fell into a reverie which lasted some minutes.

“Come, host,” he said, “will you not rid me of that frantic fellow? In conscience, I cannot kill him, and yet,” he added with a coldly threatening expression, “yet he annoys me. Where is he?”

“In my wife’s room, where he is being dressed, on the first floor.”

“Are his clothes and his bag with him? Has he not left his doublet?”

“On the contrary, all that is below in the kitchen. But since he annoys you, this young madman…”

“Doubtless. He causes in your inn a scandal which honest folk cannot endure. Go up to your room, make out my bill, and warn my lackey.”

“What! Is the gentleman leaving already?”

“You know it well, since I had given you the order to saddle my horse. Have I not been obeyed?”

“Yes, and as Your Excellency may have seen, his horse is under the great gate, all equipped for departure.”

“That is well; do as I told you then.”

“Hm!” said the host to himself, “would he be afraid of the little lad?”

But an imperious glance from the stranger stopped him short. He bowed humbly and went out.

“Milady must not be seen by that rascal,” continued the stranger; “she should not be long in passing; already even she is late. Decidedly, it is better that I mount my horse and go to meet her… If only I could know what this letter addressed to Tréville contains!”

And the stranger, muttering to himself, made his way toward the kitchen.

Meanwhile the host, who did not doubt that it was the presence of the young lad which was driving the stranger from his inn, had gone up to his wife and found d’Artagnan at last master of his senses. Then, while making him understand that the police might well deal harshly with him for having gone to pick a quarrel with a great lord — for, in the host’s opinion, the stranger could be none other than a great lord — he prevailed upon him, despite his weakness, to rise and continue his journey. D’Artagnan, half stunned, without his doublet and his head all bandaged with linen, rose therefore, and, urged on by the host, began to descend; but, on arriving at the kitchen, the first thing he caught sight of was his provoker, who was talking quietly on the step of a heavy carriage drawn by two big Norman horses.

His interlocutress, whose head appeared framed by the curtain, was a woman of twenty to twenty-two years. We have already said with what rapidity of investigation d’Artagnan embraced a whole countenance; he saw therefore at a glance that the woman was young and beautiful. Now this beauty struck him the more in that it was perfectly foreign to the southern lands which d’Artagnan had till then inhabited. She was a pale and blonde person, with long curling hair falling on her shoulders, with large languishing blue eyes, with rosy lips and alabaster hands. She was talking very briskly with the stranger.

“So, His Eminence orders me…,” said the lady.

“To return at once to England, and to warn him directly if the duke leaves London.”

“And as to my other instructions?” asked the fair traveller.

“They are enclosed in this box, which you will not open until on the other side of the Channel.”

“Very well; and you, what are you doing?”

“I, I am returning to Paris.”

“Without punishing that insolent little boy?” asked the lady.

The stranger was about to reply; but at the moment he opened his mouth, d’Artagnan, who had heard everything, sprang onto the threshold of the door.

“It is that insolent little boy who punishes others,” he cried; “and I hope well that this time he whom I must punish will not escape me as the first.”

“Will not escape me?” repeated the stranger, frowning.

“No, before a woman you would not dare flee, I presume.”

“Think,” cried Milady, seeing the gentleman lay his hand on his sword, “think that the least delay may ruin all.”

“You are right,” cried the gentleman; “be off then on your side, I on mine.”

And, saluting the lady with a nod, he sprang upon his horse, while the coachman of the carriage vigorously whipped his team. The two interlocutors therefore set off at a gallop, each withdrawing by an opposite end of the street.

“I say, your bill!” shouted the host, whose affection for his traveller turned into deep contempt on seeing him depart without settling his accounts.

“Pay, scoundrel,” cried the traveller still galloping to his lackey, who threw at the host’s feet two or three silver pieces and set off at a gallop after his master.

“Ah! coward, ah! wretch, ah! false gentleman!” cried d’Artagnan, springing in his turn after the lackey.

But the wounded man was still too weak to bear such a shock. Scarcely had he taken ten steps than his ears rang, a dizziness seized him, a cloud of blood passed before his eyes, and he fell in the middle of the street, crying still:

“Coward! coward! coward!”

