The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [14]
Tréville knew how to appeal to and profit by his master’s foibles. His skill in appraising these explains how he enjoyed the long and steadfast favor of a monarch whom history does not record as particularly faithful in his friendships. He paraded his musketeers before Armand Duplessis, Cardinal and Duke, with a defiant air that made His Eminence’s gray mustaches bristle with impotent anger. Tréville had an admirable grasp of the war methods of his period; he realized that when soldiers could not live at the enemy’s expense they must live off their fellow-countrymen. His men formed a legion of devil-may-care fellows, quite undisciplined except in regard to their Commanding Officer.
Loose in their ways, great drinkers, battle-scarred, His Majesty’s Musketeers—or rather Monsieur de Tréville’s—roamed the city. They were to be seen lounging in the taverns, strolling in the public walks and attending all civic sports and entertainments, shouting, twirling their mustachios and rattling their swords. They took immense pleasure in jostling the Guards of Monseigneur Cardinal when they met; then they would draw their swords in the open street, amid a thousand jests, as though it were all the greatest sport in the world. Sometimes they were killed, but they died certain of being mourned and avenged; often they did the killing, but they were certain of not languishing in jail, for Monsieur de Tréville was there to claim them. Obviously then they praised their Commanding Officer to the skies, they adored him, and, ruffians though they were, they trembled before him like schoolboys before the magister. Submissive to his least word, they were prepared to suffer death in order to wash out the slightest affront.
Monsieur de Tréville employed this powerful weapon on behalf of the King and the King’s friends in the first place, then, in the second place on behalf of himself and his own friends. For the rest, no line in the memoirs of a period so fertile in memoirs, even those left by his enemies, accuses this worthy gentleman of acquiring personal profit from the cooperation of his minions—and heaven knows! he had enemies aplenty among both writers and soldiers! Gifted with a genius for intrigue which made him a match for the ablest intriguers, he remained a model of probity and honor. More, despite grueling training and murderous duels, Monsieur de Tréville had become one of the most gallant frequenters of boudoirs, the most subtle squire of dames and the most exquisite turner of pretty compliments of his day. Monsieur de Tréville’s triumphs in the lists of Venus were as widely bruited as those of Bassompierre twenty years before—and that was saying a good deal! The Captain of the Musketeers was therefore admired, feared and loved, a state which constitutes the zenith of human fortune.
Louis XIV absorbed all the smaller stars of his Court in his own vast radiance, but his father, pluribus impar, more accommodating, suffered each of his favorites to retain his personal splendor, and each of his courtiers his individual value. Besides the levees of the King and the Cardinal, Paris at that time boasted more than two hundred others, minor ones but much frequented. Among these, Monsieur de Tréville’s levee was one of the most avidly sought after.
In summer from six o’clock in the morning, in winter from eight, the courtyard of his mansion in the Rue du Vieux Colombier resembled an armed camp. Groups of fifty or sixty musketeers appeared to replace