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

being ill, ran toward his horse. They stopped him at the door.

“Well, where the devil are you going now?” cried Athos.

“It is he!” cried d’Artagnan, pale with anger, and with the sweat on his brow, “it is he! let me overtake him!”

“He? What he?” asked Athos.

“He, that man!”

“What man?”

“That cursed man, my evil genius, whom I have always met with when threatened by some misfortune, he who accompanied that horrible woman when I met her for the first time, he whom I was seeking when I offended our Athos, he whom I saw on the very morning Madame Bonacieux was abducted. I have seen him; that is he! I recognized him when the wind blew upon his cloak.”

“The devil!” said Athos, musingly.

“To saddle, gentlemen! to saddle! Let us pursue him, and we shall overtake him!”

“My dear friend,” said Aramis, “remember that he goes in an opposite direction from that in which we are going, that he has a fresh horse, and ours are fatigued, so that we shall disable our own horses without even a chance of overtaking him. Let the man go, d’Artagnan; let us save the woman.”

“Monsieur, Monsieur!” cried a hostler, running out and looking after the stranger, “Monsieur, here is a paper which dropped out of your hat! Eh, Monsieur, eh!”

“Friend,” said d’Artagnan, “a half-pistole for that paper!”

“My faith, Monsieur, with great pleasure! Here it is!”

The hostler, enchanted with the good day’s work he had done, returned to the yard. D’Artagnan unfolded the paper.

“Well?” eagerly demanded all his three friends.

“Nothing but one word!” said d’Artagnan.

“Yes,” said Aramis, “but that one word is the name of some town or village.”

“Armentières,” read Porthos; “Armentières? I don’t know such a place.”

“And that name of a town or village is written in her hand!” cried Athos.

“Come on, come on!” said d’Artagnan; “let us keep that paper carefully, perhaps I have not thrown away my half-pistole. To horse, my friends, to horse!”

And the four friends flew at a gallop along the road to Béthune.

LXI The Carmelite Convent at Béthune

Great criminals bear about them a kind of predestination which makes them surmount all obstacles, which makes them escape all dangers, up to the moment which a wearied Providence has marked as the rock of their impious fortunes.

It was thus with Milady. She escaped the cruisers of both nations, and arrived at Boulogne without accident.

When landing at Portsmouth, Milady was an Englishwoman whom the persecutions of the French drove from La Rochelle; when landing at Boulogne, after a two days’ passage, she passed for a Frenchwoman whom the English persecuted at Portsmouth out of their hatred for France.

Milady had, likewise, the best of passports⁠—her beauty, her noble appearance, and the liberality with which she distributed her pistoles. Freed from the usual formalities by the affable smile and gallant manners of an old governor of the port, who kissed her hand, she only remained long enough at Boulogne to put into the post a letter, conceived in the following terms:

To his Eminence Monseigneur the Cardinal Richelieu,
in his camp before La Rochelle.

Monseigneur⁠—Let your Eminence be reassured. His Grace the Duke of Buckingham will not set out for France.

Milady de ⸻ Boulogne,

evening of the twenty-fifth.

P.S.⁠—According to the desire of your Eminence, I report to the convent of the Carmelites at Béthune, where I will await your orders.

Accordingly, that same evening Milady commenced her journey. Night overtook her; she stopped, and slept at an inn. At five o’clock the next morning she again proceeded, and in three hours after entered Béthune.

She inquired for the convent of the Carmelites, and went thither immediately.

The superior met her; Milady showed her the cardinal’s order. The abbess assigned her a chamber, and had breakfast served.

All the past was effaced from the eyes of this woman; and her looks, fixed on the future, beheld nothing but the high fortunes reserved for her by the cardinal, whom she had so successfully served without his name being in any way mixed up with the sanguinary affair. The ever-new passions which consumed her gave to her life the appearance of those clouds which float in the heavens, reflecting sometimes azure, sometimes fire, sometimes the opaque blackness of the tempest, and which leave no traces upon the earth behind them but devastation and death.

After breakfast, the abbess came to pay her a visit. There is very little amusement in the cloister, and the good superior was eager to make the acquaintance of her new boarder.

Milady wished to please the abbess. This was a very easy matter for a woman so really superior as she was. She tried to be agreeable, and she was charming, winning the good superior by her varied conversation and by the graces of her whole personality.

The abbess, who was the daughter of a noble house, took particular delight in stories of the court, which so seldom travel to the extremities of the kingdom, and which, above all, have so much difficulty in penetrating the walls of convents, at whose threshold the noise of the world dies away.

Milady, on the contrary, was quite conversant with all aristocratic intrigues, amid which she had constantly lived for five or six years. She made it her business, therefore, to amuse the good abbess with the worldly practices of the court of France, mixed with the eccentric pursuits of the king; she made for her the scandalous chronicle of the lords and ladies of the court, whom the abbess knew perfectly by name, touched lightly on the amours of the queen and the Duke of Buckingham, talking a great deal to induce her auditor to talk a little.

But the abbess contented herself with listening and smiling without replying a word. Milady, however, saw that this sort of narrative amused her very much, and kept at it; only she now let her conversation drift toward the cardinal.

But she was greatly embarrassed. She did not know whether the abbess was a royalist or a cardinalist;