“He is indeed a coward,” murmured the host, approaching d’Artagnan and trying by this flattery to make his peace with the poor lad, as the heron of the fable with his snail of the evening.

“Yes, a great coward,” murmured d’Artagnan; “but she, very beautiful!”

“Who, she?” asked the host.

“Milady,” stammered d’Artagnan.

And he fainted a second time.

“All the same,” said the host, “I lose two, but I keep that one, whom I am sure to keep at least some days. That is still eleven crowns gained.”

We know that eleven crowns made exactly the sum remaining in d’Artagnan’s purse.

The host had counted on eleven days of illness at a crown a day; but he had counted without his traveller. The next day, at five o’clock in the morning, d’Artagnan rose, went down himself to the kitchen, asked, besides some other ingredients whose list has not come down to us, for wine, oil, and rosemary, and, recipe of his mother in hand, composed a balm with which he anointed his many wounds, renewing his compresses himself and admitting the addition of no doctor. Thanks doubtless to the efficacy of the Bohemian balm, and perhaps also thanks to the absence of any physician, d’Artagnan found himself on his feet that very evening, and almost cured the next day.

But, at the moment of paying for this rosemary, this oil, and this wine, the only expense of the master who had kept an absolute fast, while on the contrary the yellow horse, according to the innkeeper at least, had eaten three times more than one could reasonably have supposed for his size, d’Artagnan found in his pocket only his little purse of threadbare velvet together with the eleven crowns it contained; but as for the letter addressed to M. de Tréville, it had disappeared.

The young man began by seeking this letter with great patience, turning and returning twenty times his pockets and his gussets, searching and searching again in his bag, opening and closing his purse; but when he had acquired the conviction that the letter was nowhere to be found, he fell into a third fit of rage, which nearly occasioned him a fresh consumption of wine and perfumed oil: for, seeing this young hothead grow warm and threaten to break everything in the establishment if his letter were not found, the host had already seized a pike, his wife a broom handle, and his servants the same sticks that had served the day before.

“My letter of recommendation!” cried d’Artagnan; “my letter of recommendation, blood and thunder! or I spit you all like ortolans!”

Unfortunately a circumstance opposed the young man’s accomplishing his threat: that is, that, as we have said, his sword had been, in his first struggle, broken in two pieces, which he had perfectly forgotten. It resulted that, when d’Artagnan would indeed have drawn, he found himself purely and simply armed with a sword-stump some eight or ten inches long, which the host had carefully thrust back into the scabbard. As for the rest of the blade, the chief had adroitly diverted it to make himself a larding pin.

However, this disappointment would probably not have stopped our fiery young man, if the host had not reflected that the claim addressed him by his traveller was perfectly just.

“But, after all,” said he, lowering his pike, “where is this letter?”

“Yes, where is this letter?” cried d’Artagnan. “First, I warn you, this letter is for M. de Tréville, and it must be found again; or if it is not found again, he will know well how to have it found, he!”

This threat completed the intimidating of the host. After the king and M. the cardinal, M. de Tréville was the man whose name perhaps was most often repeated by the military and even by the bourgeois. There was indeed the father Joseph, it is true; but his name was never pronounced save in a low voice, so great was the terror inspired by the Gray Eminence, as they called the cardinal’s familiar.

Accordingly, throwing his pike far from him, and ordering his wife to do the same with her broom handle and his valets with their sticks, he gave the first example by setting himself to the search for the lost letter.

“Did this letter contain something precious?” asked the host after a moment of useless investigations.

“Sblood! I should think so!” cried the Gascon, who counted on this letter to make his way at court; “it contained my fortune.”

“Bills on the savings bank?” asked the host, uneasy.

“Bills on the private treasury of His Majesty,” answered d’Artagnan, who, counting on entering the king’s service thanks to this recommendation, believed he could without lying make this somewhat venturesome reply.

“The devil!” said the host, quite in despair.

“But it matters not,” continued d’Artagnan with national assurance; “it matters not, and money is nothing: — this letter was everything. I had rather lose a thousand pistoles than lose it.”

He risked no more in saying twenty thousand, but a certain youthful modesty restrained him.

A ray of light suddenly struck the mind of the host, who was cursing himself for finding nothing.

