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By Root 1048 0

about women; in the antechamber they were exchanging stories about the Court. On the landing, D’Artagnan blushed; in the antechamber he shuddered. In Gascony his lively and vagrant imagination had rendered him formidable to young chambermaids and even sometimes to their young mistresses; but even in his most delirious moments, he had never dreamed of half the amorous wonders or a quarter of the feats of dalliance which he heard exposed here, with no detail omitted or attenuated, in connection with the loftiest names of the realm. But if his love of decency was shocked on the landing, his respect for the Cardinal was scandalized in the antechamber. There, to D’Artagnan’s amazement, they were loudly and boldly criticizing the policy which made all Europe tremble; worse, they blamed the private life of the Cardinal, blithely indifferent to the fact that so many powerful nobles had been punished mercilessly for merely attempting to learn something about it. What! Was it possible that the great man whom Monsieur d’Artagnan the elder revered so deeply served as an object of ridicule to Monsieur de Tréville’s musketeers? D’Artagnan could scarcely believe his ears as he heard these soldiers cracking jokes about His Eminence’s bandy legs and His Eminence’s crooked back. Some sang scurrilous lampoons about Madame d’Aiguillon, his mistress, and Madame de Combalet, his niece; others formed parties and laid plans to annoy the pages and guards of Monseigneur Duke and Cardinal.

However when by chance the King’s name was thoughtlessly uttered amid all these cardinalist jests, it was as though a gag had suddenly been clamped down over all these jeering mouths. The speakers glanced hesitantly about them, apparently doubting the thickness of the partition separating them from Monsieur de Tréville’s office. But a fresh allusion soon brought the conversation back to His Eminence and then laughter waxed boisterous as ever and a bright, cruel light was shed upon the least of his actions.

“Upon my word, these fellows will all be imprisoned and hanged!” D’Artagnan thought. He was terrified. “And that will be my fate, too. I have been listening to them and I have heard them; I shall undoubtedly be held as an accomplice. What would my good father say—father who so earnestly counseled respect for My Lord Cardinal—what would my good father say if he knew I was in the society of such heathens?”

Needless to say, then, D’Artagnan dared not join in the conversation. But he was all eyes and all ears, jealous lest he miss the merest detail. Despite his faith in the paternal injunction, his tastes and instincts led him to praise rather than to blame the unheard-of things he was witnessing.

Although a stranger in the throng of Monsieur de Tréville’s courtiers and making his first appearance in this antechamber, D’Artagnan was finally noticed. A flunkey went up to him and asked what he wanted. D’Artagnan gave his name very modestly, emphasized the fact that he was a fellow-countryman of Monsieur de Tréville and requested a moment’s audience. The servant with a somewhat patronizing air promised to transmit his request in due season.

D’Artagnan, recovering from his first surprise, now had leisure to examine the persons and costumes of those about him.

The center of the most lively group was a very tall, haughty-looking musketeer dressed in so peculiar a costume as to attract general attention. He was not wearing the uniform cloak (it was not compulsory in those days of less liberty and more independence) but, instead, a sky-blue doublet, somewhat faded and worn, and over it, a long cloak of crimson velvet that fell in graceful folds from his shoulders. Across his chest, from over his right shoulder to his left hip, blazed a magnificent baldric, worked in gold and twinkling like rippling waters in the sun. From it hung a gigantic rapier.

This musketeer had just come off guard, coughed affectedly from time to time and complained of having caught a cold. That was why he was wearing his cloak, he explained to those around him, speaking with a lofty air and