The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas [top business books of all time TXT] 📗

who beheld in these two men demigods, and in their leader an Olympian Jupiter, armed with all his thunders.

When the two musketeers had entered; when the door was closed behind them; when the buzzing murmur of the antechamber, to which the summons which had been made had doubtless furnished fresh food, had recommenced; when M. de Tréville had three or four times paced in silence, and with a frowning brow, the whole length of his cabinet, passing each time before Porthos and Aramis, who were as upright and silent as if on parade⁠—he stopped all at once full in front of them, and covering them from head to foot with an angry look, “Do you know what the king said to me,” cried he, “and that no longer ago than yesterday evening⁠—do you know, gentlemen?”

“No,” replied the two musketeers, after a moment’s silence, “no, sir, we do not.”

“But I hope that you will do us the honor to tell us,” added Aramis, in his politest tone and with his most graceful bow.

“He told me that he should henceforth recruit his Musketeers from among the Guards of Monsieur the Cardinal.”

“The Guards of the cardinal! And why so?” asked Porthos, warmly.

“Because he plainly perceives that his piquette2 stands in need of being enlivened by a mixture of good wine.”

The two musketeers reddened to the whites of their eyes. D’Artagnan did not know where he was, and wished himself a hundred feet underground.

“Yes, yes,” continued M. de Tréville, growing warmer as he spoke, “and his majesty was right; for, upon my honor, it is true that the Musketeers make but a miserable figure at court. The cardinal related yesterday while playing with the king, with an air of condolence very displeasing to me, that the day before yesterday those damned Musketeers, those daredevils⁠—he dwelt upon those words with an ironical tone still more displeasing to me⁠—those braggarts, added he, glancing at me with his tiger-cat’s eye, had made a riot in the Rue Férou in a cabaret, and that a party of his Guards (I thought he was going to laugh in my face) had been forced to arrest the rioters! Morbleu! You must know something about it. Arrest musketeers! You were among them⁠—you were! Don’t deny it; you were recognized, and the cardinal named you. But it’s all my fault; yes, it’s all my fault, because it is myself who selects my men. You, Aramis, why the devil did you ask me for a uniform when you would have been so much better in a cassock? And you, Porthos, do you only wear such a fine golden baldric to suspend a sword of straw from it? And Athos⁠—I don’t see Athos. Where is he?”

“Ill⁠—”

“Very ill, say you? And of what malady?”

“It is feared that it may be the smallpox, sir,” replied Porthos, desirous of taking his turn in the conversation; “and what is serious is that it will certainly spoil his face.”

“The smallpox! That’s a great story to tell me, Porthos! Sick of the smallpox at his age! No, no; but wounded without doubt, killed, perhaps. Ah, if I knew! S’blood! Messieurs Musketeers, I will not have this haunting of bad places, this quarreling in the streets, this swordplay at the crossways; and above all, I will not have occasion given for the cardinal’s Guards, who are brave, quiet, skillful men who never put themselves in a position to be arrested, and who, besides, never allow themselves to be arrested, to laugh at you! I am sure of it⁠—they would prefer dying on the spot to being arrested or taking back a step. To save yourselves, to scamper away, to flee⁠—that is good for the king’s Musketeers!”

Porthos and Aramis trembled with rage. They could willingly have strangled M. de Tréville, if, at the bottom of all this, they had not felt it was the great love he bore them which made him speak thus. They stamped upon the carpet with their feet; they bit their lips till the blood came, and grasped the hilts of their swords with all their might. All without had heard, as we have said, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis called, and had guessed, from M. de Tréville’s tone of voice, that he was very angry about something. Ten curious heads were glued to the tapestry and became pale with fury; for their ears, closely applied to the door, did not lose a syllable of what he said, while their mouths repeated as he went on, the insulting expressions of the captain to all the people in the antechamber. In an instant, from the door of the cabinet to the street gate, the whole hotel was boiling.

“Ah! The king’s Musketeers are arrested by the Guards of the cardinal, are they?” continued M. de Tréville, as furious at heart as his soldiers, but emphasizing his words and plunging them, one by one, so to say, like so many blows of a stiletto, into the bosoms of his auditors. “What! Six of his Eminence’s Guards arrest six of his Majesty’s Musketeers! Morbleu! My part is taken! I will go straight to the louvre; I will give in my resignation as captain of the king’s Musketeers to take a lieutenancy in the cardinal’s Guards, and if he refuses me, morbleu! I will turn abbé.”

At these words, the murmur without became an explosion; nothing was to be heard but oaths and blasphemies. The morbleus, the sang Dieus, the morts touts les diables, crossed one another in the air. D’Artagnan looked for some tapestry behind which he might hide himself, and felt an immense inclination to crawl under the table.

“Well, my Captain,” said Porthos, quite beside himself, “the truth is that we were six against six. But we were not captured by fair means; and before we had time to draw our swords, two of our party were dead, and Athos, grievously wounded, was very little better. For you know Athos. Well,