“This letter is not lost,” he cried.

“Ah!” said d’Artagnan.

“No; it has been taken from you.”

“Taken! and by whom?”

“By yesterday’s gentleman. He went down to the kitchen, where your doublet was. He remained there alone. I would wager it is he who stole it.”

“You think?” answered d’Artagnan, little convinced; for he knew better than anyone the wholly personal importance of this letter, and saw in it nothing that could tempt cupidity. The fact is that none of the servants, none of the travellers present would have gained anything by possessing this paper.

“You say then,” resumed d’Artagnan, “that you suspect that impertinent gentleman.”

“I tell you I am sure of it,” continued the host; “when I announced to him that Your Lordship was the protégé of M. de Tréville, and that you even had a letter for that illustrious gentleman, he appeared much uneasy, asked me where this letter was, and immediately went down to the kitchen where he knew your doublet was.”

“Then he is my thief,” answered d’Artagnan; “I will complain of him to M. de Tréville, and M. de Tréville will complain of him to the king.” Then he majestically drew two crowns from his pocket, gave them to the host, who accompanied him, hat in hand, to the door, remounted his yellow horse, which conducted him without further incident to the Porte Saint-Antoine at Paris, where its owner sold it for three crowns, which was very well paid, seeing that d’Artagnan had greatly overdriven it during the last stage. Also the horse-dealer to whom d’Artagnan ceded it for the said nine livres did not hide from the young man that he gave this exorbitant sum only because of the originality of its color.

D’Artagnan therefore entered Paris on foot, carrying his little packet under his arm, and walked until he found to let a room suited to the scantiness of his resources. This room was a kind of garret, situated in the rue des Fossoyeurs, near the Luxembourg.

As soon as the penny was given to God, d’Artagnan took possession of his lodging, spent the rest of the day in sewing to his doublet and his breeches some trimmings which his mother had detached from an almost new doublet of M. d’Artagnan father, and which she had given him secretly; then he went to the quai de la Ferraille, to have a blade put to his sword; then he returned to the Louvre to inquire, of the first musketeer he met, as to the situation of the hôtel of M. de Tréville, which was situated in the rue du Vieux-Colombier, that is to say exactly in the neighborhood of the room taken by d’Artagnan: a circumstance which seemed to him of happy augury for the success of his journey.

After which, content with the way he had conducted himself at Meung, without remorse in the past, confident in the present and full of hope in the future, he went to bed and fell asleep with the sleep of the brave.

This sleep, still quite provincial, carried him until nine o’clock in the morning, at which hour he rose to betake himself to that famous M. de Tréville, the third personage of the kingdom according to paternal estimation.

CHAPTER II. THE ANTECHAMBER OF M. DE TRÉVILLE

M. de Troisvilles, as his family was still called in Gascony, or M. de Tréville, as he had ended by calling himself in Paris, had really begun like d’Artagnan, that is to say without a penny to his name, but with that fund of boldness, wit, and understanding which makes that the poorest Gentleman of Gascony often receives more in his expectations from the paternal inheritance than the richest gentleman of Périgord or Berry receives in reality. His insolent bravery, his luck still more insolent in a time when blows rained like hail, had hoisted him to the top of that difficult ladder called court favor, and whose rungs he had climbed four at a time.

He was the friend of the king, who honored greatly, as everyone knows, the memory of his father Henri IV. The father of M. de Tréville had served him so faithfully in his wars against the League, that for lack of ready money — a thing which all his life was lacking to the Béarnais, who constantly paid his debts with the only thing he never needed to borrow, that is to say with wit — that for lack of ready money, we say, he had authorized him, after the surrender of Paris, to take for arms a golden lion passant on a red field with this motto: fidelis et fortis. It was much for honor, but mediocre for comfort. Accordingly, when the illustrious companion of the great Henri died, he left as sole inheritance to monsieur his son his sword and his motto. Thanks to this double gift and the spotless name which accompanied it, M. de Tréville was admitted into the household of the young prince, where he served so well with his sword and was so faithful to his motto, that Louis XIII, one of the good blades of the kingdom, had the habit of saying that, if he had a friend who fought, he would give him the advice to take for second, himself first, and Tréville after, and perhaps even before him.

Accordingly Louis XIII had a real attachment for Tréville, a royal attachment, a selfish attachment, it is true, but which was none the less an attachment. For, in those unhappy times, men sought greatly to surround themselves with men of Tréville’s stamp. Many could take for motto the epithet fort, which formed the second part of his inscription; but few gentlemen could claim the epithet fidelis, which formed the first. Tréville was one of the latter; he was one of those rare organizations, with an obedient intelligence like that of the mastiff, with blind valor, with a quick eye, with a ready hand, to whom the eye had been given only to see if the king was displeased with anyone and the hand only to strike that displeasing someone, a Besme, a Maurevers, a Poltrot de Méré, a Vitry. In short, to Tréville there had until then been lacking only the occasion; but he watched for it, and promised himself well to seize it by its three hairs if ever it passed within reach of his hand. Accordingly Louis XIII made Tréville captain of his musketeers, who were to Louis XIII, for devotion or rather for fanaticism, what his ordonnance companies were to Henri III and what his Scottish guard was to Louis XI.

On his side, and in this regard, the cardinal was not behind the king. When he had seen the formidable elite with which Louis XIII surrounded himself, this second or rather this first king of France had wished, he too, to have his guard. He had therefore his musketeers as Louis XIII had his, and one saw these two powers rivaling each other for their service, in all the provinces of France and even in all foreign states, the men celebrated for great sword strokes. Also Richelieu and Louis XIII often disputed, while playing their game of chess in the evening, as to the merit of their servants. Each praised the bearing and courage of his own, and while pronouncing aloud against duels and against brawls, they secretly excited them to come to blows, and conceived a real grief or an immoderate joy at the defeat or victory of their men. Thus, at least, say the memoirs of a man who was in some of those defeats and in many of those victories.

Tréville had taken the weak side of his master, and it was to this address that he owed the long and constant favor of a king who has not left the reputation of having been very faithful to his friendships. He made his musketeers parade before Cardinal Armand Duplessis with a mocking air which bristled with anger the gray moustache of His Eminence. Tréville understood admirably well the warfare of that epoch, when, if one did not live at the expense of the enemy, one lived at the expense of one’s compatriots: his soldiers formed a legion of very devils, undisciplined for anyone but him.

Disordered, drunk, battered, the king’s musketeers, or rather those of M. de Tréville, spread themselves in the taverns, in the walks, in the public games, crying loud and curling their moustaches, making their swords ring, encountering with voluptuousness the guards of M. the cardinal when they met them; then drawing in the open street, with a thousand jests; killed sometimes, but sure in that case to be wept and avenged; killing often, and sure then not to moulder in prison, M. de Tréville being there to claim them. Accordingly M. de Tréville was praised in all tones, sung in all keys by these men who adored him, and who, rough fellows that they were, trembled before him like schoolboys before their master, obeying his least word, and ready to get themselves killed to wipe out the least reproach.

M. de Tréville had made use of this powerful lever, for the king first and the friends of the king, — then for himself and for his friends. Moreover, in none of the memoirs of this time, which has left so many memoirs, is this worthy gentleman seen accused, even by his enemies — and he had as many among men of the pen as among men of the sword — nowhere, we say, is this worthy gentleman seen accused of having himself paid for the cooperation of his minions. With a rare genius for intrigue, which made him the equal of the strongest intriguers, he had remained an honest man. Still more, despite the great thrusts which dislocate and the painful exercises which fatigue, he had become one of the most gallant pursuers of women, one of the finest dandies, one of the most far-fetched speakers of high-flown nonsense of his epoch; they spoke of the good fortunes of Tréville as they had spoken twenty years before of those of Bassompierre — and that was saying not little. The captain of the musketeers was therefore admired, feared, and loved, which constitutes the apogee of human fortunes.

Louis XIV absorbed all the little stars of his court in his vast radiance; but his father, a sun pluribus impar, left his personal splendor to each of his favorites, his individual value to each of his courtiers. Besides the king’s levée and that of the cardinal, there were then counted at Paris more than two hundred little levées, somewhat sought after. Among the two hundred little levées that of Tréville was one of the most frequented.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”